According to Eric M. Lang, Clash of Clans was the perfect IP to make into a board game. And true, as a board game designer who’s just made Clash of Clans: The Epic Raid, he might be a little biased about that, but his pitch sold me on the idea.
I recently had the chance to play this upcoming strategy board game with Lang in a tabletop simulator demo, while we chatted about the philosophy behind the title. We shot the breeze while attempting to build up competing villages and tear each other’s settlements down.
Created by Lang and co-designer Ken Gruhl, and expected to hit crowdfunder platforms Backerkit and Kickstarter in a matter of weeks, Clash of Clans: The Epic Raid mixes worker placement, engine building and tower-defence combat. In the words of one of the two minds behind it: it’s “a gateway game with a complexity that respects its audience”.
Can even the best board game hope to capture a mobile game audience used to an entirely different medium? That was my biggest question going into the interview. But Lang was quick to correct me. Supercell – who’s partnered on this project with board game publisher Maestro Media – isn’t targeting a general mobile audience. It’s aiming specifically for Clash of Clans’ audience: the 30-70 million users who still open up this 15-year-old title every day, many of whom do not play any other games.
According to Lang, this very specific focus has resulted in an unusual chance to create a game for both newbies and experienced board gamers alike.
“This is a medium-weight game. So why am I calling it a gateway game?” Lang asks, posing the question to himself. “Because the folks that are going to be exposed to this are used to complicated games.”
“This is a unique opportunity to make an actual gateway game, their first game experience, that does not trip them up, because it borrows a lot of complexity language from this game they already know,” he explains.
“And so hobby gamers are going to like this as a big box, medium complexity game”.
How does the Clash of Clans board game actually play? Well, you might expect a title that mixes up so many genres to feel unfocused or bloated, but The Epic Raid is actually pretty lean in the way it’s designed, with no feeling of bloat or wasted space.
At its core is a classic worker placement game. You’re tasked with choosing what actions to take to give yourself the biggest advantage, while blocking off opportunities that would allow your opponent to pull ahead. You only take three actions a turn, and in a 1 v 1 most actions can only be picked by one player, so you’ve got to be very selective; this aspect of the game feels very tight and mean.
As you might expect in a Clash of Clans board game, you’ll be building an army to raid your opponents, whilst at the same time creating and defending a village. Cards representing units and buildings can be drafted from a shared marketplace, so everyone has the same stuff up for grabs.
Your settlement will earn you points and resources passively over time, but if your buildings are raided by your opponent, they’ll benefit instead. That means there’s no point creating a lovely idyllic town if you don’t invest in the means to protect it.
Combat is a pretty simple affair. You roll red dice to try and burn down buildings and walls, while nearby towers roll black dice to shoot your marauders. The strategy is not in the actual fighting, but in the planning for it, deciding who to attack and from what direction to come away with the most loot.
A light engine-building game with combat mechanics was a pretty novel experience for me, and I was pleased to see how it managed to feel competitive and brutal, without letting you permanently wreck one another’s engines. Lang describes the design intent as “painful, but not nasty.”
On a similar note, while you can gang up on one player, and might be incentivized to do so if someone’s really ahead, there’s built in mechanics that tend to discourage this kind of dogpiling. If one player’s already had their settlement torched to the ground, you’re not going to get anything further out of raiding them, making it a better bet to share the love and hit someone else.
Overall, while I didn’t get to play through a full game of Clash of Clans: The Epic Raid, I liked what I saw – even hampered by the jankiness of TTS. It’s a very quick game to learn and jump into, but with an enjoyable amount of strategic decision-making.
It may have helped that I was winning. Maybe Lang was going easy on me, but I’m pretty sure I had him on the ropes!
What’s your favorite tie-in board game – care to share over at our Discord? We’ve previously reviewed another such title by the same designer. Check out our Mass Effect board game review here. Or why not check out the best couples board games?
Source: Wargamer
