If you’re at GenCon and you like two player strategy board games, I’ve got a tip for you – find the Corvus Belli booth, and ask for a demo of HexaDome Legends. I’ve had my hands on a review copy of this head to head arena battler for a couple of weeks now, and – while I haven’t completed enough games to give it a full scored review yet – all the time I’ve spent playing it has set neurons sparking in my brain.
Consider these my first impressions. HexaDome Legends is set in the Infinity sci-fi universe, 180 years into a future brimming with ideas from cyberpunk, anime, and even some hints of Mass Effect. Humanity’s most popular entertainment is Aristeia, a gladiatorial combat sport where teams of champions duke it out at the centre of the roaring crowds of the HexaDome.
HexaDome Legends is actually a revised edition of an earlier game, called Aristeia!, which Corvus Belli released in 2017. I missed that completely, so I’m coming to the new version as innocent as a babe. It fits into a genre of strategy board games inspired by MOBAs and Hero Shooters that became quite popular in the late 2010s, where each character is a quirky oddball with pronounced strengths and weaknesses and a role to play as part of their team.
The HexaDome Legends core box contains eight of these sci-fi weirdos. I’m impressed by how much character Corvus Belli has imbued them with, not just with their excellent single-piece plastic miniatures, but in relatively small amounts of rules text.
Take Miyamoto Musashi – who, yes, is a clone of the legendary Japanese sword saint, because the Infinity universe is cool like that. He’s a classic glass cannon damage dealer. His raw stats make him fast moving but not amazing at slipping past enemies, he struggles to pin enemies in place, and he’ll fold if he’s ever locked down by a serious opponent. But he’s utterly lethal on the offensive, and able to chop through enemy champions like a stand of bamboo once he closes the distance.
No two champions in the box feel at all alike. Compare Musashi with the other dedicated DPS champion, Beatbox, a ranged hacker who can stun or mark enemies without line of sight, then deliver an utterly lethal alpha-strike via the hacked connection. Or there’s the felinoid Gata, who has basically no offensive capabilities, but unparalleled freedom to hop over obstacles, dash through the legs of enemy fighters, and help you claim objectives.
With eight heroes in the box there’s decent scope to experiment with team composition. However I’m already itching to try out Valkyrie and Nadir from the already-announced Cold Blood expansion – which is probably the reaction that Corvus Belli wants.
The game uses a bespoke dice system to resolve conflicts, which packs lots of nuance into a single roll. Players roll a pool of colored dice, looking for hit or block symbols which cancel one another out, determining who damages who and how much. But models may have special abilities, called switches, which they can trigger by spending their dice results. An switch on an attack effectively grants it an alternate fire mode, while some models have switches they can use on any roll – so if the Oni Obake doesn’t roll enough defense results to stop a foe from slipping past him, he can instead spend those results as switches to pursue them.
Both players get a small deck of tactics cards for handy single-use effects, and this is another place where your champions will influence how you’re going to play. Each champion has four unique cards, and you’ll pick two from each champ to add to your deck before the match begins.
You could make the angelic Tangerine double-down on her protective role with cards that grant her allies shields and improve those shields’ effectiveness. Alternatively you could pivot her to be more disruptive, with deployable droids and the ability to expend shields to deal damage to all adjacent enemies.
I haven’t tested this enough to work out if there are dominant strategies, feel-bad moments, and quite how fast playing it becomes once you’ve got the rules down. But I’ve been impressed by the core systems and the general vibes – audacious plays, clever traps, and occasional outrageous turns of fortune at the hands of the dice gods. The game is up for pre-order now and set to release at the end of August, but if you want it early, there’s stock at GenCon. More will be on sale in a couple of weeks at Corvus Belli’s Interplanetario convention in Vigo, Spain.
Did you play Aristeia! back in the day? Or is another MOBA-influenced arena battle board game in your heart? Let us know in the Wargamer Discord community!
Source: Wargamer
