Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends Review – A Chess-like Game with a Fantasy Twist

Vlaada Chvátil has developed excellent games for almost every genre imaginable. From the deduction and worker placement board game Alchemists to the wild and crazy game of shipbuilding and ship exploding, Galaxy Trucker. His newest game Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends is yet another wildly creative and inventive game.

Best described as combat Othello, Tash-Kalar is a game of grid-based fighting. While there are several different game modes such as Deathmatch, and Teams. This review will focus on the best-rated game type called High Form.

In this mode, your goal is to score nine points by completing different tasks or summoning legendary creatures. This requires you to complete different patterns on the board using your tokens.

Each turn, you’ll be trying to complete these patterns by taking two actions. These can be:

• Placing a common token on any empty space.
• Completing a pattern and summoning a being.
  • First, place a higher-level token, either heroic or legendary, on the board. Then carry out the action of being summoned. Usually, this includes moving, upgrading, or destroying tokens.
• Or, discard a faction card (you’ll redraw another at the end of your turn).

While your hand of cards is mostly made up of heroic summons, you’ll also have a couple of more powerful legendary summons. Additionally, you’ll have a couple of flare cards. These are a catch-up mechanism that can only be used if you’re several units (or heroic units) behind.

After taking your actions, see if any of the tasks are met and restock your hand. If either player has 9 or more points, then both players have one more turn before the game is over.

Be a mind gladiator

Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends has a weight behind its play. Like Chess or Starcraft, it feels so balanced and competitive that the difference between winning and losing is put squarely on the players, rather than the game.

Tash-Kalar is fully aware of this stress it puts you under, as there’s a distinct push and pull nature to the game. Sometimes the board is flooded with your tokens, and then moments later, they’re gone. Because of the stress involved, these radical changes to the board state will have you strapped to your chair, riding an emotional rollercoaster.

These highs and lows are felt the most in Deathmatch when the objective is to remove your opponent from the board. Meanwhile, in High Form, you’re more interested in collecting points.

This takes some of the sting out of the game. In its place adding layers and layers of strategy. The true delight of High Form is attempting to complete tasks in plain sight of your opponent.

With all of the patterns so straightforward, it’s easy to get a sense of what they’re trying to do. However, learning to hide your true intentions and building contingencies into your play is how you get better at the game. This is also how the game evolves over multiple plays.

Another evolving factor is Tash-Kalar’s short and medium-lengthed objectives. Driven by the cards you draw, the tasks available, and what your opponent has planned. There’s always something you can do immediately, like ruin an opponent’s pattern or complete a low-scoring task. But then there’s also a longer-term view of the high-scoring tasks and legendary summons, that takes time and strategy to set up.

Are you not entertained?

Beyond the excellent mano-a-mano gameplay, the way Tash-Kalar manages to infuse its theme into its gameplay is nothing short of incredible. Each summon’s action plays on its shape or lore. For example, the eagle card is in a bird shape, while the infantry captain stands in front of a line of troops. The level of thought put into every card, honestly makes me worried about Vlaada’s sanity.

The only real misstep of Tash-Kalar, and it’s not much of one, is the flare cards.

This catch-up mechanism only activates when a player is behind by a certain amount of tokens. This leads to you having to pause and count pieces a lot, putting a dent in the speed of an otherwise fast-flowing game.

Otherwise, Tash-Kalar is a board game that stands with arms spread and asks: are you not entertained?

Between its ferocious competitiveness and thematic integration, you’re bouncing between a plausible world of battle and playing an abstract game like Chess or Checkers.

Because of the confrontational back-and-forth aspect of the game, Tash-Kalar appealed to me as a competitor. Wanting to take the game seriously, and try my hardest to win. Making it unlike most games in my collection that I only play for fun and relaxation.

So before you pick up this game, you need to ask yourself one question. Are you ready to step into the arena?