Review: Windup War

This summer I received a startup game, Windup Wars, that succeeded in meeting its funds and made its way through production and shipment. Last week I played this game for the first time, with a friend. Here’s what I liked and didn’t like about the game. I won’t go into details on how to play it, but will indicate how I think this game can be improved.

The game is compact and easy to carry, to take anywhere and play. The box fits in the palm of my hand. There are six sets or factions of windup toys and their action and health cards. This is great and has potential to expand with newer factions to play with.

The game would be even better if each faction had specialties, different actions from other factions. I found that playing this game with only two players is not as fun since we each have the same action cards, and we are limited as to which ones benefit ourselves. Certain cards when played actually hurt ourselves or our opponent and ourselves. This is because their range of shooting spans to two players. If there are only two players, and the card hits both the player one space away and the player two spaces away, then it hits your opponent and yourself. If a card only hits the player two spaces away, then it only hits you.

If each faction has its own action cards, it would make the game more interesting, since there would be more options for what can be done. It would also gives the opportunity for expansion sets. Sometimes when playing, my opponent and I would play the same cards because there aren’t that many other options. It’s no fun when we are both blocking and not attacking, or both attacking and hurting both ourselves and our opponent. This makes toys die faster as we each take at least two damage. Some cards deal two damage, so it would add up to three damage or even four damage if we both played the deal two damage cards to the player two spaces or even one space away.

This game would be more fun with more people as you can chose who to attack, which adds some variation in the game play, and therefore creates more options for strategies. When I played this game with my friend, we resulted in a stalemate because we both killed all of our windup toys at the same time, both having three charges resulting in points. This game has two ways to end: when one player loses all their windup toys, or when one player has four points (when playing with two or three players), or three points when playing with more players. The reason why we ended in stalemate is because we each were on our last character, and we each had three points, so the best possible action sequence we could have done was to play our charge card to score the last point, first. If one person plays the charge card and the other person does not, then the player with the charge card scores. If both players play their charge card at the same time, then neither scores a point. So we could only play the charge card first in our case or let the other player win.

All in all, this is a fun and simple game that is fast paced, and more fun with more players. So if you like short games similar to rock paper scissors, only more elaborate, this may be a good game for you. This game also has some room for improvement and definitely has potential to be an even better game.