Game summary:
A game for 2-5 players
Play time around 20-40 minutes
Designer: James Hudson
Artist: Noah Adelman, Lina Cossette, Damien Mammoliti
Publisher: Druid City Games, Skybound Games
Get ready for a new game from Druid City Games and Skybound Games. Put on your sunglasses and get ready for this bluffing game. There are 5 Guardian’s, each player chooses one of those leaders from the mighty clans. Gather the most Victory Points and become the Guardian of the Realm!
This game was successfully funded after a 10 days Kickstarter campaign.
What’s in the box?
In this great box, from Game Trayz, you’ll find some really nice components;
– 5 Player boards
– 5 Player miniatures
– 20 Player offer token
– 1 Castle Track
– 20 Player Offer tokens
– 36 Coin tokens
– 72 Victory Tokens
– 120 Guardian cards; different type cards, Artifacts, Curse, Shields, Spell, Villagers and Weapon cards. This deck contains 20 of each type of cards.
– 18 Quest cards
– 20 Treasure cards
– Council and War cards
– 1 Starting Player marker
Let’s get it to the table
Every player got 3 actions on his or her turn.
1. Refill the market up to 5 open cards.
2. you can choose what you want to do in any order:
– Take cards in your hand, up to 6 cards;
– Buy a card from the market directly to your tableau for 3 coins;
– Remove a curse from the market (for 5 coins) and gain 5 VP.
3. Offer a set of the same cards to another player. At this time you have to bluf to your opponent.
At any time during your turn you may discard 3 Artifacts. When you do this, take a look at the top 2 cards of the treasure deck and add 1 in your tableau. You can place the other card on the bottom of the Treasure deck.
When you offer cards to a Guardian (player), you have to turn that players token that is in front of you and hasn’t turned over yet. When you’ve turned over all of your player tokens, you can turn them back faced up.
The cards that you offer to a player must:
– consist only 1 type of card;
– always bluff when offering Curses;
– only offer to a Guardian (player) if they have an unused offer token for that Guardian;
– lie or bluff about the type of the cards but not about the number of cards that are being offered.
The Guardian that receives the offer, must say clearly that he believe the other Guardian or not (true or false).
When you are cursed, when a Guardian suffers the effect of a curse they gain 1 coin:
1. 1 Curse, discard any Guardian card of your choice from your tableau;
2. 2 Curses, the opposing player may discard 1 Guardian card of their choice from your tableau;
3. 3 Curses, the opposing player chooses and steals 1 Guardian card from your tableau.
When a player draws the Council card, he directly shows it to the other Guardians. The warlords are called to the Council for the upcoming war.
1. Castle Track, the first and second player and on the track score 10 points and 5 points respectively;
2. Quests, check and award points for any Quests with rewards during the Council.
After these effects are resolved, the player that has drawn the Council card continues his turn.
When the War card has been drawn by a player, then the game is going to end. You’ll finish the current round and then go the final score.
The player with the most Victory Points is the Guardian of the Realm.
Final Conclusion & rating:
Weight: 2/ 5
My rating: 8 out of 10 dices
Really loved to play this game, it was like I was a couple of years younger (a lot of years 😉 ) when we loved to played poker every Friday night. Don’t get me wrong, this game has nothing to do with poker, but you have to bluff to your opponents and when we’ve played poker I wasn’t very good at bluffing so I was curious how it should go with Guardian’s Call. Too bad for me, I’m very bad at bluffing to my opponents so I lost mostly all the time. But I really enjoyed it, it was fun playing this game and but also difficult what kind of cards do you get or don’t. But also when the game continues it becomes more and more exciting when and who draws and reveals the Council and War card. The components really looks great, I really like the 5 miniatures! They look very detailed but also not cheap plastic. The Game Trayz that they used is again awesome! I really hope that more publishers are going to use Game Trayz for their games, it looks great and everything fits excellent in every box.
It’s not a party game but when you have a fun evening with friends, this game is really a game that you can get on the table.
Thanks to Skybound games, see their website for more great (board)games https://www.skybound.com
