Hero Realms from White Wizard Games

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The Hero Realms Box
Today’s review this is not a new game, but one I got to play for the first time: Hero Realms. If you are familiar with Star Realms, also from White Wizard Games, the mechanic used is the same. Cards provide either resources (in Hero Realms that is gold), Attack damage, Health or occasionally some other special effect. You play all the cards in your hand, if you can, since there is no carry over from one turn to the next. We were also using the Hero Expansion packs that are not in the core game. That allowed us to play specific character types instead of a non-descript hero.

This is a deck builder and the goal is always to add cards to your deck that will work well together. Gold is used to buy cards from the market which are face up for all players to see. I happen to enjoy deck builders but this one does suffer from the same minor flaw that other deck builders can have. If your market draw at the beginning of the game contains too many high-cost cards, you’ll be spending early turns just buying Rubies (worth 2 gold) until you can draw a hand with enough gold/rubies to purchase cards in the market. That is minor and very rare, but it can happen. This is NOT part of the rules, but if it’s your first time playing or you are playing with a lot of new players and your initial market deck contains only 5 gold and higher cards, I suggest reshuffling the deck and drawing again.

Another thing I like about Hero Realms is that everything is done with just cards. Your gold is cards and your damage is tracked with cards. It is really nice not having to worry about losing tokens or adding them to the cost of the game.

My Cleric and his starting unique cards.
I don’t normally pick Cleric as my character in any game, but I wanted to mix things up for a change and chose it for Hero Realms and battled against my opponent’s Wizard. The first few turns, while I tried to get some cards to help, I took a beating from the Wizard, but my ability to heal kept me in the game. I was doing 2 damage or taking out the Wizard’s heroes early, but not really hurting him. I didn’t let the early damage I took discourage me, though, because the little healing I could do kept me in the game. I focused on my plan to collect the cards I needed for the big combos.

My end game saw me drop cards that did just about 20 points of damage, knocking the Wizard out and giving me my second win in two weeks (that is a winning streak in my book). The White Wizard “Realms” games are a lot of fun and quick to play. You can easily get 2-3 games played in an hour. It also doesn’t take up much space so plays nearly anywhere.

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