The evocative artwork from Davide De Bellis, Gaia Degli-Innocenti, Giovanni Lazzari, Giovanni Panarello and Pietro Bastas is impressive so we were excited to get our hands on a preview copy of Feralis in advance of its upcoming launch on Kickstarter.
Feralis is a deck construction combat game, ideally for two players but playable with four as a team game. The premise is that deities are competing for mastery over a brutal plane of existence - the Feralis of the title. The gods have access to special powers, including, for some, a single-use ability, but the ebb and flow of battle is between the gods' minions, summoned from their deck of creatures.
This is a game that's bound to appeal to those who've grown up with games like Magic: The Gathering (Wizards of the Coast). For us, the standout feature of Luca Vincitore's game is the way in which the cards in the creature deck operate. The cards each have two sides: stand them up one way and it shows their 'Call' side but if they are inverted so that return on their 'Awakening' side... Time becomes a key currency in this game: it takes time (ie: a number of turns) to incubate a creature to put it onto the battlefield but you can hurry the process by spending 'Catalyst' tokens. Watch out tho' because you'll only have a limited supply of these...
Our copy of Feralis included four different races/sets of deities and creatures, each with their own strengths and idiosyncrasies, so combining these in different ways should add to the variety of the decks players construct and the replayability of the game.
Deer Games Studio have been at pains to point out that the advance copy of Feralis: Obscure Land that we're showing here on Board's Eye View is an early pre-production prototype and the game we've had was still work in progress, so this is not so much a review as a teaser ahead of the game's launch on Kickstarter - scheduled for 29 March. We're keen to see how the game develops and we'll add a link to the KS campaign when it goes live so you can check this game out in much more detail.