Summon your army of legendary heroes.
CrowD Games contacted me to check out their tactical battle game Bestiary of Sigillum, now in a new Collector’s Edition with extra maps and upgrades components. It was new to me, but the game has been around since 2014, and there’s even a digital version available on Steam.
Bestiary of Sigillum does one thing, and it does it well – you gather a band of 3 (or 2, if you’re playing a team game with 4 players) warriors and go head to head on a small hex map. Movement is very limited, and players will be jockeying to get into the best positions to control catapult towers, which do damage to an opponent’s stronghold each round. Once you’ve reduced this number of ‘hit points’ to zero, you’ve won the game. Simple right? Well yes, but because there’s no luck in this game, everything comes down to the special abilities of your warriors and the synergy between them.
The system is straightforward – each warrior gets one core ability which they can use as a manuever or an attack, plus a couple of special abilities – but the big wrinkle is the Sigil of Time board. Because when you use one of those special abilities, you put its token on the Sigil board, and it’s going to be a certain number of rounds before you can retrieve your token and use the ability again. So the strategy is in not only what your ability does, but when you use it – fire it off at the wrong time and you can find yourself without an effective offence or defence!
While ultimately, Bestiary of Sigillum’s very thinky, non-random nature didn’t click with my personal preferences in gaming, those who enjoy a tactical challenge with a like-minded opponent will find this game rewarding. And you’ll also find in this set a plethora of solo game puzzles – chess-like problems you can solve, strung together in a campaign sequence.