Blood Rage

Let’s start with what everyone starts with, because it’s true: the miniatures are fantastic. I’m not usually a paint-the-minis guy, my shelf is mostly unpainted and I’ve made my peace with that, but Blood Rage’s monsters have enough presence that I’ve genuinely thought about breaking out a brush for the first time in years. The larger monsters especially have real heft to them, and setting the board up fully assembled is one of those moments where anyone walking by the table stops to look.

The game underneath the minis is a card draft feeding into area control and action selection, and it’s good, straightforward enough to teach in about fifteen minutes, which matters a lot for a game with this much table presence. Where it gets complicated is exactly where drafting games always get complicated: once your group knows the cards, certain picks become obvious and certain others become obvious traps, and the fun of discovery you got on your first few plays turns into hate-drafting the card you know your neighbor wants rather than building your own plan. I don’t think that’s a flaw exactly, it’s just what happens to every draft game with a fixed card pool eventually, but it changes the character of the game more than I expected going in.

I love the point salad nature of scoring here, especially if you lean into it as a “suicidal” player who’s optimizing for glorious deaths over survival, since it gives you a genuinely different path to points than everyone playing it straight. That kind of asymmetric approach to the same shared scoring system is where the design shines brightest for me.

Setup with a full monster collection takes some real time, sorting figures by clan, laying out the age cards. Worth it. Two players works but loses some of the drafting tension since there’s only one other hand to read. Bring three or four if you can.