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Here to Slay! is the 5th game release by Ramy Badie. Following the success of Unstable Unicorns, this is his 5th successful campaign via Kickstarter. Here to Slay! raised the most funds yet with $3 million in pledges, just shy of 40,000 unique backers.
The game follows a similar concept to the original Unstable Unicorns game. It sees you strategically building an army of heroes. Your end goal is to build a mighty raid party to slay monsters of various difficulties. You must prove yourself as the greatest champion amongst your friends.
The game plays between 2-6 players. It can take anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes to complete. You’ll often find that as soon as one game finishes, you’ll be straight back in for round two to get your own back on those backstabbing friends!
The artwork on this game is fantastic. You can’t help but fall in love with some of the adorable characters represented. My personal favourite being fuzzy Cheeks the Squirrel Bard!
How Does the Game Play?
Each player is dealt 5 cards at the start of the game. The starting player is the one who picked their party leader card last. This is a hero card that will have a unique ability that gives the player a bonus once per turn. Players then have “points” to spend on their turn. Depending on what action they do, determines how many points are spent.
Picking up a card, for example, is just a single point.
Playing a card from your hand is two points and fighting a monster is three points.
Players receive 5 points per turn, any action can be repeated so long as points are not over-spent.
Points cannot be carried over to the next turn, making it very tactical how you play your turn.
Cards can be played at all different times during the game. Placing hero cards down straight away can give you a free one-shot bonus (which therefore costs an action to play) and strengthen your party.
Item, Challenge and Modifier cards can all be played at any point during the game to either aid you in your quest or to disadvantage your “friends” preventing them from winning the game.
How Do I Win?
Winning can be done via two methods.
The first is from a blaze of glory - fighting and defeating three monsters from the monster deck. Monsters have various pre-conditions that need to be met before you can fight them, such as requiring a certain type of hero(s) in your party. Once a player meets that monsters criteria and has the available points to fight it, they roll the game’s two-game dice, through the games dice tower, to see if they meet the monsters second conditions.
The second condition on the monster determines if the kill is successful or not, the monster will have a value required to kill it, along with a value which can result in bad things to happen to that player, anything in between has no effect. (For example, an 8+ roll is a successful roll and a 5- is a failed roll) Kill three unique monsters, and you win the game!
The other method to win the game is to successfully build your raid party, this means having 6 different types of hero’s played out in front of you (including your party leader card) this is the more sneaky way to win the game and can sometimes leave the game ending on a bit of an anti-climax but nevertheless is still a win to brag about!
Can I Stop Someone Winning?
Yes! This is the funniest part of the game, screwing over your friends and stopping them from winning the game.
Players have the ability to play item cards which can either boost their own party or curse other party players giving them a negative effect, on top of this there are also modifier cards which give a positive or negative value to players roll if they had just successfully rolled to defeat a monster this card can be played to tip the odds in your favour and stop them from taking the win! But be aware, they also have the ability to counter should they have a modifier card themselves!
The last card which can prevent a player from winning is the challenge card, this is played at any point to challenge an action from another player when played both players roll a dice to determine if the card is played or not, often with the challenger having a roll advantage.
The Review
Having played this game several times now, I have to say that it’s a game that I can see myself coming back to over and over again! After figuring out how the game worked, Here to Slay! was easy enough to play. It is one of those games where I feel like I could easily explain to others that had not played before.
Here to Slay! reminds me of the game Munchkin in many ways. Fighting monsters, playing item cards to help, and ultimately, betraying your friends to climb to the top and claim victory.
Don’t let the fact that the game came from Kickstarter put you off, the entire campaign was run to perfection and you can tell that from the moment to open the box, with a small magnetic clip to open the lid and the plastic moulding around all the cards and dice, plus the artwork is to die kill for!
The hero cards are a combination of the cutest woodland animals with the cutest little faces but you wouldn’t want to mess with them!
