The Masters' Trials: Wrath of Magmaroth

Designer: Vangelis Bagiartakis, Anastasios Grigoriadis
Artist: N/A
Published: 2017
Players: 1-4
Playing Time: 60-90 Mins
BGG Rating: 6.6
BGG Ranking: 7324
Publisher: Artipia Games
Mechanisms: Cooperative Game, Dice Rolling, Variable Player Powers
Sleeves: MEU 45x68mm, TCG 63,5x88mm

Game Description:

The legend says that in a time of grave danger, masters of the elemental orders will leave their ancestral retreats and join forces to restore peace to the world. From the once-dormant Tekirin volcano, the vengeful Magmaroth has emerged. Born of earth and fire, its goal is to mold the world to its image: primal and ruthless. The time is now for the masters to face their destiny.

Quick play overview:

Players build their character by selecting a class, an order and a weapon board. All boards grant slightly different abilites to each character AND they each add some cards that make the character decks. These cards are actually quite different which will cause players to have very different type of characters by the end of the game.

Players will roll the 5 colored dice and place them on the specific numbers into the right colored row.

Each player will take his turn by activating all the dice which will cause some actions:

- damage will be dealt to minions (or the boss at the end of the game)

- heal damage from your character

- get element tokens that can be used to improve your character or to destroy boss sigils

- a die can be spent to move another die 1 position to the left or right (also another player's die)

 - lots of other class/order/weapon specific action

Once players finished all their actions, the minions that survived will cause damage to the players, by placing dmg tokens on their boards. Until removed, this tokens block this position from activation.

After 9 turns players will have to fight the boss and have 3 rounds to save the world or burn in the flames of the vulcano. Each sigil that is not broken will increase the power of the boss.

Final thoughts:

This game has a great flow. Each turn the players become a little bit stronger.. but also the minions increase in numbers and the boss is looming in the distance with a lot of sigils that should be taken care of. So you are pushing against the odds from the very first turn.

Manipulating the dice to get the best actions each turn or to at least help your friends get some good actions, is very rewarding.

There should be more than one boss to make the game more dynamic.. but with all the possible character combinations, there is some replayability in the base box.

SCORE:

Gameplay & How often I want to play it: 8/10

Gameplay is tense and the leveling up + manipulation of dice rewards players for the spent time.

I will keep this game in our collection and play it a few times a year.

Art & Graphic Design: 7/10

It's not one of the most stuning games out there.. but the art is not ugly in any way.

There are a lot of cards in the play but as you only care for the ones where the dice landed on, the graphic design does it's job well and make the game play flow.

Rules & Complexity: 9/10

This game offers plenty of interesting decisions what to do with your 5 dice each turn and the rules are not in the way once you've learned how to play the game.

Theme & Mechanism fit: 7/10

A generic fantasy theme with a twist of different class/order/weapon instead of the standard »put on a ton of equipment« trope.

Spending actions to use one ability or the other or help your friends, spending mana to improve your skills or channel it into breaking the sigils that make the boss stronger.. it's a good mechanism for this theme.

Fun & Replayability: 8/10

This game shines in the leveling up of characters as the turn 10 character does a lot more than a turn 1 character. I felt very invested in the game

I have to take away one point on replayability because it would have been so easy to put a second boss in the box to make the end game just a  bit more diverse. At least the characters will be different each game, which will make this game come to the table at least a few times a year.

FINAL SCORE: 7.8/10