Adellos – a Wesnoth inspired board game

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Spixi
Posts: 91
Joined: August 23rd, 2010, 7:22 pm

Adellos – a Wesnoth inspired board game

Post by Spixi »

Hi community,

this year I met Till Engel, a guy from Bonn, Germany, who invented a Wesnoth inspired board game: Adellos. The name is a German pun: „tadellos“ means “not to complain about” and „Adel“ means “nobles”.

Adellos is a medieval wargame featuring four factions: Royal Army, Rebels, Undead and Clergy, which come with multiple different units. Some generate event cards, others generate money, which is needed to recruit other units. Like in Wesnoth, you play on a hex grid and recruit your units in a castle and there is even Prince Konrad as one of the nobles for the Royal Army. Interestingly, even Adellos’ logo has some resemblance with the Wesnoth coat of arms.

There are two possibilities to win: eliminating all opposing nobles (which are similar to leaders in Wesnoth) or controlling the center field for multiple turns (king of the hill). The battle system is much simpler as in Wesnoth. It is just attack against defense, but you can use event cards to influence the battle result. This mechanic is very similar to the battle system of Yu-Gi-Oh.

The event cards are suprisingly well-balanced, but a little repetitive. At the first glance I had the feeling that it was to easy to just recruit bulky units, escort them with some faster ones and conquer the center field, but the rule that you always have to use all of your action points and some of the event cards make stalling more difficult. The four factions have all a different feeling. For example, the Undead have powerful units, which need no gold, but must be summoned, which requires a few turns until they are finally recruited. The different nobles (leaders) also add multiple possibilities and interesting synergy effects. It is also not possible to spam one unit type, because each faction has a preset pool of 30 unit tokens and as soon a unit is defeated, it cannot be recruited any more. All in all, it is a very solid board game adaption of Wesnoth and I can really recommend it.

Adellos can be found here:
BoardGameGeek entry: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/229703/adellos
Official website: https://adellos.de/
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