I intended to post this as the first article when I got back from Origins, but somehow it fell through the cracks. I would ordinarily not be attracted to Exalted: War for the Throne because it looks so much like Risk, but I wanted to try it out for the redoubtable J. Vogel, a fan of the RPG.

Time: 1-3 hours. The people I demoed with confirmed that they had seen very short games as well as games where a balance of power was reached, forces built up, and the game ended up taking a very long time. I think this is a problem–I want to go into a game knowing about how long it’s going to take, and a two-hour swing is a big deal. In particular, in almost all cases “three hours” translates to “the rest of the night.”

Central mechanic: Massed armies in regions, like Risk. There are differences: you can attack from nonadjacent regions (using “ranged attacks” and “sorcery”). The attacker is not at risk for casualties but has only one attack per turn, so the attack isn’t taken lightly.

Theme and mechanics integrated nicely. I haven’t played a lot of Exalted but I recognized the “Charms” (magic techniques) and artifacts and it looks like they pulled this off pretty well. The foundation is a wargame where soldiers are moved from region to region; Charms grant special abilities that can be used every turn, while “Event Cards” are one-time special powers that can be used in or out of combat.

There are two resources: money, which is used to pay for units, and Essence, which can give temporary boosts to offense and defense or power Charms. They seem to be of about equal value.

(If you were looking for cinematic, over-the-top personal combat, that’s not really included.)

Luck: Uncomfortably heavy. The resolution mechanic is taken straight from the game: roll a certain number of d10; 7-9 is a success and 0 is two successes. In an attack, both attacker and defender roll; defender’s successes are subtracted from the attacker’s and the difference is the number of casualties. It turns out that this is not only a lot of dice to roll, but the variance is very high. Attacks can go unexpectedly fall completely flat, even if you have invested a lot in them, and likewise seemingly small threats can bite hard with a lucky attack and bad defense roll.

Elimination and near-elimination. Not unexpected, but: once you’re out, you’re out, and if you lose most of your territory, you’re crippled until someone decides to put you out of your misery. There’s not much of a chance to have a serious impact on the game if you lose most of your territory or forces, but you’ll be asked to keep playing to avoid tipping the balance of power…

Defense = numbers. This worries me the most. The more armies you have in a region, the more difficult they are to kill. This makes the game feel “unbalanced” to me.

Verdict: Let R be the your rating on an arbitrary scale for Risk and E be your score for the Exalted RPG. Then your rating for this game will be (2R+E) / 2.9. (The quotient is 2.9, not 3, to reflect the “neat” aspect of bringing the games together.) Then penalize yourself 10% for every person less than 5 who would be difficult to find to play. (This is not a game you can occasionally get nongamers to play–especially not after the first time.) It’s not an easy sell, but a group of Exalted fans who like Risk as well will probably dig it.