After last week's introduction to Animals and what they do in Wild Realms, it's finally time to get to another critical component of this premium board game—The Realms.
What are Realms?
Realms are best to think of as, vast wild-lands or natural habitat in which the Animals roam, dwell and defend as territory in the game. There are four realms in the base tabletop game, which are—Air, Land, Water, Fire. Together with your Alliance of Animals, Realms form your "in game" Kingdom.
How Important Are Realms?
Critcally. Ha! To win the game you not only need Animals (as we saw in Part 1 of this series), but also Realms. In order to establish your Kingdom and win the boardgame, you must find all four Realm types. You "explore" and "discover" new realms by drawing cards from your Player Deck. In the Deck you will find cards for: Animals, Realms and "unleashing" Legendary Animals. Most often you'll find new Animal Allies (50 in the deck), but occasionally, you will "discover" a Realm of the Air, Land, Water, or Fire type. There are eight (two of each type) Realm cards in your deck, so when you "discover" one, you want to be very smart about how to play it.
What is "Locking" a Realm?
As we said above, Realms win games, so you may be asking yourself, "How?" Great question! Here is the simple one word answer—Locking. When you discover a Realm and play it, you must put at least one Animal ally onto it to "defend" it from other players' Animals. This is just the beginning though! To win the game, you must Lock Realms and to lock Realms you must place 5 animals onto it.
Not just any five Animal allies though! While Animals may be of any Realm type (designated by the Realm icon at the bottom of their card), you must have one from each of the 5 Animal Classes, and also, one must be a Leader (designated by the crown icon). At that moment, you may "Lock" the Realm (stacking the Animal defenders under the Realm card). Be first, to lock one of each of the four Realm types and you've established your new Animal Kingdom and won the game!
What Type of Game is Wild Realms?
At it's heart, Wild Realms is what is called a "Set Collection" board game. Set collection is a game mechanic where a player works to complete "sets" of items. In this case, cards are the item. We call it mainly a set collection game because in Wild Realms, it is the key way to win the game. In fact, if you don't want to perform any combat (where's the fun in that?), you can still win the game. It's probably obvious at this point, but the "sets" you collect are the five Animal Allies needed to lock each Realm.
But there are other "game mechanics" in Wild Realms, too. The next most important one is "Hand-Management," which is when an item in a game has multiple uses and the player must decide how best to utilize each item. In Wild Realms, this is the Animal cards. Your Animal allies can assist you in multiple ways, from attacking opponents', to defending your fledgling Kingdom, to locking your Realms.
Lastly, there is dice rolling. Although there is a significant amount of strategy and decision making in Wild Realms, sometimes it's just plain fun to introduce a little Chaos Theory and roll some dice! LOL. In Wild Realms, that is in the form of 3—12-sided dice (D12's). There are some other mechanics invovled, but they are minor to the game.
Sound interesting and fun? Visit our Wild Realms page to learn more about our coming Wild Realms launch. Check back, next week for Part 3 of our Introducing Wild Realms series.
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