I’ve never played a dice masters game before. Today we received my order of the Warhammer 40000 themed dice masters campaign box Battle for Ultramar. We’ve played the intro game twice – more on our experience below.

Previous sets of dice masters have involved random distribution of cards and dice in sealed packs. A major change for the Warhammer release was the move to campaign boxes and faction expansions with set content. This was a big motivation for me considering starting the game as I have really gone off random distribution card games (Fantasy Flight Games have spoiled me).

Dice masters is a bit like a hybrid of magic the gathering and roll for the galaxy. It combines pregame deck building and in game dice drafting while both players attempt to eliminate the other by reducing them to zero life.

While I’ve played magic the gathering and many other competitive card games before my partner hasn’t. She has always been put off, in part, by the complexity (or rather time requirements) of preparing a deck. It was nice to see a game where, at least initially, only a small number of choices of which card to include are required.

On with the game: the tutorial game is 50% the size of a regular game having less life and fewer cards in each side. The suggested set up has a fairly fast hitting Ultramarines combo facing a Death Guard pair of plague marines and a very expensive Typhus. So far we have played once each way with the more balanced Ultramarines scoring a major victory in both cases. I think in a full game this will be very different but it’s a shame the designers didn’t write a more balanced tutorial.

The game play is fairly easy to understand after a couple of turns, but even in this mini game there were some opportunities for very tactical decision making. There are several places online that do a very good job of explaining the rules so I won’t go into more detail here. The rules can also be downloaded for free from the WizKids website.

We both enjoyed the game, although I think I enjoyed it more both due to my past experience of this kind of game and my love of the Warhammer 40000 universe. The game play is fast and exciting with no stage feeling to bogged down.

I think the deck building aspect will keep me interested for quite a while despite the low number of cards per deck. I plan to stick to Warhammer sets but I don’t think there is any reason you can’t take Iron Man and Typhus in the same deck. One of the main reasons I got the game was because I’d heard that a Dark Angels set is coming with the next round of releases so I’ll certainly be adding that.

I have read that some people has encountered quality control problems, receiving sets missing one or more components or with crooked dice. The box we received was perfect. It was interesting to note that one of the cards shown in the tutorial game does not exist in the set but there is a card with a different name and identical rules text.

In summary, our experience so far has been very good. The quality of the set is (perhaps surprisingly) very high. The game play is fast and fun as well as evocative of the setting. The designers Mike Elliot and Eric Lang have good form for writing great games so this is what I expected. I’m looking forward to playing more games and will likely expand our collection with the next campaign pack (Eldar Vs Deamons) and of course the Dark Angels. I’ll update this once we’ve played a few more games but so far I thoroughly recommend it.