Description

Champions: Hills of Glory is tactical arena style card/board game for 2 to 4 players where each takes the role of a commander in a fantasy battlefield who is ordered to capture and hold a strategically positioned small hill. Commanders will send their units up the hill battling the opponents’ in a 4x4 field, trying to keep as many as possible alive while assisting them with their unique abilities and specialty cards. Each unit in the field will grant their commander 1 victory point at the end of each round. The first player to score 24 victory points claims the hill and becomes the winner.

The game consists of two types of cards; units (of levels 1 to 5) and specialty cards (of five types: combat, tactics, sorcery, trickery and faith). Each player chooses a commander and takes the appropriate template. On their commander templates, players can track their power (the resource needed to play cards), their actions and their abilities (each commander has two). Commanders aslo have one or two specializations each, noting which specialty card types they're favoring. Units are set up on 5 stacks - one for each level and players will reveal the topmost of each level and place it in front of its stack. Specialty cards are also separated in 5 stacks by type.

During a game round each player will take two turns. When one's 1st turn comes, he or she will choose and execute two of the four available actions (any of them in any order). Once done, turn passes to the next player and so on. When his or hers second turn comes, he or she will execute the remaining two actions. The actions player can take are: A) Increase Power: player increases his or her power by 3. If he has a specialty card in hand, he can discard one to increase the power for 2 more. A player's power can't be more than 6 or less than 0. B) Draw: player can draw up to two cards whether they are units, specialties or a combination of both. If a player wants to draw a unit, she must pay the unit's level in power. She can either draw from the revealed ones or the top face-down unit of a stack. To draw a specialty card the player needs to pay no power. She can just draw one from any stack plus one of the stack she specializes. C) Play: player can play up to two cards from their hand, being a unit, a specialty or a combination of both. To play a specialty card he must have at least as many power as the card indicates (though he doesn't spend it). Specialty cards can empower friendly units or effect negatively the opponent ones. Each specialty type focuses on different gameplay aspects (damage, buff, debuff, heal, extra activations etc). To play a unit he puts it face-down on his starting area. Opponents can see now that he is about to send a unit of X level (it's typed on the card back) in the field. D)Command: the meat of the game. During this action the player can activate up to 2 of her units in the field. Units have 4 characteristics indicating how long they can move, how many dice they roll per attack and what type of attack they have (determines its range), its defence (how difficult is to get hit) and its life (how many damage it can sustain). They also have special abilities that they can use at that moment. When a unit attacks another, the controlling player rolls dice equal to its attack. For each roll that was equal or higher than the target's defense, he scores a hit. The number of hits is the damage inflicted upon the opponent unit. If a player has more than 2 units in the field and he didn't activate them, he can put them under "defend command". They can now act during an opponent turn! Special condition effects such as daze, poison, bleed or shatter can be applied to units via abilities or specialty cards, to spice up the game and give it more tactical depth.

When all players have played 2 turns each, the round ends and they count score - 1 point for each of their units remain on the field. If a player has 24 points at that time, he or she is the winner.

—description from the designer