Japanime Tactics: Granblue Fantasy Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Japanime Tactics: Granblue Fantasy published by Japanime Games. Japanime Tactics: Granblue Fantasy is a light skirmish game with some accessible rules.

Everyone in my life enjoys combat games but me. They revel in painting miniatures, building terrain, and taking over my whole living room with complex battle scenarios, whether it’s space marines, mini mechs, hobbits, or X-wings. I am the curmudgeon who derives no enjoyment from painting nights. I’m a simple soul, one who prefers card games, particularly those with watercolor landscapes, happy birds, or pretty anime art. But as I’m not a tyrannical board game dictator, sometimes we have to search out a happy medium for game nights.

Japanime Tactics: Granblue Fantasy is a game that seeks to fill that niche. It’s a simple-to-learn, pared down combat game that is compact enough to fit most tables, has beautiful acrylic standee figurines and modular terrain, and, most importantly to me, has pretty anime art. Calling itself an Expandable Battle Game, it has a little something in it to please any game-night curmudgeon. But is it the right game for you?

In the beginner game of Japanime Tactics, players start by taking a command card and drafting character boxes, each of which comes with an acrylic standee, a stat card representing that character, and action cards. The action cards for each character on a team are shuffled together to make one deck. Playing action cards from your hand is how characters can attack and defend against one another. Next, players set up the modular playfield and place their standees. One starter box comes with four double sided battlefield tiles, a Control Zone tile that sits at the center of the board, 3D trees, and hills in two different sizes. These terrain pieces can be rearranged and combined to make repeat game experiences a little different.

Each round has three phases, draw, action, and cleanup, and play continues for six rounds, or until one player reaches a win condition (12