Rone: Invasion Preview

boardgamequest.com:

Note: This preview uses pre-release components and rules. What you see here may be different from the final, published game. This post was a paid preview, you can find out more information here.

The Rone world has been building since 2016 with its initial game release, Rone. In 2018, the second edition was released with some tweaks and added expansions. The original Rone games were card duelers with deck construction. The designer has switched up the formula for Rone: Invasion. Rone: Invasion is a standalone deck and dice-building game for 1 to 2 players (expandable up to 4). We are still in the same dark, post-apocalyptic wasteland, battling for scarce resources. This time, however, a new foe has entered the fold. Celesta, a powerful AI being, is invading Earth along with the armies that she commands via mind control. Battle each other or work together to take down Celesta.

This game can be played either competitively or cooperatively. This overview will focus on the competitive mode.

If you’re familiar with deck-builders, this will be intuitive to pick up. The goal is to reduce your opponent’s health to zero. Players will work toward reducing each other’s health with attacks on cards. Many attacks (melee) reduce armor first which must be fully depleted before affecting health directly. However, there are also ranged attacks that directly deplete health.

Throughout the game, players will take turns which are broken into 8 phases. First, beginning of turn effects are resolved. Next, the active player draws as many cards as they want. Then, they will roll any available dice and move on to their main actions. This is where they collect resources from dice and spend newly collected and previously stored resources to play