Final Fantasy VII Remake Boardgame: Materia Hunter

The game has a pretty steep learning curve at the beginning; there is basically a sequence of three turns, an intermission/judgment phase, then another sequence of three turns before a final judgment to conclude the game. Every step has a large number of considerations, such as what materia cards to play and where, what playing different types of materia does to the game state, and the myriad of player ability costs and effects. All of this must be factored every single turn. This makes for a relatively short but mentally more intense board game than something like Risk, Monopoly, or Settlers of Catan. Broadly, the game is very similar to Queen's Blood, the card game from Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. I would assume someone buying a Remake based board game has probably already played Rebirth, but the idea is roughly that you have columns which you and your opponent vie for control over. Each materia color is a column, with you and your opponent playing materia cards of the same color by it. At the judgment phases, whoever has the highest total materia value for that color gets sole credit for controlling that column, much like adding up the card values per row in Queen's Blood. My only criticism of the game, and a small aesthetic one at that, is that Final Fantasy VII Remake Boardgame: Materia Hunter is in fact exclusively based around Remake, but is only finally available a few months after Rebirth's release. This leaves players with the likes of Andrea Rhodes, Madam M, or President Shinra as some of the character cards, while more popular picks such as Vincent and Cid are omitted.

The game has a pretty steep learning curve at the beginning; there is basically a sequence of three turns, an intermission/judgment phase, then another sequence of three turns before a final judgment to conclude the game. Every step has a large number of considerations, such as what materia cards to play and where, what playing different types of materia does to the game state, and the myriad of player ability costs and effects. All of this must be factored every single turn. This makes for a relatively short but mentally more intense board game than something like Risk, Monopoly, or Settlers of Catan. Broadly, the game is very similar to Queen's Blood, the card game from Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. I would assume someone buying a Remake based board game has probably already played Rebirth, but the idea is roughly that you have columns which you and your opponent vie for control over. Each materia color is a column, with you and your opponent playing materia cards of the same color by it. At the judgment phases, whoever has the highest total materia value for that color gets sole credit for controlling that column, much like adding up the card values per row in Queen's Blood. My only criticism of the game, and a small aesthetic one at that, is that Final Fantasy VII Remake Boardgame: Materia Hunter is in fact exclusively based around Remake, but is only finally available a few months after Rebirth's release. This leaves players with the likes of Andrea Rhodes, Madam M, or President Shinra as some of the character cards, while more popular picks such as Vincent and Cid are omitted.

Really original and a great Adaptation