Guards of Atlantis II

I quit MOBAs a couple years back, too much toxicity in the queue, and more than one person online said they’d replaced that exact hole in their gaming life with this, which is why I finally tried it. It mostly delivers. Lanes, pushing, positioning that actually matters turn to turn, real tension between fighting now and farming for later. My first play I couldn’t find a single real criticism, which almost never happens for me on a first play of anything.

Where it doesn’t quite land the abstraction is the action economy. You get one action per turn, four turns per round, and then everything resets, which is a clean system on paper but doesn’t fully capture what a cooldown ability actually feels like in the games this is drawing from. In a video game you’re managing overlapping timers, here it’s more of a hard reset every round, and after a few plays I could feel the seam where the tabletop format had to compromise the source material.

It’s also, in my experience, a game that wants more bodies at the table. I played a 2v2 first and liked it fine, then got a 3v3 going and the whole thing opened up, more lanes, more real decisions about where to commit. If you can only ever get four people together this is still good, but if you can round up six, do that instead.

Four stars. The best tabletop MOBA translation I’ve played, with an honest asterisk on how it handles ability timing.