An Overview of Nightfall: Martial Law

Details

Details: Category: General Geekery; Published on Sunday, 27 November 2011 15:31; Written by Jayvee

I recently acquired a copy of Nightfall: Martial Law created by AEG after having spent a couple of months researching for a new deck building card game I could play with my regular board game group. The 'Nightfall' series is a fairly popular franchise in the gaming community set in a world where vampires, zombies, werewolves and the human "hunters" duke it out to control what's left of civilization. And before you get illusions of "vampires" and "werewolves" of either being sparkly-clean or abs-endowed, nope this isn't Twilight.

Nightfall: Martial Law is a standalone expansion set to the original Nightfall core set. The beauty of this release is that it can either be played with the core set and its expansions as well as be played as a standalone game. As I was having a hard time finding a local copy of the core set, I really had to do some searching. It so happened that Neutral Grounds had one copy of the Martial Law expansion which I reserved and then acquired for PHP 1,800.00. The game can be ordered online for roughly USD $35.00 or thereabouts so the local pricing was actually quite attractive since I would have had to pay for shipping and handling with Amazon.

Deck Building Explained

A "deck builder" is essentially a sub-genre of collectible card games where players usually start off with crap-worthy cards which then lead them on to acquire more powerful ones as the game progresses. Hence towards the end of the game, players will continuously reshuffle their cards while acquiring new ones in order to make their **decks** .. bigger. (Yeah, I know. Pun intended.)

Unlike popular collectible card games (CCG's) like Magic: The Gathering and L5R , deck builders are usually standalone -- everything that you need to play is comes in the box and all players start off on equal footing. Game creators usually release a number of expansions adding more gameplay mechanics. But yes, as someone in his 30's who is well over with spending too much money on Magic, deck building becomes Pretty attractive. As of late, the Nightfall franchise easily occupies one of the top slots for best implementation of the deck building genre with Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer and the ever popular Dominion completing the "holy trinity" of deck building.

Unboxing the Game

Martial Law doesn't come with a board. The huge box comes with over 300 cards, a number of card dividers and foam. The dividers and foam are used to store and segregate cards as the game requires you to distribute them a certain way when you begin play. In addition to this, the set includes "draft cards" that help you make the initial set up work more smoothly. Once all the draft cards are in place, you replace these with a pile of "real" cards for each draft. This type of setup is a bit odd but it does make absolute sense as I can think of no other elegant way to set up over 300 cards on a table. That would be a mess. The creators have somewhat addressed this issue in the rulebook and have designed a pre-made game template you can follow if you're not too keen on the daunting card setup.

Gameplay

The objective of Nightfall is to defeat your opponent by having the least number of "wounds" by the end of the game. Players don't have a set number of lives (as vampires, the undead, and werewolves are essentially immortal in this setting). Every time you damage a player, he or she draws one wound card which in turn gets shuffled back into the deck. In effect, wound cards make a player's deck more inefficient in the long run as they take up the much needed hand space for chaining moves.

There are two types of cards -- Minions and Orders. Minions are essentially creatures and Orders are "instants." Players begin their turn by placing a creature into play and then can chain various actions as long as conditions are met. This is called "Chaining."

Chaining is one of the core gameplay elements that makes Nightfall shine. All cards are color coordinated. When you play a card, you can play an additional card that matches the color of the previous one played. If you have no more cards to play, the next player can chain a series of cards that match the color conditions of the previous cards. And so on. All actions resolve after the last chain is made, and effects get resolved first in, last out. From a gameplay perspective, chaining cards reduce downtime by a lot, allowing all players an opportunity to do something even when it is not their turn.

The game ends when all players have used up the pool of wound cards. A 3 player game may have 30 wound cards and the player that has the least number of wounds by the end of the game wins.

Bottomline

Once the game gets going, Nightfall can easily be one of the most addicting deck builders to date. This is mainly because you're never idle even when it is not your turn so the downtime is reduced drastically with the game's chaining element.

The impression that each player controls one of the four factions is a misnomer. Although there is a 4-way war between the different factions, the cards are all mixed up in the game. The so-called "war" is really for thematic purposes.

As to whether you should get this game or the original Nightfall, that's completely up to you. The main difference between the two is the new "feed" element which allows you to repeat card effects by discarding cards or taking wounds. An average game of Nightfall can take up to around 30-45 minutes.

Sample Cards and Documentation

* more art can be found at the AEG Nightfall Facebook page

* Download the actual Nightfall Game Manual (15MB)

* Nightfall Website