Toy Battle

• Designers: Paolo Mori, Alessandro Zucchini 
• Publisher: Repos
• Players: 2
• Age: 8+
• Time: 15 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/43EJ20K
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

On land, on sea, in clouds, and even in space, battles are breaking out between toys. Your troops need your tactical talent to lead them to victory. Your mission? Be the first to reach the enemy headquarters or control more territories than your opponent.

On your turn in Toy Battle, you either draw two toy troops or place a troop on the board and apply its effect. When you place a troop, you can place it on an empty base, a base that you control, a base that the enemy controls with a lower-valued troop than the one you’re placing, or the enemy’s headquarters; however, in all cases you must place on a location that has a continuous path to your own headquarters through bases that you occupy, that is, that have your troop on top. If you occupy bases that form a continuous path around a region, you claim the medals within this region. (You don’t lose these medals if the enemy later occupies one of these bases.)

The game ends as soon as you occupy your opponent’s headquarters or win the required number of medals based on the current game board. If a player cannot draw or place a troop, the game ends, and whoever has the most medals wins.

To start the game, choose one of the 8 Terrain boards and place it between the players so that one player is on the Red side and one player is on the Blue side.  Place a Medal marker on each corresponding space on the board.  Players take the troops of their color and shuffle them facedown, remove 4 to the box unseen, and place the rest in a pile to form their Reserve.

A starting player is chosen and that player draws 3 troops to start.  The other player draws 4 troops.  The game is played over a number of turns until an enemy HQ is captured, the Medal count objective is met by a player or a player cannot perform an action.

On a turn, the player has 2 choices: Draw 2 Troops (to a max of 8) or Play 1 Troop from your hand onto the board.  Once you place the Troop, apply the effect of that particular Troop and then the effect of its base (if any).

You are allowed to place a Troop in four situations:

• Any empty space
• Any space occupied by your own troop   (If there are multiple troops on a space, only the top troop is considered to occupy the space.   Anyone can look at the troops in the stack, but the order must remain unchanged.)
• Any space with an enemy Troop whose strength is lower than the Troop you are placing
• Your opponent’s HQ – this action immediately ends the game and you win!  (You may never place a troop on your own HQ)

In all cases, you must always place your Troop on a space that has a complete direct connection to your HQ – that is, you can trace a line of spaces all occupied by your troops.  Empty spaces will break this chain.

If you control a region – by having a troop occupying every space on the exterior of the area – you collect all the Medal tokens that were placed within the region in setup.  The game is won immediately by the player who has as many medals as shown on the board’s Medals objective.

The game also ends if a player cannot draw nor place a Troop.  Compare medals and the player with the most medals wins.

My thoughts on the game

Though I normally don’t have a lot of gaming time for 2-player games, that seems to be changing this year – and lucky for me, I got a bunch of 2p only games in my bags home for Spiel 2025.  Toy Battle was getting a lot of buzz from the Repos representative that I met with, so it was high on my list of games to hit the table first.

There are a number of different boards provided in the box, and each one that I’ve played has a different feel and initial strategy based on the layout and the special rules on each board.  Individual turns take very little time, and the simple placement rules make it easy to see where you can and cannot play each turn.

A few of the troop types have special abilities which give you some extra options, and after a few games, you’ll have those abilities memorized and you won’t even need the player aid.  The special board spaces are similar, and I would definitely recommend going over all the abilities at the start of the game.  Trust me, once your opponent surprises you with a great use of a special board space – you won’t ever forget how it works!

One rules question that we had was whether you still got to use the special ability of a space if it was already occupied – if I can’t see it, can I use it?  Also a question about which troops could be taken back based on a board action.  The rules are a little loose on this, and as far as I can see, there haven’t been official rulings given from the designer/publisher yet.  These niggles haven’t been a big deal, we just made a house ruling for now that we all agreed upon and just moved on.

Each battle takes maybe 10 to 15 minutes, and each feels different based on the different maps that can be played on as well as dealing with the random draw of your troop tiles.  In a world prior to Sky Team, I would have said that this had no chance for a big game award as it is 2p only, but this simple and accessible PvP game has a lot of the characteristics that I feel game juries like.  It’s not something I think I’ll play over and over, but I also know that I’m not the target audience for those jury-winning games.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y
• Neutral.
• Not for me…

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/43EJ20K