March of the Wicked Horde 2023

March of the Wicked Horde is a card game that simulates fantasy battles. The setting is medieval fantasy including factions such as elves and undead. The gameplay is a mixture of chess-like strategy and mechanics similar to trading card games but with no randomness like shuffling or dice.

Players choose a faction and determine who goes first. They then take turns placing land and units, moving units, attacking, activating schemes and using scheme abilities. There is no board but cards are used as tiles and arranged in a grid relative to other cards. The object of the game is to kill the enemy commander.

The elves hail from forested lands, using assassins with acrobatics and bow tactics to consume an enemy's forces. The undead hordes emerge from graveyards and grow faster as they kill the enemy. New factions are planned and each new faction that comes out will increase the number of players for the game by one.

March of the Wicked Horde is all about skill. There are no dice, no shuffling and no face-down cards to draw. The movement may remind you of chess but units can only be attacked when your threat is greater than the enemy's reinforcement. You may need to pick off weakly reinforced enemy units, pose a greater threat by ganging up on a strong enemy unit, or combine schemes in a clever way. Any two games are very unlikely to go exactly the same way as there are many possible actions on each turn and many layered strategies to experiment with.

—description from the designer