Radlands (Saturday Review)

The sun blazes over the wasteland as your tribe fights for survival, its fate tied to three fragile camps and its lifeblood measured in precious drops of water. A single rival warband looms on the horizon, ready to strike. You need to be ready to fight and unleash chaos. Every drop of water spent is a gamble, a step toward victory or ruin. When the dust settles, only one tribe will remain in the desolate Radlands by Daniel Piechnick from Roxley Games with illustrations from Delia Arnone, Lina Cossette, Damien Mammoliti and Manny Trembley.

Think Mad Max and you’re probably very close to the feeling that Radlands is trying to evoke. However, rather than biker gangs and road warriors roaming the deserted highways of post-apocalyptic Australia, in this lane battler, everything evolves around the people and your three camps.

If you’ve never played a lane battler before, think of a more traditional two-player card battling game such as Keyforge and imagine it being played in a number of parallel lanes. While in Keyforge, you play cards to the left or the right of your battle line, in Radlands, you add cards to one of the three camp columns. Every additional card goes in front of those that are already there, lengthening the column. Every additional card provides additional protection for the relevant camp, while also giving it extra firepower. Getting the right balance is important, because as soon as a player’s third camp has been destroyed, they lose.

Water, Water Anywhere

The game starts relatively slowly. Neither you nor your mortal enemy is strong enough to be a threat. So you can happily focus on getting your camp in order. While everything you do costs water and water is terribly scarce, it’s still relatively easy to build up your attack force and line up your human shields. Life is still fairly good.

Yet, you only ever have three water droplets to spend each turn. As the game progresses, these few droplets of water no longer seem to be anywhere near enough. You really start to feel how little water there is and how absolutely vital it is. Prioritizing your actions becomes critical, but deciding what is more important is terribly difficult. Some of the more impactful things you can do cost more water, but that means not having enough water to do something else that is also hugely important.

Each time you assign a droplet token to a card, you feel another bead of sweat forming on your forehead, because you know that if you got your calculations wrong, this could be the bitter end. The stress levels constantly increase.

It gets worse when your enemy launches a ruthless attack and decimates your team, leaving one of your camps dangerously exposed. That’s when you have to make a choice: immediately retaliate in the hope that your opponent won’t be strong enough to destroy your wide open camp or bring in reinforcements to shore up your defenses with human shields. Sometimes your hand of cards will make the decision for you and forces you to risk it all.

Deadly Radlands

That’s what makes Radlands such an exciting and enjoyably infuriating game. The scarcity of water, managing your hand and your camps and hoping that you can time everything just right to make the final blow that kills your enemy or at least stave off another attack and last another round, work wonderfully together. You feel the hot sun on your body and the sweat on your brow.

To add another level of tension, you can play events. They can be amazingly powerful and devastating to your enemy, but they go off with a time delay, which gives your opponent time to prepare. Events need to be timed perfectly to be effective, otherwise they can be just another waste of your precious water. Get it right though and it feels amazing. Either way, events usually put the fear of the water gods into your nemesis and will leave them to scramble for cover.

Radlands has more to offer though. The camps themselves have unique powers, some of them absolutely crazy. So while the events are already amazing, camps can help turn the tide. Just imagine having a nuclear reactor as one of your camps that you can intentionally blow up, killing everyone on the battlefield – your own fighters as well as the enemy’s. Sure, you’re one camp down, but if you’re faced with an immense attack force and your own team is down to one or two people, this last resort self-destruct action will give you at least one more round to fight back.

Crazy Radlands

There is one more thing that makes Radlands my favourite two-player card battling game and that is its length. It takes less than an hour to set up and play this game. At the same time, you get an amazingly crazy experience where every card is absolutely ludicrous, with plenty of combo potential, but ridiculously limited resources. It’s about the survival of the camps and people are expendable. After all, life expectancy is already low, given how little water there is. So everyone knows they need to sacrifice themselves for the greater good.

There is so much gameplay in this tiny box already, but if you do get bored with it, there is an expansion that can give you more variety, if you really want it. Personally, I’m super happy with the base game. It’s so much fun blowing up my reactor to wipe everyone off the table, then destroy my construction yard to repair the reactor for another chance to clear the battlefield a second time.

So, if you fancy yourself a Mad Max and want to see how well you can lead three camps of misfits, mercenaries and simple fighters to victory, without running out of water at crucial moments, then Radlands is for you.

Useful Links

• Radlands: https://roxley.com/products/radlands
• Rulebook: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0246/2190/8043/files/Radlands_Rulebook_Booklet_2.0.pdf?v=1731534467
• Roxley Games: https://roxley.com/
• BGG listing: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/329082/radlands
• KeyForge: Call of the Archons review: https://tabletopgamesblog.com/2019/01/12/keyforge-call-of-the-archons/

Videos

Transparency Facts

I feel that this review reflects my own, independent and honest opinion, but the facts below allow you to decide whether you think that I was influenced in any way.

• I played a friend's copy of the game.
• At the time of writing, neither the designers, nor the publisher, nor anyone linked to the game supported me financially or by payment in kind.

Audio Version

Intro Music: Bomber (Sting) by Riot (https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/)

Music: “Uprising” by AShamaluevMusic.
Website: https://www.ashamaluevmusic.com

Music I Use: https://www.bensound.com/free-music-for-videos
License code: U7SXOPAR3VS0IWKP

Playlist

These are the songs I listened to while I was writing this review: