Battle Of The Bards

Battle of the Bards is a 2-4 player family friendly competitive strategy game that will take 20-40 minutes to play. This fourth title from JSG is a strategic dice rolling game with light aspects of deckbuilding. Each player will start with a basic set of Bards and during play they will recruit new bards to add to their deck, create performances and work with their roadies to entertain the audiences that show up to cheer for their favorite troupes in the competition.

On your turn you will have a hand of 4 bards and you choose three of them to send to the stage. You then roll all dice in your dice pool and the puzzle of your turn unfolds in front of you as you prioritize your strategy based on what is in play and how well (or badly) you rolled. You have many different types of actions you can take, and during your turn you can take them in any order that you choose.

All Bards can have dice assigned to them to give you a bonus as they perform, such as giving you more dice, allowing you to tune your dice or stealing dice from other players.

To fill out your Troupe, you can post Wanted posters to recruit new bards for your deck. You add new Bards to your deck, and you cycle through your deck multiple times in any given game so any purchased Bards will return later in the game to perform. Additionally, recruiting Bards will give you small amounts of victory points.

With the dice from your pool, you can also create performances with any set of three dice that are in a sequence, such as 2,3,4 or 4,5,6. After creating a number of performances, you spend them to capture audiences securing your path to victory. All audiences are worth victory points, and some of them give an extra ability to the player that captures them first.

Once someone has collected their 4th Audience, that round then becomes the last round of the game. You’ll all go into an Encore round, for one final performance and then you’ll simple add up points and the player with the most wins!