Arena Rex Forums

Did a quick little test against myself just to work through some of the rules. It's definitely cool and I can tell there was tons I missed, but here's my very initial thoughts:

-Lupa's Hot Blooded Power Attack hits like a wrecking ball. She would often do 12 damage to enemy models and reposition away so that she ended only fatigued instead of exhausted. I sorta forgot about her second skill which can negate one of her attacks, but that still has a huge cost. Power attacks + favor dice = some real hurt.
-Terrain should be there. Maybe this is obvious to some, but I did my quick test without terrain of any kind, just a straight up brawl. It really makes control pieces like Zahra under powered. Maybe there should be some lines in the rulebook suggesting what constitutes an "average" amount of terrain.
-Favor doesn't come easy. I found it tough to get enough favor to do everything I wanted to do. I rarely considered most of the tactics because I felt the favor dice would be better spent in battle.
-Morituri are tricky. I'm not sure yet if their death abilities are worth the difficulty of triggering them. They feel very much like they need to be in carefully put together squads for synergy.
-There are a lot of reaction options. I had a hard time keeping most of the potential reactions in mind, so they didn't get used much. Once I get used to all the options, I think the game will really open up strategically. Might be useful to make a cheat sheet with all the standard actions and reactions available for easy viewing (the rulebook almost has this, but condense it and make it 1 page, I might do so once I have more free time).
-This game is aggressive! It will take some getting used to, but I think you can be much more aggressive with gaining fatigue than I realized. That's probably a good thing, making you go for bolder and more action-oriented plays.

Anyway, hope everyone else is also enjoying the beginning of playtesting. Feel free to post here and correct me on my silly notions as well as share your own initial experiences!

Good stuff!

I will say in regards to terrain there is a little blurb in there somewhere I believe suggesting a minimum number. And they've stated in another post possibly tightening up the terrain placement rules, but in general the want to leave it to players to decide.

Who did you play as ludus wise? (Moritui vs Magnus?) Did you play all one faction per side or mixed?

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It was Mago, Zhara, and Thoth versus Lupa, Iason, and Viatrix. I chose those teams mainly because I was impatient and didn't want to cut up the character sheets before I played, so I chose based on what shared a single page...

The 3 DEF (and 2 ARM on two of the models) really felt like it made it hard for Morituri to do much damage...

Great feedback! We'd love for you to try it again with terrain and the same lists, or still no terrain and different lists, and let us know how it feels. Thanks for the write-up!