This is a review of the boardgame called Skytear, by PvP Geeks. You can play Skytear for free on Tabletop Simulator or purchase a physical copy at Team Covenant’s website.

Introduction

Given the popularity of Dota-style games (often referred to using the misnomer “MOBA”¹), its not surprising that more than a few tabletop designers have attempted to recreate the objectives, mechanics, and possibly even the thrill found in said genre via the tabletop medium. Guards of Atlantis, Rum and Bones, Cloudspire, Battle for Biternia, and Skytear are a few standouts in recent years. I have decided to focus on Skytear, however, because it presents itself as a competitive tabletop game, with intentions for organized play. Since I love organized competitive tabletop gaming but have grown disillusioned with Magic: the Gathering, any game attempting to fill that void is of great interest to me.

I originally intended to play at least ten games of Skytear before writing a review. I knew that Skytear is a deep game, and I truly hoped to get to know the heroes and cards well enough to start to appreciate its depth of strategy. The strong community surrounding the game also appealed to me greatly. Although I don’t care for miniatures, I couldn’t help but be impressed with the effort that went into the game’s production. This didn’t appear to be more CMON-esque Kickstarter pablum, in which pretty minis distract from bland gameplay. Needless to say, I stopped at three games because two issues quickly surfaced that caused my interest to cool off. I’ll discuss them first and then some minor complaints.

Convoluted Action System

Most combat games use a combination of built-in actions and card-based actions. Magic: the Gathering is a good example. You have a few built-in actions that you must memorize, like being able to play only one land per turn and being able to attack once per turn, but beyond that you are simply doing what is stated on the cards themselves. On rare occasion you will see a game that is only built-in actions, like chess, in which you can only move and capture. Most successful games have this in common: they minimize options for the player and allow other elements of the game to create depth.

Dota is no exception. In Dota, you have these main actions available to you:

1. Move
2. Attack
3. Use ability

Yes, there are many other “minor actions” you can perform — buying items, picking up items, using the courier, etc., but for the most part the core gameplay can be described using the actions above. I love the simplicity and elegance of this trifecta of built-in actions, which is why I’m using the same system in Legacy’s Allure. Skytear, however, misses this completely. Instead of giving you a simple list of core actions you can perform, limited only by mana or a set number of possible actions per turn, you’re given this:

1. Five built-in actions, three of which may be used during a hero’s turn.
   1. Move – self-explanatory.
   2. Lead – flip a card from your deck in order to increase your lane advantage.
   3. Skirmish – move and attack a hero only.
   4. Attack – attack a minion or hero.
   5. Worship – use an ability unique to each hero.
2. Card actions – use the mana of a hero (exhausted or unexhausted) to perform the card action. (Note: What’s weird is that the rules specifically state that cards don’t require action points even though they are, effectively, actions.)

Too many built-in actions, redundant actions, exceptional actions (i.e., cards are basically actions that are exceptions to normal action rules) — this action system is a mess, and I’d be beating around the bush if I said otherwise. Unlike some reviewers, I don’t think that the inclusion of cards in this game was forced, but I do think that the action system should have been exclusively card-based actions, just like Gloomhaven. Each card should have provided a movement option, an attack option, and an ability option. A major streamlining of the action system would likely also require scrapping the skirmish action, which feels ad hoc.

Secondary Objectives

The simplicity of the objective in a Dota-style game is perhaps one of the strongest aspects of the genre. A billion and one possibilities can unfold in any given game, and yet only one thing matters: will you destroy their base before they destroy yours? Every game of Dota 2, for example, tells a fascinating story of how this happens. Will you form a deathball composition and barrel your way down the lanes as soon as possible? Will you play four-protect-one until your hard carry is an unstoppable force? Will you sneak Roshan early and hunt their carries? Will you wait for a team fight to break out and send your pusher to the far lane to destroy towers?

Skytear, on the other hand, makes these fascinating micro-objectives the macro-objective itself. At the start of each game, three objective cards are flipped over to reveal ways to win the game in addition to destroying the enemy base. For example, “destroy the left tower” or “control The Outsider” or “kill three enemy heroes”. The thought of playing a Dota-style game with these as game-ending objectives is nothing short of perverse, yet this is what Skytear has done in an effort to shorten games.

Therein lies the problem: the designers did not build a game around the objective, they built the objective around the game. If you’re going to call your a game “tabletop Dota”, then you must bring over its sine qua non: heroes joining never-ending waves of minions on their quest to destroy the enemy base. The result, unfortunately, is that Skytear isn’t a tabletop Dota-style game at all, it’s a skirmish game with some Dota-style features tacked on. The essence of Dota-style games is not heroes casting spells and hitting each other. Plenty of other brawl / arena games do that, but Dota-style games are deeper, which is part of why the genre is so captivating.

One of the worst implications of the secondary objectives is that heroes cannot attack buildings, unlike in Dota. Why? Because achieving the tower-destruction objectives would be far too easy. Split-pushing is one of the most interesting aspects of Dota and it has no place in Skytear, sadly.

Other Minor Complaints

I have certainly covered the most notable flaws I see in Skytear’s design, but I want to point out a few other complaints that did not merit their own section:

• Ties. Though they might be rare, Skytear allows for ties. A competitive game that allows for ties is a game that is willing to break its promise to its players, as I discuss in more depth in my critical article on chess’ design. No one ever sits down to a game of Skytear hoping for no conclusion, but a tie is exactly that: a non-conclusion. Again, part of the beauty of Dota is its inevitability: someone’s base is going to be destroyed.
• Too many game modes. Currently the game has three modes, played on three separate maps. The mode chosen dictates the length of the game: three-lane map for a long game, two-lane map for a medium game, and one-lane map for a short game. Like Dota-style games, I think a regular and turbo mode, both played on the same map, is appropriate. This would have reduced components and further simplified the game.
• Too much fiddliness. “Fiddliness” is a consequence of too many components, too small components, or too many interactions of components. I could give countless examples, but a consequence of the morass of stuff you can do in a game of Skytear is that the game has far more components and component interactions than it needs. Much of this is due to how minions are implemented, but part of it is also due to faction-specific abilities like marking, pillars, and illusions.
• Roshan? The verdict is out on this one, but it is unclear what the purpose of Roshan (called The Outsider) serves in Skytear. Does it break up stale games, like Roshan does in Dota, or does it simply act as a cool thing to do?

Closing Thoughts

PvP Geeks noted in a podcast with Team Covenant that they spent an amount of money equal to a house on developing Skytear. I hope they recoup those expenses and build a dedicated community around Skytear, but my feeling is that the community will struggle to find footing in a market in which “competitive lifestyle board game” has historically been an oxymoron. I think Skytear is a bit too fiddly and inelegant to draw away players from stalwarts like MTG and entice Dota or League players to get into tabletop gaming.

I think that Skytear had the potential to enter the tabletop landscape as one of the first and only competitive board games, but it’s inelegance prevented this. At the end of the day, it is not tabletop Dota, it is a skirmish game with a convoluted action system. If Skytear is the best tabletop Dota around, as I have heard some people claim, then the genre still has set to see a good tabletop implementation. Personally, I would be quite interested in Skytear 2.0 addressing my concerns.

Further Reading

Elegance In Game Design

Footnotes

1. “MOBA” stands for Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. This is misnomer because an arena game treats the player-controlled characters as the driving force of the game and defeating other characters within a certain number of rounds or a certain time limit is the primary goal, whereas in a Dota-style game, the lane creeps are the driving force of the game and the main objective is to assist them in their quest to destroy the enemy’s base. Quake 3: Arena and Starcraft 2 are examples of arena games. Since “MOBA” doesn’t capture the essence of the genre, I will refer to these games as “Dota-style” games.