Forbidden Stars

I like a game that makes me plan five moves ahead and then punishes me for it in a way that still feels fair, and the order system in Forbidden Stars is exactly that, orders get stacked bottom up and resolved top down, which means the thing you commit to early is the thing you’re most exposed on, and reading your opponent’s stack becomes half the game before a single die gets rolled. Where it loses me a little is that once you’ve read the stack correctly, combat still comes down to counting gun symbols off a pile of dice, and no amount of clever ordering saves you from a cold night with the cubes.

The rulebook doesn’t do the symbol-heavy combat any favors either. It’s a game that leans on iconography over plain text for who gets to act when and how damage gets assigned, and I had to stop mid combat more than once to check what a specific gun icon on a card actually did versus what I assumed it did from a previous game. That’s on me some, four different faction combat decks means four different vocabularies to half-remember between plays, and I don’t think a single reference sheet fully solves that.

It also runs long for what it is. Three or four hours is normal once a real fight kicks off, and I don’t think the game’s actual ideas need that much table time to land, the good stuff happens in the planning phase, and the back half of a long combat starts to feel like waiting out a timer rather than making decisions. I’d rather this were the tight two hour war game its bones suggest it could be.

None of that erases the order system itself, which is one of the smarter things I’ve seen a war game do, timing and cunning genuinely beat brute force here more often than they should in this genre. Just go in knowing you’re signing up for a long night, and that the dice get the final word no matter how well you played the setup.