Summon elemental warriors and challenge other sages to a showdown.
What Is Command of Nature?
Command of Nature is a deck-building battle game for 2 or 4 players, ages 10 and up, and takes about 30–60 minutes to play. It retails for $20 and is available in stores or directly from the publisher. Although it is a battle game, it features cartoony animals and no gore, so I think the 10 and up age rating seems appropriate, but kids may need some help learning the game.
Command of Nature was designed and illustrated by Ramy Badie and published by Unstable Games.
Command of Nature components. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Command of Nature Components
Here’s what comes in the box:
— 4 Sage boards
— 4 Sage decks, each containing:
— 1 Sage
— 3 Champions
— 3 Warriors
— 4 Basic Elementals
— 5 Commands
— 4 Level Tracker tokens
— Elemental Market deck (40 cards)
— Command Market deck (40 cards)
— 20 Gold coins
— 20 Shield tokens
— 20 Damage tokens
— 20 Boost tokens
The contents of the Leaf Sage pack. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
If the illustrations from Command of Nature remind you of TeeTurtle shirts, it’s because the artist and designer, Ramy Badie, also happens to be the founder of TeeTurtle. The creatures in this game are at once adorable and fierce, and wouldn’t be out of place on a T-shirt. There are four sages in this game, belonging to four elemental factions: Pebble, Droplet, Twig, and Leaf, each with their own strengths.
The various tokens are double-sided: one side is worth 1 and the other is worth 3. That does save on tokens, but it also means you have to be careful not to flip them over accidentally or it will change the value. That’s particularly true of your gold, which is stored on your board. Players who like to fiddle with their resources may change their wealth if they’re not careful.
The sage boards hold the rest of the components in place. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
The box insert is simple but holds everything just fine, with two wells for the cards and smaller wells for the tokens. My only complaint is that the token wells are sized almost exactly for the tokens, so getting them out of the box isn’t easy — I often opt for just dumping the whole thing out, which defeats the purpose of having special wells to keep them separate.
The cards came with little paper wrappers instead of shrink wrap, and since the wrappers were labeled, I decided to keep them on the decks for handy reference.
How to Play Command of Nature
You can download a copy of the rulebook here. The game is played with 2 or 4 players, on 2 teams. I’ll explain the 2-player game first, and then describe the differences in the 4-player game.
The Goal
The goal of the game is to defeat your opponent’s sage.
Starting formation. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Setup
Each player chooses a sage and takes the pack of cards, the corresponding sage board, and the level tracker token.
Set up your starting formation as follows:
— Row 1: Basic elemental
— Row 2: 2 Basic elementals
— Row 3: 2 Elemental Warriors, with your sage in the center.
Note that each sage has 3 elemental warriors, so you’ll have to decide which two you want in your starting formation. The two formations will be placed head-to-head on the table, so the single basic elementals are opposite each other.
Gravel, the Pebble Sage. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Place your three Elemental Champion cards on your sage board — they are labeled Level 4, 6, and 8. Place your level tracker token at level 1. The rest of your cards — commands, 1 basic elementals, and 1 elemental warrior — are shuffled together to form your deck. Draw 5 cards from your deck.
Shuffle the Elemental Market and Command Market decks separately and place them nearby, revealing the top 3 cards of each deck to form the market. Place the various tokens nearby to form the supply.
The player with the most house plants goes first and starts with 0 gold. The second player starts with 3 gold.
Gameplay
On your turn, you first trigger any daybreak effects (marked with a sun icon.) The sages all have a daybreak ability that gives you gold.
Then, you may spend up to 4 action points (AP) to take actions. Each of these actions costs 1 AP and may be done multiple times during your turn:
— Summon an elemental from your hand to your formation if there is a space for it.
— Play a command card from your hand.
— Swap the positions of two connected (adjacent) Elementals in your formation.
— Draw 1 card from your deck.
Starting command cards. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Command cards are how you actually make things happen. You start with 5 command cards in your deck: a few attacks and some defense. Attack cards let one of your elementals in your formation attack — melee attacks can only hit one space away, so typically they can only be used by the elemental in the frontmost position, but ranged attacks can hit from further away, giving you more flexibility. Defense cards are typically played when you would take damage and have various effects, from reducing damage to doing damage back to the attacker.
A few elemental warriors from the market deck. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Every player has some basic elementals and elemental warriors matching their own faction, and more elementals can be acquired from the market deck. Each one has an attack value, health, and usually some special ability. The Roman numeral above the ability shows which rows the ability is active, and there may be additional icons like a sun for a daybreak ability or rotating arrows for ongoing effects.
Elemental champions are very powerful but can only be unlocked by defeating enemy elementals. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Damage is tracked by placing damage tokens on the cards, and if an elemental ever takes damage equal to its health, it is defeated and removed from the game. Defeating an elemental lets you increase your level tracker, eventually unlocking your warriors (which go into your discard pile) and uncovering new faction abilities on your board. Whenever an elemental is removed from the formation, that player must move their elementals forward to fill in as many of the front rows as possible.
The command market deck includes utility cards with powerful effects. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
After completing your actions, you may spend gold to buy cards from the market — prices are marked at the bottom of each card — and cards you buy go into your own discard pile. Markets are refilled immediately when you buy a card. You may also sell cards from your hand for more money, returning them to the game box and getting half (rounded up) of the card’s cost in gold. Starting cards marked with a star are worth 1 gold when sold. You may also spend 1 gold to refresh either of the two markets, putting the cards at the bottom of the deck and drawing 3 new ones.
Finally, you clean up: discard any cards remaining in your hand and draw back to a hand of 5 from your own deck. (If you have more than 5 cards, discard down to 5.)
Game End
The game ends when one player’s sage has been eliminated, and the other player wins!
4-player setup. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
4-Player Rules
For 4 players, you play in teams of two, and the game is fairly similar except that the starting formation is twice as wide and center-aligned. You share gold as a team, and the starting team still gets 0 gold, while the second team gets 4.
On your team’s turn, you get a combined total of 6 action points to spend, and the two players may take actions in any order.
The goal is to eliminate both of the opposing team’s sages. When your sage is defeated, you may still play during your team’s turn, but you can’t use your own faction actions or increase your level anymore.
Why You Should Play Command of Nature
Command of Nature isn’t too difficult once you’ve looked through the cards and figured out how to identify them, and the card effects tend to be fairly straightforward. Figuring out the best way to defeat your rival, though, can be a little harder.
The object of the game is to defeat the opponent’s sage, but at the beginning of the game the sage is far in the back row, and you don’t have anything that can attack that far. There are some ranged attacks that can hit the back row, but it’s still limited by whatever elemental you have in your front row (and at the start of the game, they’re your most basic grunts). A lot of the game is about trying to maneuver your stronger cards into the right positions, and eliminating your opponent’s front lines, which pulls their troops forward. As long as somebody can keep putting more units into play, their sage can just hang back where it’s safer, but if you can do enough damage quickly, then eventually their sage moves into striking range.
Some more powerful attack cards from the market — melee on top, ranged on bottom. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
All of that requires a lot of balancing: with a limited number of action points each turn, do you spend them to swap cards around in your formation, put more elementals into play, or use the command cards to actually do something with them? Many of the stronger elementals have to be in a specific row to use their powers, which can also make things tricky — the first row is the most dangerous place to be, so you want to protect whoever’s there.
There are various powers that will allow you to add status effects to the elementals: boosts to increase damage, or shields to block damage. What’s important, though (and easy to miss in the rules), is that these effects only last for one attack, and are then discarded. That means you can’t really pile a whole lot of shields on your sage to protect it from multiple attacks — you’ll just have too much shield for the first attack, and then be vulnerable again. Similarly, you can keep adding boosts to your warrior, but if it then attacks a basic elemental, all that overkill is wasted. Boosts and shields have to be constantly refreshed.
Some defense cards from the market deck. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Each of the four factions has its own strength: Pebble has a lot of defense and shields; Twig is more about offense and boosts; Leaf is able to manipulate their deck and discard pile; Droplet is able to get more cards and rearrange its formation. Each of them has warriors and champions that complement these strategies. What’s interesting, though, is that you’re also not completely tied into those approaches. The market is a mix of all of the factions, and you aren’t limited to buying cards from your own faction. The downside is that one of your basic defense cards only applies to your own faction, so it does mean cards from other factions aren’t as well-protected.
Basic elementals from the market deck are slightly stronger than your starting basic elementals. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Since you level up by eliminating enemy units, attacking the basic units is an easier way to gain access to your faction abilities. However, that means leaving the warriors and champions on the field, where they can wreak more havoc and do more damage. Again, figuring out that balance is a challenge.
Finally, there’s the market: the two separate markets let you choose new commands or new elementals to add to your deck, and of course the more powerful the card, the more it costs. Typically you just get 3 gold per turn from your Sage, but you can earn more by weeding cards from your deck. Of course you need more elementals to refill your formation when things are defeated, but if your formation is full then elementals just clutter up your hand. On the other hand, if you invest a lot in command cards, you may run out of elementals and allow your sage to get pulled into a vulnerable position. The ability to refresh the market is a mixed blessing: it costs 1 gold to do it, which means sometimes you refresh it and the perfect card appears … that you can no longer afford. There’s also the defensive refresh, where you spend a gold just to make sure your opponent can’t buy a card that would be great for them.
Partway through a 4-player game, things are not looking good for the Leaf-Pebble team. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
All in all, Command of Nature is a clever combat game that has a lot of room for exploration as you try different factions and learn their abilities. Since there are so many different characters in the market deck, you won’t see all of them in any given game, so that mix of the market plus the factions keeps you on your toes. You can’t necessarily depend on one strategy every time.
The only main downside for me was the player count, since many of my game nights involve 3 players, which meant that I wasn’t able to play Command of Nature with the whole group (which is part of why this review took me so long to do, because I had to wait to try it at 2 and 4 players). I feel like it’s a tighter game in the 2-player version, but the 4-player version allows for some intriguing combos and lets you mix up the abilities a bit.
For more about Command of Nature, visit the Unstable Games website.
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Disclosure: GeekDad received a copy of this game for review purposes.
