It is not only the living who must engage in war, but in Toy Battle by Repos Productions, it is the toys who bear the scars of the battlefield. In this two-player area/majority game, there is more than one path to victory. Bringing the right toys to battle and positioning them strategically on the map to win the required medals—or blazing a path to your enemy’s headquarters—can win you the game.
Battles take place on one of eight different maps with a headquarters for each battling faction. Play as the red or blue troop, shuffling your 24 troop tiles and stacking them in piles next to your play area. Each person puts a provided wooden rack in front of them and randomly removes 4 troop tiles from the game. Once the starting player is chosen, they take three troop members from their reserve piles and put them on their rack, with their opponent putting four on theirs. Place the provided medal markers in designated “star” spaces on the map, and you are ready to play.
About the troops: There are eight different types of troop member “toys.” Some have no effect and others have an action associated with them. They also have different number powers printed at the top of their character tile. For instance, Skully is a level 1 toy that lets you draw 2 troops from your reserve stacks after you place him on the map, while XB-42 is a level 5 toy that gives you the chance to randomly take one troop from your opponent’s rack and discard it from the game. However, Roxy, who has the highest number value, has no effect.
There are two actions available to a player on each turn: they choose to either draw 2 troops from their reserve to put on their rack or place 1 troop on the map terrain and apply its effect. When placing a troop, you can put it on an empty base, a base that you control, a base that the enemy controls with a lower-valued troop than the one you are placing, or the enemy's headquarters. In all cases, you must place on a location that has a continuous path to your own headquarters through bases that you occupy, that is, that have one of your troops on top. If you occupy bases that form a continuous path around a region, you claim the medals within this region. (You do not lose these medals if the enemy later occupies one of these bases.)
The game ends if you place a troop on the enemy headquarters or if you gain the number of medals that are shown on the map that you are playing. Both situations are an immediate win! For two players with a 15-minute playtime. ~ Marsha