A small game with HUGE table presence, Tiny Epic Tactics will have you feeling like a master tactician as you maneuver your team of four brave heroes to conquer your opponents. 

What is Tiny Epic Tactics? 

Tiny Epic Tactics is a game in the tiny Tiny Epic game series. Tiny Epic games are small box, approachable strategy games that bring the “epic” game play that you expect to find in a large box but deliver it in a “tiny” package that is far more than meets the eye. Each game in this series is completely unique with different mechanics and themes.

Tiny Epic Tactics is a combat strategy game that will have players utilizing their player powers and traversing the 3D terrain map to best their opponents and achieve victory.

How Do You Play Tiny Epic Tactics?

Before the game begins, players will set up the game board, using the nested boxes inside the game box, creating the 3D map you will maneuver around on.

In Tiny Epic Tactics, players each have a team of four unique heroes types (fighter, wizard, rogue, and a beast) that they’ll choose from a plethora of character options to make their team. Each character is different and will provide players unique strategies for attacking, movement, or defense. 

There are many different ways to play Tactics. In fact, the game comes with five different modes of play. For this review, I’ll mostly be talking about the basic mode: Competitive. This mode puts 2-4 players against each other where they will take turns moving their team of heroes around the map to score the most victory points to win the game. 

On each turn, players have 3 actions to take where they can move and/or attack with their heroes. 

Victory points are awarded for area control, capturing enemy heroes, and heroes alive at the end of the game.

This means that Tiny Epic Tactics is not so much about attacking your opponents to capture their characters as it is cleverly utilizing your actions to position yourself carefully on the map to balance both offensive and defensive strategies while maximizing your characters unique abilities to earn victory.

The game end is triggered when a set number of areas are captured (determined by player count) or one player has lost all of their heroes. 

The player with the most victory points is declared the winner.

What do we think?

I have been completely impressed by just how much game is packed into this small little box. This is a fully fleshed out tactical game with area control, grid movement, take that, and exciting fantasy fighting! 

Each time we set it up on the table it’s hard not to remark on just how cool it all looks! 

Beyond its table presence, we have really enjoyed finding all of the ways to use the map to our advantage and how it changes based on which characters we select for our team. Combat between characters is smooth and pretty straight forward. I never had an issue knowing how much damage was dealt or how a character could counter to respond. Everything was always very easy to follow and resolve. 

As the name would suggest, Tiny Epic Tactics is very tactical. You can try to have an overall strategy, but you will need to make quick decisions based on the actions of others, knowing that their choices can dramatically impact (and potentially tank) the strategy you are hoping to employ. Due to this, it is not uncommon for some turns to take a bit longer as you adjust and change plans based on what other players did. 

The replay-ability element in Tiny Epic Tactics is sky high. There are so many things to explore in this game from the various game modes and the intriguing special abilities of the characters.

Finding which characters you want to use to build your team is crucial. There are so many different ways to utilize each character and I found that after a few plays, some characters that I initially thought weren’t that interesting, suddenly became so cool after I figured out ways to use them to my advantage. There’s a lot to discover!

It’s also so fun figuring out the best way to use the map. At first, it seems like a really large playing field to have to traverse. Thanks to the nifty portals however, you can bebop around relatively easily which helps especially when you need to shift tactics and strategies to better your position. Plus you can play with using the different heights of the terrain to gain a better position and range on your opponents by scaling to the top of a peak. Other times you might want to stay close to a village for a quick recovery from a fight gone wrong. 

Each game we find that we play just a little bit different and we each become much better at employing more strategic tactics, maximize both our characters and our positions on the map to challenge each other. 

While we love the back and forth of the battle with each other, players who are not fans of player interaction will probably not enjoy the experience to be found in Tiny Epic Tactics. 

One drawback to the game we found was that there was a lot of things to remember. From the abilities of the many different characters, the special keywords, how attacks/counter attacks/movement work and can be altered by abilities or cards, the impacts of terrain type, etc etc etc you’re going to need to keep the rulebook nearby so that you can double check rules and keywords throughout play. 

Perhaps it’s the fact that our kids never let us sleep, but we just could not remember everything and kept having to rifle through the rulebook quickly to answer gameplay questions. It would be nice if there could have been some player aids included that could help out with this. 

However, all of these choices and mechanics to remember are what brings the fun tactical nature to the game, and while it can be a lot, it’s still relatively accessible, I just think it can be slightly overwhelming at the start.

Theme

I love the theme and find it to be really well incorporated throughout the game. 

The huge cast of characters all have fun abilities that work well with their various hero types in a way that makes sense and gives players different ways to interact with and utilize the terrain of the map. Perhaps your character is magically enhanced by the water so you work to keep them near water features.

The 3D aspect of the map also helps incorporate theme into the game. With terrain creating different effects, (such as climbing costing more actions, water slowing you down, the forest providing you cover from attacks, and peaks giving you increased range, etc) I found we enjoyed a more immersive experience because it felt more theatrical and tangible.

Components

I’m always amazed at just how much content is able to be packed into the small box of a Tiny Epic game! 

Opening Tiny Epic Tactics for the first time was like opening a Matryoshka doll! Inside the main box are 5 smaller boxes that you use to build your 3D terrain map. But that’s not all, they also manage to fit in a map scroll, all your character cards and player pieces. 

We were sent the deluxe version of the game which includes all Kickstarter content with stretch goals and the Lanterns mini-expansion which all fits inside perfectly without too much difficulty. The box does come with a sleeve which helps keep the lid on and avoid box-lift while also protecting the box bottom which functions as part of the play environment.

There’s also a really cool maps expansion that they were kind enough to send us to check out.

This expansion gives two new terrain layouts, The Winter Highlands, and The Savage Wastelands. These provide two new map scrolls and cardboard sleeves that slide over the base game boxes to give them a quick makeover! It’s quite clever.

If you have been playing the base game a lot, and really enjoyed the game, these map expansions are a great way to give a new set up and challenge through new layouts that’ll cause you to rethink how to move around the map. If you’re happy with the base game, I don’t find these expansions to be particularly necessary. 

There is also a gaming mat that you can purchase to give a little extra grandeur to your game. If you’re mostly interested in the “Tiny” aspect of the game, I’d recommend skipping this as there’s obviously no way to roll this bad boy up in the box. But if you’re all about upping the “Epic” element, the mat is really quite nice and, while it’s definitely not necessary, we’ve enjoyed playing on it. 

Can kids play?

Tiny Epic Tactics has a lot going on that I feel it would be best suited for the teen or tween crowd. This game is pretty much pure strategy, planning, and reacting. While younger kids around age 10 may be able to figure out the general mechanics, figuring out how to get your characters to work together, when to move, when to attack, and knowing how best to react to what your opponents are doing tip this game outside of the kid realm as it is just too overwhelming. 

But don’t worry, it is kid approved for Tiny Epic Imaginative Play! 😉 Our son asks to get this out every day so that he can use it for pretend play and act out all of the fantasy stories he has swirling in his head. 

Summary

Tiny Epic Tactics is a highly enjoyable game with high replayability factors. It manages to pack all the fun of a hugely tactical gaming experience into a smaller, portable package while still maintaining a wealth of interesting choices for players to utilize and discover over many many different plays. 

With Tactics in the name, players looking for that tactical experience will not be disappointed. Every choice you make is important and you’ll need to be ready to strategize and adapt at a moments notice depending on what your opponents choose to do. 

While there is a lot to learn, the game remains fairly accessible and easy for new players to pick up though there is a learning curve at the beginning. 

And finally, thanks to the multiple game modes that come built into the game, it’s easy to quickly switch it up and give a different feel to the playing experience which in turn helps extend the life of this game, helping you get it to the table again and again as it stays fresh and exciting.

Pros:
Many Interesting Choices
Highly Replay-able
Multiple Game Modes
Great Table presence

Cons:
A lot of rules to remember with no player aid
Turns can take a bit long

To purchase a copy of Tiny Epic Tactics:
Retail Edition
Deluxe Edition

A special thank you to the team at Gamelyn Games for sending us Tiny Epic Tactics to play and review. As always our thoughts and opinions are our own. To learn more about Gamelyn Games and their awesome games, be sure to check out their website!

Game Info:
Title: Tiny Epic Tactics
2-4 Players Ages 14+
Designer: Scott Almes
Artist: Nikoletta Vaszi, Naomi Robinson, Benjamin Shulman
Publisher: Gamelyn Games
Published: 2019

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