Wroth is not a traditional historical wargame of the sort you usually see on my blog, and many of you will not treat it as a wargame at all. It is, however, very much a conflict-oriented area control title – a bloody one hiding behind all that color. The copy I am showing is the Polish edition from Portal Games. It plays one to four players in around an hour, and the box is huge and sturdy. The game caught my eye at our latest Polish convention, Wargameron 2026, where I played it with Michal and Janek and enjoyed it so much that I picked it as my quiz prize. We were sitting surrounded by hex and counter games – tanks, artillery, infantry – and then unrolled this gorgeous neoprene map. People kept stopping at our table to ask what we were playing.
You control one of five strongly asymmetric factions fighting over a map of roughly a dozen areas. Each turn you roll a pool of dice and draft them for actions – mining for Kora, reinforcements, maneuver and attack – plus your own all-seeing die, which can gather resources, kill a unit anywhere on the map, attack, or double an action. Beyond the basic units, shared by everyone, you invest in your faction’s special units, and those are what really twist the game. Each faction also has three one-shot special abilities, powerful but hard to recover from once spent.
The game ends when a player reaches 30 points at the end of a turn, with the furthest along winning if several cross together, and there is a neat catch-up mechanism – the last die each round goes to the player with the fewest points. Setup varies every time, with eight victory tokens distributed randomly among the numbered areas, so you rarely have time to do everything you want. Every faction board has an AI version on its reverse, so you can play solo, cooperatively against the bots, or straight competitive – and I would encourage the cooperative mode, because those bots can be demanding.
To some extent this is doing to the wargame community what Root did – people still argue about whether Root is a wargame, and I honestly do not care. This is a cool conflict area control game, asymmetric and replayable, and if you want to impress somebody or give a present, this is the thing to take. You can read about the convention where I found it in my Wargameron ’26 recap and impressions.
Below I am presenting the game components, giving also a quick overview of the rules and key design features:
Enjoy the material!