Feud Review

Grade: A-

Strategy board game that’s simple to learn yet has surprising depth

Feud is a chess-esque strategy game that’s played out on a 4×4 grid. There are 6 different piece types (Knight, King, Wizard, Priest, Archer, Shield) with complementary abilities. The two players (Black and White) takes turns, and there are two phases to each turn. In the first phase of your turn, you can switch places with an adjacent token. In the second phase of your turn, you get one action, where you can use one of your piece’s special abilities (heal, attack, teleport, fire arrow). Unlike most board games, during the switch phase, you update not just your own positioning, but you impact the other players as well. This is a big part of the strategy and complexity of the game.

While Feud takes about 5 minutes to learn, the game takes a lot longer to master. The tutorial was excellent at walking you through the game learning. In my first dozen or so solo matches, I was wiped by the AI. After a while though, I got to a 50/50 win/loss mark against the computer on easy mode. Hard mode, though, forget about it!

I had more fun playing the versus mode against actual humans in a few games. It was nice to see that Bearwaves, the developer, set up a discord that holds monthly tournaments, too (discord.gg/Bearwaves).

Feud Gameboard

Feud Strategies

Since I’m new to the game, I went to Bearwaves discord to collect a few strategy tips from the players there who are more experienced than myself.

From “IsthisChess”, “Raelag”, and “Richard Fu” on the Bearwaves discord (my thanks to them for the contribution!):

  • Isolating a piece is just as effective as killing it.
  • In most games, you each move your own pieces, but in Feud, you want to carefully consider where you can move an opponent’s pieces as well.
  • It’s usually better to pick an opening with the King in the corner.
  • Maximize the usage of Knights in the early game.
  • NEVER use the Wizard’s ability in the early game.
  • If you’re about to lose a piece, make sure your other pieces still stay connected.
  • Never allow your first deaths to occur at b1 and c1 (middle of your bottom row). If any piece in b1 or c1 is about to be killed, move it aside.
  • You typically win a Feud game by killing some enemy pieces and isolating the others. Therefore, don’t attack a piece that you plan to isolate.
  • Kill units when you can (or murder the enemy medic first). You may regard one health unit as unusable, but the medic is still a thing and quite an annoying one at that.
In this Winning match, I used my knights early, took out the enemy’s shield, isolated the knight attacking me, and then took out their king one turn before the enemy could take out mine. Many of my games went more longer, but this one was a quick 5 turns and 5 minutes.

Overall Impression

Feud leans into the medieval theme with lovely Rennaissance festival music jamming in the background as you play your matches. The UI is clean and intuitive, and the only knock I saw is that the game doesn’t let you replay a completed match to see where you went wrong, and it doesn’t store your win/loss history over time. Having a game log and match histories to scroll back through would help players.

I’ve seen comments from other reviewers that the game was too simple, but I disagree on that point. There’s a lot of abstract strategy angles in Feud that make it interesting to play. In my few dozen games, I keep being challenged by various scenarios, and it kept my interest. Keeping my interest says something, as I’m notoriously distractable!

Unlike many of the games I review, I’ll probably keep Feud installed and may play a few matches from time to time. If you want to play a game yourself against others, download the game and join the Bearwaves discord. If you like the free game, you can support the developers on Patreon.

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