When news broke that the publishers of fantasy card game Magic: The Gathering were working on a board game set in the series’ fictional universe, fans reacted with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. In the 22 years since it was first released, the game has hooked an estimated 20m players with its blend of compelling storylines and strategic gameplay. A poorly-executed adaptation would leave a lot of people disappointed.

Fortunately, Arena of the Planeswalkers may be the best tabletop game released this year.

A fast-paced skirmish battle game, it sees you and your friends take command of armies of creatures led by “planeswalkers”, the powerful, dimension-hopping mages who serve as the central characters in Magic’s ongoing plot. Over the course of about an hour, you’ll summon units to the modular hex-grid battlefield, engage in vicious combat and cast deadly spells in an effort to slay your rivals and emerge as the last man, woman or woodland elf standing.

It’s all very dramatic, but Arena of the Planeswalkers actually starts out as quite a low-key affair. Each player begins the game in command of just a single character – their planeswalker – represented on the battlefield by a miniature plastic figure. As the game progresses, you’ll summon more creatures to join the fight, until the board becomes a glorious, swirling, chaotic melee.

Each unit you bring to the fray is accompanied by a card outlining its abilities – the number of spaces it can move, the amount of damage it can endure and its skill in attacking and defending in combat. But as well as these basic stats, each unit boasts special powers allowing it to do things that others can’t. The red player’s “firecats” can move and attack as soon as they’re summoned on to the board, making them an immediate threat. The blue player’s phantoms can move through enemy figures as if they weren’t there. The black player’s zombies smell so bad that any enemies who come near them suffer a penalty to their defence rolls.

Game-changing spells

Using these abilities to their best effect is a huge part of the game, but you’ll also have a collection of magical spells at your disposal, represented by a personal deck of cards. You’ll draw one of these at the start of every turn, and they can affect the battle in a number of potentially game-changing ways. Some simply deal damage to opposing creatures, others beef up your own troops’ abilities, or disrupt your opponent’s plans by countering their spells or forcing them to discard cards from their hand.

Individually, none of these spells are necessarily all that powerful, but play them at just the right moment, or in just the right combination, and they can completely change the course of the game. In this respect, Arena of the Planeswalkers is much like its card-based older sibling. You can conceive and execute a winning strategy, only for your opponent to play a masterful turn leaving your forces in tatters as you desperately try to improvise a plan B.

All of this happens at a pretty blistering pace. The board quickly fills up with opposing units, and there is minimal preliminary manoeuvring, leaving you to get straight down to some thoroughly satisfying combat. The turn structure itself also keeps the game moving along quickly, with each player activating, moving and fighting with just a single one of their units on any given round, meaning that a complete turn rarely takes more than about a minute.

This means you’re never waiting long for your next turn to come around, even with four or five players at the table. But it also throws up some interesting tactical dilemmas. Often you’ll find yourself with two or three situations on the board which all require your attention at the same time. Knowing which crisis you have to deal with right now and which can wait one more turn can mean the difference between victory and defeat.

Like someone failed at using a 3D printer

This is an astonishingly good game. It’s easy to learn, but packs genuine depth. The dice-based combat system is simple and intuitive, and multiplayer games in particular are an anarchic, violent joy with players forging alliances and stabbing one another in the back with each passing turn.

It’s also impressive just how faithfully the game adheres to the theme and flavour of the Magic universe. Each army feels very different to command. Where the white faction specialises in disciplined, coordinated attacks, red prefers to rush in with lightning-fast early assaults, lobbing fireballs at anything that survives. Where green units thrive on their affinity with nature and the survival of the fittest, the black army corrupts and weakens opponents before wiping them out with a tide of reanimated undead horrors.

But while Arena of the Planeswalkers does so many things well, it does have one glaring weakness.

The plastic figures included in the box are among the worst components I’ve ever seen in a board game. They’re god-awful, like someone’s failed first attempt at using a 3D printer. This would be offputting in any game, but in one based on a franchise that’s given us some of the most beautiful fantasy artwork in all of gaming, it’s a near-unforgivable oversight.

It’s the kind of production mis-step that could conceivably cause people to overlook the game, and that would be a pity, because it’s a joy to play. It’s also a game that’s going to grow. The core boxed set, which sells for £29.99, comes with five small squads that have clearly been carefully balanced against one another. But an ongoing series of expansions will offer new commanders, units, settings and scenarios, allowing players to construct their own personalised armies and spell decks and develop new strategies in the months and years to come.

This is a game to get your teeth into, and one that could easily become an obsession. Whether you’re a player of its trading-card predecessor or not, this is a must-play for any strategy fan.