Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com —and let us know what you think.

The area control genre—troops, creatures, or cubes seeking majorities on a map—is a cramped and crowded one. Though well-regarded titles like Cry Havoc, Inis, and Star Wars: Rebellion all arrived in 2016, the calendar keeps turning and the plastic miniatures keep coming. This time, though, they’re positively enormous.

Game details Designer: Andrew Parks

Publisher: WizKids

Players: 3-6

Age: 14+

Playing time: 90-120 minutes

Price: $79.99 Standard Edition ( Andrew ParksWizKids3-614+90-120 minutes: $79.99 Standard Edition ( Amazon )/$129 Premium Painted Edition ( Amazon )/ ~£80 Standard Edition

In Assault of the Giants, a horde of titans descend upon Faerûn, the prominent continent featured in the Dungeons & Dragons Forgotten Realms setting. This Andrew Parks design takes a conflict-oriented thematic chassis and bolts a smooth Euro-style engine to its frame. The game is a hybrid of schools, delivering carnage and tremendous 5” plastic miniatures to satisfy your eyes as well as your brain. The fact that it plays in a cool 25 minutes per player is just wax on the hood.

Taking on the roles of giant clans in the wake of a societal sundering, you are vying to ascend to the oversized throne. This is accomplished in game through amassing Ordning points in an effort to please Annam the All-Father. As a concept, it’s a bit like Game of Thrones... if everyone was leading an army cloned from the lifeblood of The Hound.

Managing your actions well lies at the heart of Assault of the Giants. Each player has a hand of nine cards that offer abilities such as movement, combat, and plundering. As a giant, the people inhabiting the land are yours to use and abuse. You can pillage their resources, you can rip spells from the earth, or you can even flood the continent with the blood of your giant-kin foes.

On each turn, you play one of these nine cards from your hand to perform one of those aforementioned abilities. The cards remain on the table and won’t return to your hand until you eventually play the Rest action. The longer you take to play particular cards, the more powerful they grow; each card receives a boost in potency based on how many total cards you have already played to the table. Your recruit ability might at first offer just five points to muster up some tall brutes, but if you play it as your fourth card, you get nine points instead. A turn or two in and the gears start turning as strategy and clever play emerge.

What’s particularly intriguing is that the game’s tempo is in your hands. Since each action only appears a single time in your deck, if you want to attack again, you need to toss down that Rest card. Do you rest often so that you can play a smaller set of abilities more frequently? Or do you try to maximize plays, squeezing efficiencies out of every possible action before burning a turn to rest and reset? When you tie the strategic considerations into the board state and swirling environmental factors at work, it’s a wonderful system.

But who wants to Rest in a game titled Assault of the Giants? Lukcily, in this game, even kicking up your feet and cracking a cold one is exciting. In addition to picking up your cards, Resting lets you control the three neutral human giantslayers who are skipping about the board. They can battle and harass your foes, poking a sharp sword into even the most ferocious of titans.

A smooth core mechanic will only get you so far, of course. What really brings the proverbial Hill Giants to the yard is the game’s glorious asymmetry. Taking a page out of the fantastic Cthulhu Wars playbook, Assault of the Giants strongly diversifies its cast. Each faction boasts different units, different action cards, and a unique narrative. That’s right—this is a game with a story.

Each clan attempts to exert influence through its own path. The Ice Giants want to freeze the countryside, the Hill Giants want to amass piles of food for their leader to gorge on, and the Stone Giants think this is all a terrible nightmare from which they can awake only by crushing human civilization. You accomplish these endeavors by meeting the requirements listed on your faction event cards. Some giants will have multiple narrative beats to work through while others will find their path straighter. You’ll pull off fantastic, world-shaking maneuvers that actually feed into the board situation. (Wait until you see the Fire Giants forge their dragon-slaying golem, Vonindod, for the first time.)