Table of contents for Issue 62 in Tabletop Gaming

Welcome Welcome to the future. Well, at least three sci-fi futures of gaming in this issue. We’ve got the story making machine of ARCs, the techno-dystopia of CY_BORG, or the life on the intergalactic lamb in Stardriven Saga. All of which offer different ways to look at a future that’s either influenced by stories of the past, is terrifyingly close, or surpsingly bright. One thing is for sure, there’s no Cylons in sight in Voices In My Head, the newest game from the designer of Battlestar Galactica. Instead we’ve got a wild tug of war inside the mind of a man on trial – do you want to save him, or see him sent down? You’re all in it together so you better have a pretty convincing case. Plus we’ve…

You said… 37. I found a mint copy of Hero Quest in a charity shop for £3.99. I remember loving it for Xmas ‘89 when I was 12. I got Space Crusade in Xmas ‘90 but that’s where it stopped as none of my family liked them. After getting it I found Kickstarter and the rest is solo gaming history. Stuart Galloway I was 12. A friend of mine played D&D with his family. It was like nothing I’d ever seen. From that point on I was hooked. I started working on creating my own game soon after. I never stopped. @6083_the_ttrpg About 20. Started an AD&D game with one group one day, a Fourth Edition game the following day with a different group, and a 3.5 Edition game with…

around the world in 80 plays BOTSWANA Words by Chad Wilkinson This month we’re taking a trip to Botswana. This landlocked country, geographically characterised by the vast Kalahari desert, is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world. However, with our ever-playful species residing here for over 200,000 years, there must undoubtably be evidence of gaming. Indeed, as evidenced by ancient game boards carved into rocks, mancala style games have existed in Botswana for hundreds of years. The Lozi people – of the former kingdom of Barotseland, whose southern tips incorporate segments of northern Botswana – commonly played a mancala variant called Mulabalaba. The Ju|’hoan people of northern Botswana also play a mancala game, known in their Khoisan click consonant language as |úí (meaning ‘one’), alongside card games…

STARDRIVEN SAGA SURVIVORS Can we survive the cold embrace of outer space? Words by Christopher John Eggett “Stradriven: Saga might be my magnum opus,” says Mike Gnade, the owner of Rockmanor Games. Rockmanor has had a string of particularly interesting hits – the biggest is probably Maximum Apocalypse (now with an associated roleplaying game), but also D&D downtime simulator Set A Watch and the recent courtroom frolics of Lawyer Up. Stardriven: Saga is a spiritual successor to Maximum Apocalypse, but with everything turned up to eleven. Oh, and in space. “We’ve got the first half of the campaign locked in at this point,” says Gnade, as he catches us up on the development of the game. The old card system for storytelling is gone, to be replaced by a book…

PLAYED ANKH: GODS OF EGYPT Godlike Designer: Eric Lang Publisher: CMON 90m 2-5 14+ £100 Ankh, the third instalment of Eric Lang’s mythology trilogy, devised in part from the books on myth he read as a child, is a daring and divisive finale. There are two games here to review – the two player experience, and the three-plus player experience – each with their own flavour, and some elements which might be an acquired taste. But before that, we should take a moment to admire the huge god-miniatures that players will be taking control of, the wonderful sculpts of the guardian monsters, the sand-grass-water hex board that does – for maybe the first time in gaming on hexes ever – look really appealing. The game is a thing of beauty,…

PLAYED NIGHT OF THE NINJAS House hunting Designer: Justin Gary Publisher: Brotherwise Games 15-30m 4-11 12+ £25 Gather your mercenary powers and get ready to take out enemy ninjas… just as soon as you can work out who they are. Night of the Ninja earns its place in the crowded social deduction genre. This is a competitive game and ultimately it’s every player for themselves, but different teams are created each round and forging alliances will help you triumph. The game splendidly dances the line between team and solo play, hurling you close to some players before throwing everything up in the air again. Each round your House card indicates your allegiance to Lotus or Crane and the rank denotes your status within that house. The team with the highest…

OVERDRIVE Designer: Rob Burman & Matt Gilbert Publisher: Mantic Games 30-45m 2 11+ £42 Great gameplay will interest you in a miniatures game, but it’s having a unique model collection that gets players passionate about them. Overdrive has the gameplay polished like brass – a fast paced three-on-three sports game for two players, split into eight rounds of four actions per team. Players can activate their ‘players’ (only mildly confusing) to have them run, grab objectives or slam into opponents. Each ‘player’ has different stats representing what they need to roll using three dice to succeed a check, adding or subtracting dice based on positioning and any sixes rolled ‘explode’, letting you roll more dice, making any check the potentially pivotal moment of the match. The miniatures have a wide…

KINGDOMINO: ORIGINS Going back in time to tweak a design Designer: Bruno Cathala Publisher: Blue Orange Games 25m 2-4 8+ £20 Kingdomino is a modern classic. It may only be five years old, but this Spiel des Jahres winning, tile-laying delight is hard to beat as a gateway game or light filler, and its cheerful aesthetic pop and chunky production has become almost iconic. There’s been a few expansions, rethemes, and spin-offs over the years – most recently with the child-friendly Dragomino – but could this latest take on the game be the perfect iteration? Kingdomino: Origins is very much the game we know and love, albeit transferred to a new prehistoric setting amidst a number of clever changes. Players will still be competing to lay down the best five…

DRAWN TO ADVENTURE Designer: Keith Piggott Publisher: Final Frontier Games 30-90m 2-4 14+ £29 It’s not often a roll and write limits the number of players as Drawn to Adventure does, but the reason why becomes immediately clear. Rather than offering you a familiar stack of game pages and a few Argos pencils to be distributed to the masses, Drawn to Adventure offers up to four dry erase flip book sand some marker pens, so once complete, you erase, and start again. Roll and write fans can put down their laminators and rejoice. Thankfully, the game keeps the celebration going, in frankly delightful addition to the genre. With bright and colourful artwork, this dice drafting roll and write has you exploring over three maps, trying to complete quests using the…

PLAYED THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD Slipping into a pair of tights has never felt so good Designer: Michael Menzel Publisher: Kosmos 60m 2-4 10+ £45 It’s rare that somethings as well put together as The Adventures of Robin Hood lands on our gaming table. The second full game from the artist Michael Menzel is as well designed as it is painterly and beautiful. The huge eight-piece board depicts the castle, the forest and town of Nottingham – and is indented with tiles that pop out with the same feeling of opening an advent calendar door. And rather than chocolate behind each door, there’s a little nibble of an adventure. The mechanics of The Adventures of Robin Hood are so minimal and elegant – the results of the excellent movement…

ALONE AGAINST THE TIDE Designer: Nicolas Johnson Publisher: Chaosium 86 14+ £12 Call of Cthulhu is often referred to, unfairly in my eyes, as a system that’s for people who like maths. Percentile-roll-under, super-specific but overlapping-sounding skills, makes it much more of a ‘nerds’ game’ than others. And yet, here, in this jolly solo adventure set in the lakeside town of Estbury, outside Boston, the system more or less teaches itself. In fact, as a way in to game and its engine, there’s really no better entry point (beyond the starter set). Your investigator will be exploring the town as a green mist rolls in, while trying to understand the suspicious death of a local professor of history. Your choices through the adventure lead to many dead ends and actual deaths,…

PLAYED ACHTUNG! CTHULHU 2D20 World War Weird Designer: Various Publisher: Modiphius 455 11+ £40 From its punctuation-packed name through to its wonderfully wacky World War II-but-Lovecraftian premise, everything about Achtung! Cthulhu feels like it was created as a bet, or possibly as a joke pitch that accidentally got the stamp of approval. Once you get past the mundane weirdness of the core premise, however, and start delving into the juicy weirdness that comes from arming wizards with howitzers, you’ll find a gleefully ahistorical take on the gloomy Lovecraftian horror genre that works wonderfully. So long as you don’t think about it all that much, anyway. This is actually the second edition of Achtung! Cthulhu to hit the shelves, with the biggest change coming in the form of a shift towards…

NICE BUNS Designer: Big Potato Games Publisher: Big Potato Games 30m 2-6 10+ £30 Giving your game a pun name is always a sure-fire way to get attention as people either giggle childishly to themselves or groan at the clever wordplay. Nice Buns, as you might expect, had us giggling as everytime one of us won we’d get the opportunity to say “those are some nice buns.” It’s the simple things in life and Nice Buns captures that in every aspect. The premise is that you are trying to collect three coloured sets of steamed bao buns on your plate. To do this you roll the three dice and take the actions that you roll which can be – draw from the bag, put one of your non-plated buns back…

LLAMA LAND No llama drama here Designer: Phil Walker-Harding Publisher: Lookout Games 45m 2-4 10+ £34 Llamas are a creature that many people have a great affection for – basically because they’re weird fluffy things who look like a kind of wool-loaf when they sit down. Whether you’re pro-llama or llama-agnostic, you might come to love them slightly less as they get in the way of your expanding farmland. Llama Land is a tile-layer with a mix of resource collection and management. Players spend their time laying tiles (in a variety of polyomino shapes) to extend, or raise, the shared hillsides. Whatever you cover (in terms of the cocoa, corn and potatoes) you get to pick up a matching token, for of these can be cashed in to pick up…

QUICKSTART “I wanted to create games that add to the experiences on your games shelves – as opposed to replacing something” Corey Konieczka on Voices In My Head, p20 “Every hand has threats and perils, there are a lot of turns and surprises. Playing a trick taking game often feels like magic” Cole Wehrle on ARCs, p38 “It’s a way of artistically venting. This is a cyberpunk dystopia, and then you realise – this is the real world. This stuff is actually happening” Johan Nohr on CY_BORG and the real world, p26…

FIRST TURN JUSTIN DE WITT The lord of Castle Panic looks back at the 2009 cooperative tower-defence game that started it all for him Interview by Dan Jolin BACKGROUND “As a kid I loved designing and making games; growing up I knew I wanted to do something creative. I ended up working for an animation studio called Humungous Entertainment for a while, then moved on, doing creative stuff in computers and multimedia. But in 1999 a friend of mine introduced me to Settlers of Catan and that just blew my mind. I started making games again, only with much more interesting mechanics and components. That was my evening and weekend hobby, playtesting games with friends, until after a while they kept asking to play ‘the castle one’…” COMPONENTS “I was inspired…

my favourite game CHRIS MCDOWALL The creator of Electric Bastionland and Into The Odd brings us his favourite tabletop walk, Tokaido Surely there’s no such thing as a ‘favourite game’ for those of us who are always thinking about the next addition to our collection. With limited shelf space, I strive to maintain a ruthless detachment from any one particular game, operating a strict one-in one-out system. Even Pandemic, the very game that opened me up to the wider world of boardgames, has since been sold onto a new loving home. Nothing is sacred here, so I approached this column with a view to picking my favourite game of right-now, rather than crowning a permanent champion. But nestled between this rotating cast, a few familiar faces endure. I can’t sell…

CARDBOARD MANIFESTO RPG CAMPAIGNS ARE TOO DAMN LONG Calling for an end to epics Words by Richard Jansen-Parkes Artwork from Heirs to Heresy by Osprey Games There’s always been this weird assumption hanging around the world of tabletop roleplaying, that in order for a campaign to be good it must also be long. Or, to use the more marketing-friendly term, epic. This applies to the home-brewers as much as the publishers that keep putting out sweeping campaign books that could be used to bludgeon rats to death. Almost all of us – and I very much count myself in this – fall into the trap of planning our campaigns as though they’ll last forever; as though this time we’ll definitely make it to level 20, and certainly won’t see the…

PLAYED ALIEN: FATE OF THE NOSTROMO We can’t lie about your chances… Designer: Scott Rogers Publisher: Ravensburger 45-60m 1-5 10+ £30 It’s always seemed odd that Ridley Scott’s seminal sci-fi horror film Alien has spawned a range of child-friendly merchandise. Like as the “Xenomorph Swarm” action-figure battle set, for example, or the (Walmart-exclusive) “Deluxe Alien Queen”, complete with “Internal Jaw Hissing Attack!” With its bleak outlook on humanity, its queasy body horror and, the twisted, phallocentric design of the creature itself (thanks Giger!), there is nothing about Alien or its sequels that screams, “Y’know, for kids!” In contrast, the movie’s tabletop spin-offs have up to now largely stayed true to its 18-certificate roots, whether in RPG form, as the Legendary Encounters deckbuilding game, or the recent miniature skirmish title…

DICE MINER Plan to be lucky Designer: Joshua DeBonis, Nikola Risteski Publisher: Atlas Games 20-30m 1-4 10+ £25 An idiom that there is beauty in simplicity is proven by Dice Miner. Everything you need to know about the game is in its name. You mine – draft – custom dice that form a mountain made from dice, to then score these dice based on their attributes, to then roll the dice for the next round and draft some more dice. It is, in short, a dice game. The thematical premise of the game, which involves the story as old as time of dwarves, tunnels and dragons, is almost immediately forgettable. It is only relevant in that you get to choose a dwarf hero character, with a unique asset, at the…

MICRO MACRO: CRIME CITY – FULL HOUSE Designer: Johannes Sich Publisher: Pegasus Spiele 15-45m 1-4 10+ £25 The second entry in the Spiel des Jahres 2020 winning Micro Macro series (for we assume there will be more) is very much more of the same. We have a new bit city map, and a ton of new case cards. With that comes the same problems that we had in the original game – it’s really quite a lot of squinting. Players are once again looking to answer questions using their map-reading and scanning abilities, and then a little bit of lateral-logic on top. At its best, being the sleuth who spots that the victim was left handed, so there’s no chance it’s suicide with the gun in her right hand, feels…

PLAYED HEIRS TO HERESY The trouble with Templars Designer: Alan Behr Publisher: Osprey Games 190 11+ £25 The Knights Templar have barged their way into a unique cultural position over the past 700 years or so, bridging the gap between the historical and mystical, the martial and the divine. This blending and blurring of reality and fantasy is exactly what Heirs to Heresy aims to capture in a tabletop RPG, and – for the most part – it succeeds. Rather than being a catch-all book for generic Templar adventures in the middle-ages, Heirs to Heresy is written and designed around a very specific type of campaign. Every game you run with the system opens up on the morning of Friday 13th, 1307, when the Templar order was denounced as heretical…

PLAYED LOST RUINS OF ARNAK: EXPEDITION LEADERS Welcome back to the jungle Designer: Min & Elwen Publisher: Czech Games Edition 30-120m 1-4 12+ £29 Game expansions are always a tricky prospect. Some feel like they’re offering content that should have been in the base game and only exist to burn a hole in your pocket. Others can feel superfluous, or like they’re adding unnecessary complication to a rule set you’ve happily got your head around. But every now and again, an expansion comes along that hits the sweet spot in the middle, neither feeling like it’s plugging a deliberately left hole, nor creating unwanted extra crunch. Expedition Leaders is, thankfully, just such an expansion. Min and Elwin’s Lost Ruins of Arnak was a major hit that has deserved every ounce…

PLAYED DUNE: HOUSE OF SECRETS Buried in the sand Designer: Jakub Poczęty, Przemysław Rymer, Ignacy Trzewiczek, Weronika Spyra Publisher: Portal Games 90-180m 1-4 14+ £39 As indicated by the constant stream of board games based on Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi epic, Dune’s IP is very hot right now. Dune: House of Secrets is the latest game exploring the Dune-verse, and, judging by its box art, piggybacking on the release of Denis Villeneuve’s recent cinematic re-imagining of the book. House of Secrets also features a story-driven cooperative gaming system from Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game, utilising both physical and digital components to tell an interactive story. Despite the faces of the hero Paul, his mother Jessica and one of the series antagonists, Glossu Raban on the box cover, players will…

PLAYED PROFITEERS War. What is it good for? Absolutely coining it Designer: James Dickinson Publisher: Stronghold Games 30m 3-5 14+ £16 It’s 1861 – in the world of this game, not in real life – and you are a legitimate British businessperson only too happy to assist the brave troops fighting in the American Civil War. In fact, so committed are you to justice that you’re supplying both sides, just to be sure one wins. You and your fellow entrepreneurs can arm infantry, sell cannons, and even lay down railway to ensure one side proves victorious. Who do you want to win? Why, whoever will make you the most money, of course. Profiteers is a deft bit of political satire in the form of a stripped-down, relatively simple card game.…

SMALL ISLANDS Island hopping Designer: Alexis Allard Publisher: Lucky Duck Games 30m 1-4 8+ £42 There’s a while subgenre of games that is ‘Carcassonne but with a twist’. One of my favourites from last year was the excellent Streets which does a lot to capture the feeling of Carcassonne, without much of the sprawling bloat of 20 years of expansions. So here comes Small Islands, which is both very Carcassonne and also… not. Swapping the be-castled fields of France for the small islands of, er, the ocean we guess, players set out exploring by placing tiles from the market into the shared ‘map’. Each island has little resource markers on it, and each player attempts to ensure there’s a decently scoring set of islands for them. Scoring is worked out…

YUKON SALON Designer: David Fooden Publisher: Atlas Games 15m 2-4 10+ £12 I’ve a soft spot for wonderfully silly party games, even more so when they make me laugh out loud whilst reading its rules. Yukon Salon tests players to be the greatest stylists in the Great Frozen North. Naturally, your clientele out here is restricted to Lumberjacks and Bears, but thanks to a transferable skill set, you’re capable of cutting beards and styling hair for any customer. Each turn players have two actions, where they can draw style cards, seat a customer or try to give them a new look. Each style card scores differently depending on customer, as well as offering different rewards for completion, ranging from bonus points to special skills. Higher combined customer and style value…

AT A GLANCE THE ADVENT CALENDAR IS BACK, EVEN EARLIER Christmas comes earlier every year – so early in fact that you might be reading this before you’ve even had your turkey. Tabletop Gaming’s Advent Calendar was a roaring success – selling out all 100 limited edition, hand wrapped bundles of gaming goodness in no time. Each box contained 25 days worth of presents to be opened throughout December on the lead up to Christmas. At £250 with a RRP of £550 it was a great way to get a lot of gaming into your festive period while keeping the magic of a good surprise. The 2021 calendar offered over 14 full games, plus accessories and extra fun. The games included this year were the likes of Micro Macro, Symbaroum,…

10 THE BEST FINDS OF DRAGONMEET DRAGONMEET is your best chance all year to see weird and wonderful roleplaying games, and even the occasional board game. If you missed out, here’s some of our top picks from Dragonmeet 2021 Words by Charlie Pettit and Christopher John Eggett 1 UNTOLD ENCOUNTERS OF THE RANDOM KIND Loke Battlemats are generally known for the very thing they’re named after – Battlemats. For something a little different, this was the first time we were able to take a proper look at Untold Encounters of the Random Kind, their brand new random encounter book compatible with Fifth Edition. Split inside between Town, Wilderness, and Dungeon encounters, adding in advice, example adventures, and random tables, it looks to leave even the least prepared with a perfect quick adventure,…

The Soloist HISTORY GAMES We explore the world of solo gaming one move at a time. This month: historical solo games Words by Debbie Brown Much as I can’t get enough of generic fantasy settings in board-games, particularly dungeon crawlers, I also really like games with a strong historical setting, enough to pique further interest in the period, even if they don’t cater for solo play (e.g Britannia, Capital (Warsaw) and Medieval Conspiracy). There are many games set in a particular place and time but it’s often a superficial design element. In this column I look at three high-quality games which I believe inform as well as entertain. They share a common mechanic; a score attack versus a named opponent who is relatively simple to play leaving you to focus…

5 QUICK QUESTS If you do feel like exploring some RPGs and adventures designed for shorter campaigns, we’ve picked out a handful of the best for you to pick up right now Picked by Richard Jansen-Parkes 1 BAND OF BLADES ◗ Evil Hat | £38 Gloomy, bloody and brilliant, this tale of soldiers holding back a horde of undead over the course of a long retreat is designed to play out over maybe a dozen or so sessions. The ruleset is based on Blades in the Dark and lends itself to the cinematic, high-stakes missions assigned to your squad of mud-spattered grunts. Though every Band of Blades campaign opens with the same rough goal, different routes through the wilderness, as well as a wide selection of potential adventures ensure that…

MAKING IT: ADAPTING DIGITAL GAMES TO TABLETOP XBOX TO TABLETOP We explore the trials of bringing an indie video game hit to our tabletops with the creator of The Binding of Isaac Words by Christopher John Eggett We often write about adaptation, translation, and conversion of videogames to their board game counterparts – it’s a tricky job. Luckily Ed McMillen and Javron Frazier are here to talk us through their experiences and off their tips for going from digital to analogue. It started with the flu. Ed McMillen, the designer of The Binding of Isaac and Super Meat Boy on our screens and Tapeworm and Binding of Isaac: Four Souls on our tabletops, decided to prototype something on paper. This ended up being Four Souls. Within a couple of days…

GLASS ROAD Still blowing away Designer: Uwe Rosenberg Publisher: Capstone Games 20-80m 1-4 13+ £39 Glass Road is a re-print of Uwe Rosenberg’s 2013 resource management and tile placement game commemorating the 700-year-old tradition of glassmaking in Bavarian Forest. When looking at its box art, popping a multitude of cardboard tiles and trying to align stickers on the small resource tokens, it is hard to shake the feeling that this is, perhaps, the most the Euro-est of the Eurogames. It has that traditional style artwork, the medieval theme, the economic system that feel very much ‘been there, done that’… multiple times over. Sure, some elements are exactly as you would expect, like the resource management and production. Players will be manipulating their resources to acquire new building and terrain tiles…

PLAYED DREADFUL CIRCUS A circus of horrors with big top energy Designer: Bruno Faidutti Publisher: Portal Games 45m 4-8 14+ £24 Roll up, roll up! Welcome to the macabre world of Dreadful Circus, in which you play as rival ringmasters who apparently have all decided to roll into town on the same day, and then for some reason proceed to auction off acts to one another, all in a bid to be the greatest show on earth. The theme of this game manages to be both beautifully realised and completely at odds with what you actually do at the table. The monochrome line art of different circus acts is flavourful and evocative, and the bold colours help differentiate between varying card types. There’s plenty to touch and handle too. Players…

PLAYED 7 WONDERS: ARCHITECTS A fresh twist on the classical era classic Designer: Antoine Bauza Publisher: Repos Production 30m 2-7 8+ £36 Sometimes less is more. Other times it leads to games like Monopoly Junior, where someone has hacked the original apart yet still managed to make it unexciting. Thankfully, this game goes to prove that a hard working designer can re-envision their game to a younger audience without robbing any of its charm. 7 Wonders: Architects is fundamentally a more accessible version of the classical era card drafting titan. Each player chooses a wonder and takes its specific tray, complete with its own deck (which is placed face-up on their left) and five-stage cardboard wonder, assembling it with the scaffolding side face-up. On their turn players can choose to…

STAR CLICKER Designer: Christophe Raimbault Publisher: Ludonaute 40m 2-4 8+ £30 Star Clicker is a cooperative tower defence game, inspired by the video games of the same genre, where players, as kid pilots, protect their home planet from the invading forces of alien Creepers. It is a little unclear why your parents have gone on a mission far away in space, leaving kids with no supervision and in possession of spaceships and missiles. However, this is not a game where the narrative premise needs to be nit-picked: just jump into the cockpit, press a few buttons, and enjoy shooting some Creepers. Pressing buttons is, in fact, one of the main elements of the gameplay. Each player has a pilot dashboard with buttons to move and shoot in four different directions.…

FIZBAN’S TREASURY OF DRAGONS Dragons & Dragons Designer: Various Publisher: Wizards of the Coast 224 11+ £40 It’s a rare RPG campaign that can’t benefit from a dragon or two. This truism is especially accurate when it comes to the mighty realms of Dungeons & Dragons, where the expectation of running into scaly death on wings is baked right into the title. However, while the regular old Monster Manual has a couple dozen examples of the species to proffer up, that doesn’t seem to nearly cover the gaming public’s desire for all things draconic. Enter Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons. This chunky little tome is a sourcebook all about dragons and dragon accessories. It’s packed with a smorgasbord of draconic lore, stat blocks, campaign ideas and random creation tables. It’s got…

SUBASTRAL Designer: Ben Pinchback & Chris Riddle Publisher: Renegade Games 15-30m 2-5 10+ £18 Back in 2020, designers Ben Pinchback and Chris Riddle released the stargazing two player card-drafter Stellar. This year they’ve teamed up with prolific illustrator Beth Sobel for its spiritual sequel Subastral; a clever set collection game which diverts our gaze from the skies and points them toward the diverse biomes around us. Despite this more focused and grounded setting, Subastral expands the player count to five whilst still practicing the former’s quietly contemplative, crunchy gameplay. Players will be compiling research notes in the form of their individual card displays, competing to create the largest mixed and matched sets. Each turn follows the same structure of playing a biome card to one of the columns of clouds…

UNFATHOMABLE Throw an old game into the mythos and see what happens Designer: Tony Fanchi & Corey Konieczka Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games 3-6h 2-4 14+ £80 “Battestar Galactica: The Board Game” whisper the gaming gods in your ear, so persistently that it can’t just be the wind. “You need to play Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game”, it tells you again. Despite being long out of print, and copies costing between £100-£200 it’s remained comfortably in the BoardGameGeek Top 100. When it seems like your only option is to turn to Tabletop Simulator and hope for a version there, how then do you proceed? Well, you invite the original designer to reskin and retheme the game into an existing and popular franchise, and then sit back and let a whole new…

PLAYED SUMMONER WARS: SECOND EDITION STARTER SET Fire vs ice – an introductory battle of elements Designer: Colby Dauch Publisher: Plaid Hat Games 40-60m 2 9+ £25 Following the successful launch of the Summoner Wars: Master Set Second Edition, Plaid Hat Games have simultaneously expanded the range and broadened their audience with this budget friendly Starter Set. Squeezing in all the elements needed to get up and running, this pared down box introduces the ‘Tundra Orcs’ and ‘Phoenix Elves’; two new factions ideal for a pair of duelling newcomers or simply as a welcome addition to the Master Set’s six factions. For those unfamiliar with the game, Summoner Wars is an expandable two player tactical card game of duelling summoners - think Magic: The Gathering without the randomness of booster-based…

PLAYED CHRONICLES OF CRIME: 2400 Welcome to precog club Designer: David Cicurel, Wojciech Grajkowski Publisher: Lucky Duck Games 60-90m 1-4 14+ £27 It began in 1400, we dropped back into the timeline in 1900, and now we’re hurtled into the future to the year 2400. At the closure of the Millennium series, we’ve moved from mildly psychic monk over to an ex-cyber-agent gone solo, in a series of investigatory style games that draw you into solving three kinds of crime per game. It offers the merging of the physicality of character cards, items, and locations, with scanning QR codes within an app to gain additional vital information, allowing you to interview witnesses, collect evidence, and generally zip about to different locations with relative ease. The premise sees you solving crimes…