Table of contents for Issue 67 in Tabletop Gaming

NOW PLAYING… Get On Board We’ve got an issue filled with satisfying duels this month, with a dive into the Flesh & Blood competitive scene with national champion Matt Rogers (and you should have a fresh booster pack in your hands from the front of this very magazine to get you started). Plus, we talk to the game’s designer about the upcoming release, Uprising. And if hand to hand combat between mighty heroes isn’t enough, how about a world war? We talk to Thomas Pike about STRIKE HQ – the follow-up card game to the ever popular Escape the Dark… series. We find out if we can really do a real time strategy game on the tabletop, fog of war included. Plus we take a look at two titans –…

1 EXIT: THE GAME The classic escape room game in a small box. The puzzles can range from pretty simple right up to brain-bendingly tricky. Set your group’s expectations based on the rating on the side of the box. There’s usually a destructive element to the games which is either exhilaratingly irreverent, or panic inducing, depending on what people think a games night is about. After the first cut, you get used to it, after all, you sometimes won’t be able to progress without a little destruction. Particularly good entries are the Orient Express, Abandonded Cabin outings – but for a more sedate pace, go for the puzzle versions of the game. The upcoming Lord of the Rings edition is also set to provide some new surprises in a robust system.…

In mid-2020 Gonzalo Maldonado from Salt & Pepper Games reached out to me and asked if I would be interested in a collaboration. Historically Salt & Pepper has licensed games for Spanish-language editions, but they wanted to start publishing their own designs. In addition to being a publisher, Gonzalo is a reviewer, and over the years he had reviewed many of my games. We share a love for historical games, so he wanted to see if I would be interested in designing something for Salt & Pepper. The offer was flattering, and I was very much interested in working with Gonzalo and Salt & Pepper, but at the time I was swamped with deadlines. I let Gonzalo know that I was absolutely interested in collaborating, but that it would be…

It wasn’t until the second time I moved countries that I realized I was a minimalist. Shedding unnecessary possessions gave me such a high; I now live in a studio flat, and I love how it physically constrains what I can own. If I buy something, I either need to throw something else out or prepare to start sharing my bed with the new possession. Once I became aware of it, I started seeing it spill over into everything I enjoy. My favourite movies and TV shows have small casts and limited locations; my favourite foods are simple dishes, one thing done well. Sudokus are my favourite puzzles because of how much milage you get out of one rule: no repeated numbers in boxes, rows, or columns. Abstract games are…

1 YOU’VE GOT TO LOVE IT “The biggest tip I can give is you just have to fall in love with the game. If you don’t love what you’re doing, if you’re not absolutely passionate about playing it, you’re probably not going to get there. If that’s the case, maybe competitive gaming just isn’t for you.” 2 DEDICATION “Make sure you’re testing. Make sure you’re proving your thoughts and strategies out. Like any sport or hobby, whatever you do requires hard work and serious dedication if you want to get to the very top of your game. It’s not good enough to have the best ideas in the world, you have to be able to put them into practice and come up with strategies around those ideas, work out matchups…

This month we’re not straying too far from Tabletop Gaming HQ as we take a quick trip over the Irish Sea. The verdant ‘Emerald Isles’ are of course famous for the more sport oriented Gaelic Games, and whilst this points toward an affinity for competitive play, does it indicate the existence of a traditional tabletop scene? Often reductively referred to as Gaelic chess, Fidchell is in fact a somewhat elusive game – its rules only loosely gauged from the numerous descriptions in Irish legends and lore. Literature describes Fidchell as a strategic game played by both royalty and gods. The god Lugh is said to have created the game, subsequently lending it a somewhat mystical and divinatory status. In literature, games would often inspire or foretell the outcome of battles…

As board games enter the mainstream, the more we see large companies want to release their closely guarded characters and stories to be adapted to the tabletop in a ‘proper’ way. While there’s always been a version of a tie-in game out there for pretty much any ‘intellectual property’. The fact that I’ve used the phrase ‘intellectual property’ and you know what I mean, is in part because of products like a He-Man. We’ve all been trained into using the vaguely legalese language of press releases, aided by the spread of Marvel franchises from which it is hard to return to simply talking about films. Making a He-Man game however is particularly interesting because of the way He-Man came into existence. We talk to Jacek Karpowicz of Archon Studios about…

Designer: Jose Ramon Palacios | Publisher: Devir Sometimes being good is enough. Too many board games boast about how their mechanic or innovative new system redefines what it means to roll dice or draw cards, when in actuality their design is often reinventing a wheel that’s been rolling along the industry for several decades. It’s often just as refreshing to play a game that takes a core concept found in board games and delivers a charming hour of fun as it is to play a radically new design. It’s that cosy, comforting experience that Luna Capital greatly delivers. It’s the year 1977 and humanity has finally started living on the moon (and about time too) Players have 12 rounds to build the greatest settlement on the moon to be crowned…

Designer: Randy O’Connor | Publisher: Self Published My dad was a keen golfer. Often I’d join him, albeit briefly as I tailed several holes behind, but it was fun nonetheless. But now, Roll in One is letting me address my prior ineptitude from the more level playing field of the tabletop. Roll in One is a dice game played out upon hex tiles which sees each player designing and collectively playing a number of courses. There’s six different dice in the game with the number of sides corresponding to particular clubs. A twenty sided wood for example excels at punting the ball far and straight whilst the 4-Iron increases the chances of curving. Essentially players will be racing to the green and scoring negative points for straying from the course,…

Designer: Francois Rouze & Jean-Marc Tribet | Publisher: Kolossal Games If the term ‘battle-royale’ instantly rings a bell, it’s because it has been everywhere lately. What began as a niche Japanese novel and a film of the same name, in the last ten years has taken pop culture by storm. Now you can wonder about the harm of totalitarianism of Hunger Games, while getting shot by a ten-year-old with much superior aim and hand coordination in Fortnite. Frankly, it is surprising that it hasn’t been as prevalent in board games yet. Perhaps, Reload will change that. Reload’s backstory is… complicated. There is something about cybernetically enhanced clones, off-world exploration, governmental contracts, training soldiers, a TV show… Look, all you need to know is this: you are on an island, you…

Designer: Dave Neale & Mathew Dunstan Publisher: Ravensburger The idea of an audio mystery is alluring. Our ears can be easily fooled with sounds that are similar, and might be rearranged by a context of later clues. Sadly that’s not quite what we’re doing here, instead, this is more of a ‘order of events’ kind of game. The players will lay out a bunch of the item cards (broken into two chapters by item cards, the second set put aside until later) and thicker chapter cards. One of the players downloads the app, and zaps a card with the camera – which will in turn play some audio. The audio is decent, we’re usually dropped in in medias res, and our goal is to work out what’s going on in…

Designer: Klaus-Jurgen Wrede | Publisher: Pegasus Spiele Fire and Stone is a two to four player game of stone age exploration and expansion from the famed designer of Carcassonne, Klaus Jurgen-Wrede. Over the course of a variable number of rounds, players will be hunting, gathering, inventing, and settling as they strive to net the most victory points. Points will be granted for every hut placed on the map – with bonuses for majorities and fulfilling personal goals – alongside any points snatched from a dwindling deck of gradually less valuable cards. Immediately, the game represents a significant departure from the designer’s tile-laying classic in terms of its scope. Yet, despite this increased volume of both components and mechanics, Fire and Stone strives for a level of simplicity potentially suited to…

Designer: John D Clair | Publisher: AEG Mystic Vale came out in 2016 to great excitement. The reason? It had a gimmick. Players take the role of druids working to remove a pestilence from the land. You do this by drawing and playing cards in a manner similar – but not identical – to many deckbuilders like Dominion, Ascension and Star Realms. The crucial innovation of Mystic Vale is card crafting. Rather than simply adding new cards to your deck or discarding less powerful ones, you can upgrade your existing cards by sliding clear sleeves over the top that increase payoffs. There are some other mechanical tweaks that differentiate Mystic Vale from other deckbuilders. Instead of drawing a set number of cards each turn, you draw until you reveal three…

Designer: Danny Devine | Publisher: 25th Century Games From time to time I take my son down to the pet shop to feed the koi carp. For a pound you get a cupful of feed and probably one of the least relaxing experiences available on the high street. A soggy maelstrom of slick, shimmering orange flesh commences as the fish enter their dead-eyed, writhing frenzy. I get wet, it’s over in an instant, and I inevitably have to part with another pound coin. Kohaku paints a very different picture – perhaps even a lie – as this is a peaceful game of pristine ponds and carp-centric calming contemplation. In this tile-laying game, players compete to build the best koi ponds, replete with the flora, fauna and ornamental features needed to…

Designer: Chris Chan, Chris McMahon, Rosswell Saunders | Publisher: Smirk & Dagger In The Night Cage, you and a handful of fellow unlucky victims wake up in labyrinth of narrow, crumbling tunnels. The darkness is held back only by the faltering glow of your candle, and, as you advance, you get the eerie sense that the walls are shifting as they fade from view. Worse, you hear noises that suggest you and your companions may not be alone… The Night Cage is a co-op survival horror game with a refreshingly simple design – each turn you move through a maze generated by taking tiles from a stack and laying them on a grid. As you move, tiles not immediately adjacent to you get removed from the board, and, if you…

MASTERCLASSES AND WORKSHOP ANNOUNCED FOR TABLETOP GAMING LIVE 2022 We’re pleased to announce a brace of wokrshops for you to take part in at Tabletop Gaming Live 2022. The workshops will run throughout the weekend and give you a chance to kickstart your game design, mash up some models, or just decide what games you’re bringing to the end of the world. James Wallis (Once Upon A Time, The Extraordinary Adventures Of Baron Munchausen) returns with his Game Design Masterclass – taking you on a journey from idea to game over the course of the workshop. Guy Sclanders will be running a live Q&A session helping up level up your next roleplaying session and making you a better GM. Get top tips and a new way to look at GMing.…

Flesh & Blood is a relative newcomer to the trading card game scene, with its launch in 2019 and wider release the following year, it’s also been ensnared in Covid-19 restrictions on social gatherings. With many of those restrictions now having been lifted for a number of months at the time of writing, we’re set to return to a world of in-person competitions. Many local game stores are open now with no restrictions and we’re finally seeing the return of competitive card games to the forefront of the hobby. We talked to Matt Roger, the champion of the New Zealand Nationals event and a ‘Calling’ event (which often nets a grand prize of $20,000) – which is the closest we can get to a World Champion. The World Championships were…

The real time strategy game boom from 90s and 00s created the likes of Command and Conquer, StarCraft and Age of Empires. These, primarily PC games, were all about the constant flow of troops, resources, and base building – managing it all in real time. Clicking a button to generate some troops at your base, dropping a new part of your base down next to the HQ (which will give you more options for building or troop deployment), and then sending troops out to capture objectives and fight the enemy. While one thing is producing you’ll try and do something else – it’s the spinning of plates that entices a lot of players to the genre. To be good, you have to avoid dropping anything at all while also fighting…

Long Shot was an underrated horse racing game from designer Chris Handy and publisher Z-Man games back in 2009. While a solid effort, it was often criticised for its length as well as its randomness. 13 years later Handy has fixed these problems, this time under his own publishing imprint Perplext with this sequel, Long Shot: The Dice Game. This is simply a fantastic design. It borrows the common foundations of the burgeoning roll and write genre – a group of games that didn’t exist back in Long Shot’s day – by presenting a shared roll to a group of players and asking them each to mark up a sheet and decide how to utilise the randomised value. But this doesn’t feel at all like a roll and write. It…

Q. Dear Ben, Please indulge me as I regale you with the briefest of anecdotes. I found myself in the middle of a field the other day. The field in question was the arable abattoir that is Uwe Rosenberg’s Agricola. As I was drawing my fifteenth beggar card I was propelled down the barrel of a stress induced reverie. I heard the screams of my family as they cried out for bread. I watched in muted horror as my root vegetables shrivelled in the barren earth and my pulses rotted on the bine. As my imaginary family breathed their last a thought stuck me: “Thank god I’m not a medieval farmer.” It was in that moment I looked over to John. He was holding one of the little fence sticks…

Designer: Corey Konieczka | Publisher: Unexpected Games You’ve got to hand it to Corey Konieczka. After leaving Fantasy Flight Games and naming his own publishing company Unexpected Games, he’s absolutely, admirably committed to turning out titles that don’t feel like anything else on the tabletop right now. First, there was comic-book codebreaking co-op The Initiative. Now, hot on its idiosyncratic heels, we have Voices in my Head, a courtroom-drama area-control game with minor dexterity elements that requires all but one of its players to command aspects of a feckless bank robber’s personality. What the huh?! In all honesty, it’s so out-there it’s kind of hard to grasp as a theme, and as a consequence it’ll likely take a few plays before you can latch on to any solid strategies. On…

Designer: Franz-Benno Delonge & Phil Walker-Harding | Publisher: Grail Games Australian designer Phil Walker-Harding (Sushi Go!, Bärenpark) cites Fjords as one of the games that got him into modern board gaming, back on its publication in 2005 – only two years before its designer, Franz-Benno Delonge, sadly passed away. It was then a simple tile-laying duel very much like Carcassonne, in which two players must competitively create a Scandinavian landscape, onto which they place settlers to vie for population dominance. With this re-issue, which Walker-Harding describes as a “fan’s adaptation,” he’s turned Fjords into a two-to-four player experience, while layering on some added strategy, through the introduction of rune stones, which are offered as a built-in expansion. The core gameplay remains essentially untouched. In the first phase – Exploration –…

Designer: Ta-Te Wu | Publisher: Rio Grande Games Procure works of art from galleries of varying repute to build your personal hoard. But can you drive up the value of your most abundant genres to clinch victory from rival collectors? Art Decko has similarities with other deck building games. Each turn you draw a hand from your growing deck, use the cards to acquire others and discard to use again in future. But there are differences too. Here there is a heavily economic streak, as your primary aim is to raise the value of your art. Each painting falls into one of five categories: Art Nouveau, Renaissance, Surrealism, Pop Art and Impressionism. Buy a painting card and that genre appreciates. Five galleries sell art at increasing costs. The trick is…

Designer: Nathan Woll | Publisher: Wizkids It says something about the – uh, let’s say ‘intense individuality’ – of Free Radicals that, halfway through giving the rules explanation, I glanced up from the rulebook, suddenly wondering if I was the target of a particularly elaborate and resource-heavy practical joke. Please understand: at the risk of revealing the conclusion of this review too early, I like this game. But it doesn’t lean into its premise so much as rugby-tackle it through a twelfth-storey plate glass window into the hotel pool below. The’free radicals’ of the title are mysterious alien artefacts which, years ago, appeared on Earth. In a refreshing exceeding of expectations, instead of nuking everyone or releasing millions of spiders, they provided infinite energy, and so humanity now lives in…

Designer: Ben Pinchback & Matt Riddle | Publisher: Motor City Gameworks Three Sisters is an agricultural technique where three crops – pumpkin, corn and beans – are planted together to help each other grow. Each crop brings their own quality to the trio that help the others prosper and blossom, and thus all benefit from this cosy cohabitation. In the roll-and-write game Three Sisters, this technique is featured as part of the game’s theme of growing crops, plants, honey and trees on the backyard farm. And how busy that backyard is – most roll-and-write games are confined to one player sheet or board, but Three Sisters needed space to spread out. Its first sheet only covers the six areas of the garden (for the aforementioned pumpkins, corn and beans) and…

Designer: Joe Van Wetering | Publisher: Mondo Games Much like the titular entity, the allegories attached to John Carpenter’s The Thing have mutated since its 1982 release: Communism, AIDS, immigration, and perhaps today, COVID. Essentially, it taps into and reinforces the fact that fear and paranoia are tightly and eternally bound within the vicious cycle of human existence. Cheery stuff. But, as nihilistic as it sounds, Mondo Games’ The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31 – and social deduction games in general – explicitly exemplify tabletop gaming’s power to conjure playful positivity from undesirable emotions. Tie this to a beloved cult cinema classic, throw in some miniatures, and you’ve got a level of engagement that’s hard to match. Whilst its gameplay could perhaps be best described as a merging of The…

Designer: Paweł Stobiecki, Jan Truchanowicz, Łukasz Włodarczyk, Kamil Jarzabek | Publisher: Awaken Tabletop gaming is a multifaceted beast, not least through the multitude of ways games exercise and test particular skills or abilities of those who play them. They’re both indicators of and breeding grounds for quick witted tactics and precise strategy, not to mention mathematical skills, logical problem solving and a plethora of others. In this review though, we’ll be focusing on a game utilising perhaps the most useful skillset yet: judging the precise amount of power needed to accurately flick a wooden disc. Flick of Faith is a dexterity flicking game. In regard to theme, two to four players will be assuming the roles of gods from a variety of mythologies, and playfully pitting them against one another…

Designer: Christopher Badell | Publisher: Than Games Sentinels of the Multiverse has been around a long time by modern board game standards – the original came out in 2011, to much acclaim. It’s a co-operative superhero card game where each player takes the role of a unique superhero taking on a dastardly villain. Each hero gets their own deck with its own play style and mechanics, allowing you to deal damage, draw or search for cards, heal yourself or your allies, and perform various other helpful actions depending on what your hero’s strengths are. This edition features some tweaks and rebalances that smooth out the original experience. There are a dozen heroes to choose from, six villains to fight, and six locations for the confrontation to take place in –…

Designer: Chris Cervantes, Adam Poirer, Rob Stoddard | Publisher: Weta Workshop District 9: The Board Game, is from a different time. Drawing a card called ‘Fake News’ – intended as a light barb and to elicit a smile or two from the table – tells you exactly when this game was conceived. And it feels, forgive me, a bit alien. Players take the role of one of the four factions in the box, the MNU (police), the Army, the human gangster gang, and the prawn gang (not to be confused with the unorganised prawns that spawn when you’re aggressive). They then spend their time moving around collecting and evicting prawns from their houses to gain their tech – which functions as a resource for playing cards to upgrade your vehicle.…

This reminder might come in the form of an encounter with an arch-wizard that neatly dodges the party’s shenanigans by freezing time and skipping out of the dungeon with the treasure tucked beneath one arm. Or, it might be represented by a brush with an advanced alien civilization with tech that makes their space-ships look like steam-trains. Often, it’s a run into a villain that’s leagues beyond their current power level. If so, tradition usually demands that they crush the entire team in a brief combat before indulging in diabolical hubris by leaving the defeated heroes to heal up and train until they can level the field somewhat. In any case, an encounter with a particularly powerful enemy (or even ally) usually serves a good purpose. It reminds the team…

BACKGROUND “My big draw into board games was probably DungeonQuest – or rather, the Swedish edition, which was called Dragon Castle. I was maybe seven or eight, and I spent the whole summer playing it and building little labyrinths. I started working part-time in game stores as a teenager in Stockholm, before studying film at university. Then I moved to Japan for a bit, which put a bit of a break in my gaming habits. But eventually I got to know the guys at Free League Publishing, interacting through our different blogs, and the first game of theirs I playtested was Mutant: Year Zero. I helped out with bits and pieces here and there, until we got started with Crusader Kings, which was not only the first proper board-game design…

“Uprising is a standalone booster set that plunges fans into a brutal civil war sweeping across the harsh and unforgiving land of Volcor,” says White, plunging us into the lore of the world, “Dromai, an Imperial Illusionist able to conjure the legendary dragons of Volcor out of aether and ash faces off against Fai, a hotheaded Ninja who spearheads the Uprising against the draconian oppression of the Imperials, while Iyslander journeys from her Icy homestead in search of answers to painful questions seared deep within her mind.” This set has been designed with competitive play in mind, “Uprising is designed for exceptional booster draft, sealed deck, and constructed play, and includes incredible ‘Marvels’ that will leave players and collectors in awe.” There’s around 220 new cards in the set –…

Designer: Ben Parmentier | Publisher: Quick Simple Fun Games Freight trains can be annoyingly s-l-o-w, as most commuters will testify, so they are not the most obvious choice for a quick-fire filler game. Yet it’s lightning-fast maglevs that motor Freight Cars – a set-collector-cum-Tetris® throwback. Set in a near-future where corporations rule in place of governments, players must race to make big bucks by loading and shipping goods across the United States. Getting started is swift as this is essentially a small game in a large box. Everyone picks a Corporation card, dictating a specific set(s) of goods to collect for a final-score boost. This is then placed face down to become the maglev. Next come the Freight cards, which show one of five goods icons. If the draw has…

Designer: Ubisoft Montreal | Publisher: Ubisoft Montreal Ever since Gwent, the digital TCG that stole the spotlight of the video game it was in, The Witcher 3, board games within video games have been on the rise. Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla brought us Orlog, a dice game, enjoyed by Norsemen and Anglo-Saxons alike in the game, and now available in physical format for everyone to experience. Orlog is a dice fighting game. Each player has six dice, which they can roll three times to deal damage, block opponent’s attacks and acquire gold tokens. At the start of the game players will also choose three God favours – abilities that can be activated by spending gold tokens. Despite the high level of luck, there are still elements of strategy that make players…

Designer: Andreas Muller, Markus Muller, Raphael Stocker | Publisher: BFF Games It is a tale as old as time. The emperor of Oshra is dead. The four factions that make up his lands are warring with each other. It is up to one of the six children of the emperor to bring peace back to the empire. That is the story of Hidden Leaders, and as Game of Thrones-like it may sound at first, the tone of the game set by Satoshi Matsuura’s artwork is completely the opposite. It is a fantasy world that is quick to laugh at its own tropes and does not take itself seriously at all. Each player is a leader secretly aligned with two out of the four factions. Throughout the game, they draw and…

Designer: Steven Mathers | Publisher: Osprey Games Event games are those rare breeds of strategy titles that I’ve dearly missed in recent years. Having several hours with friends pouring over a map as we politick and manoeuvre our way to victory are one of those rare board game memories that will stick with you. Just as my experiences playing Crescent Moon inevitably will stick with me. Crescent Moon is an asymmetric war game for four or five players, with no AI options or scalable way to reduce the player count, making it even harder to get played than most games of its ilk. It is also dazzlingly beautiful. From the gold etched box that screams luxury to the stamped wooden tokens that are immediately distinctive against the beautifully illustrated terrain…

Designer: Andrew Beardsley | Publisher:WizKids “Once upon a time, she was looking for love. Now she’s looking for lunch!” reads the strapline, an endeavour we can probably all relate to, though hopefully our experiences are less brain-eating and more burger-and-chips eating – though probably still singing it to the tune of Total Eclipse of the Heart. Thankfully, we’re not playing as the Zombie, but instead the chivalrous Knight duty bound to rescue her. At least, until we find out she’s a zombie, where we must high tail it out of there pretty sharpish before she gets to find out whether a brain full of board game knowledge tastes like the cardboard of those games. The method in which you play is delightfully simple. You need to pick up your escape…

Designer: Jonathan Tweet, Richard Thames Rowan, Jesse McGatha | Publisher: The Everway Company Originally launched in 1995, Everway was a revolutionary take on tabletop roleplaying that dispensed with the dice and counters of conventional games. It replaced them with a rules-light system that promoted drama and shared storytelling, as well as a tarot-esque deck of fortune cards that provided not only a hint of randomness, but also visual inspiration for GMs and players alike. More than two decades later, the entire game is back on our shelves once more in a Silver Anniversary edition. This new version of the game tightens it up and adds content, but the heart of the design is still firmly rooted in its mid-90s origins. This doesn’t just extend to the setting – a plane-hopping…

Designer: Gordon Alford | Publisher: Greenbrier Games In the fantasy narrative adventure Lost Ones, players find themselves seemingly the only survivors of battle, stranded in the unknown lands. Armed with two storybooks and a stack of map tiles, they need to find a way for their characters to escape the dream lands before it is too late. They will need to explore each tile, uncovering its secrets while fighting monsters and facing other challenges to survive. As a cooperative experience, Lost Ones is merciless. Your game ends if you run out of time, if you get stuck on the tiles and are unable to escape, if you die in a monster fight, run out of your action cards (which also act as you ‘health bar’) or perish at the hands…

Designer: Gregory Privat | Publisher: Space Cowboys It’s the late 1920s and strange things are happening in New England. Like a pair of bodies turning up in the city of Arkham with exactly the same face. Or the sudden disappearance of a seven-foot-high Inuit statue from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Could any of this be connected to recent events involving a nasty cult in Innsmouth? It’s down to you, and up to seven other federal snoopers and sleuthers, to investigate. (Though we’d honestly recommend a smaller team, as it can get a bit messy and noisy with a bigger group.) How essential a game Bureau of Investigation feels will likely depend on two things: whether or not you’re a fan of 1982’s classic narrative puzzler Sherlock Holmes: Consulting…