Tabletop Gaming -julkaisun Issue 73 -irtonumeron sisällysluettelo

2022 has been a big year for games. It feels like the hobby has got back on track to create the exciting new worlds and experiences we’re all searching for. Innovative new systems landed on our tables with the likes of The Adventures of Robin Hood’s elegant storytelling, Oltréé’s mash-up of adventure and Eurograme mechanics, or That Time You Killed Me’s time-across-three-boards abstract clash. At the other end games that we’ve been anticipating for what feels like years – whether that’s the latest, and huge, instalment of Undaunted with Stalingrad or theatrical party favourite Blood On The Clocktower. For many 2022 was a payoff on a long wait, and next year looks to continue that trend. It’s also been a strong year for roleplaying games. Indie games are flourishing (see…

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 or to get more valuable resources, like the titular glass and brick. Building tiles can…

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 traitors and attacked by the French military. Within a few minutes of getting to the table, the…

“Battlestar 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 set of gamers understand why this remains one of the greats. Or at least, that’s what Fantasy Flight Games have done with Unfathomable. Whilst I’ve never…

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 in the bag, take from the serving tray, give a bun to another player,…

It may be set in the frozen continent of Northrend and infested with ghouls and other nasty minions of the Lich King, but at its heart, World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King is still very much a Pandemic game. As players, you will be whizzing around the map trying to desperately contain the outpouring of enemies through simple dice-based combat. There are multiple ways to lose the game and only one to win – complete all quests – which requires tight teamwork, multi-tasking and some careful pre-planning. If you like solving the Pandemic puzzle – being good at anticipating where disasters are about to strike and positioning yourself to deal with them efficiently – you will figure out World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King in no…

While you don’t strictly need a mysterious cult to run a Lovecraftian horror game, you’re kind of missing out without one. This latest addition to the vast library of Call of Cthulhu sourcebooks makes it easy to toss a secret society or ancient brotherhood into your game, whether it’s straight from the book or one of your own creations. The hefty tome – and it really is a tome; the entire thing clocks in at almost 370 pages - isn’t just about any kind of cult, however. Every single one of them is devoted to the worship of the big, be-tentacled horror himself, Cthulhu. If you’re already familiar with the mythos you know what kind of stuff this entails, such as human sacrifice and prophetic dreams. If you aren’t, you…

Nicely paired with last year’s Saashi designed Remember Our Trip this new edition of Wind The Film returns from Matagot with similar vibes. This time you’re trying to create a run of good holiday snaps for your personal collection. It’s a set collecting card game with some really rigorous rules that make it a bizarrely tension-filled experience. Players set out a market of cards, based on the number of players at the table, and then each take turns picking some cards from the grid, adding them to (one side) of their hand, and ‘winding the film’ (rearranging one card). All of this is done without changing the order of cards entering your hand. You select them form either edge of the board, and add these to the ‘front’ of your…

“I’ve never seen so much cash in my life.” Those were the words I depressingly uttered as my three year old son popped out the hundred dollar tokens from the punchboard. Indeed, my life is a far cry from the romanticised drama and excess of Chicago’s roaring twenties, but at least Gale Force Nine are giving me the opportunity to play out this era of guns, glamour, and gangsters on the tabletop. Wise Guys is an exciting new 2022 release for Gale Force Nine. Not only is it a reworking of the oft overlooked but nonetheless popular Sons of Anarchy: Men of Mayhem, but it is also the publisher’s debut non-licensed game. Historically rooted in prohibition-era Chicago, players will each control one out of the four notorious rival gangs vying…

One of the first things you see on opening a new copy of The Search for Planet X is a leaflet for the Planetary Society – a non-profit organisation aimed at “empowering the world’s citizens to advance space science and exploration”. Whether or not you’re interested in visiting the website listed, one thing is very clear: this is a game that takes its theme seriously. That theme is of the real-world research into the hypothesised but as-yet undetected Planet X on the edge of our solar system, presented as a competitive race between players. You’ll be discovering this potential planet (which is guaranteed to exist in the game, if not reality) using an app which provides the results of your investigations and your own logical deductions. Since Planet X cannot…

It’s not often you can call a game fully family friendly, and in such a way it might appeal to the niche side of board gaming, but Mickey and Friends: Food Fight does it rather nicely. It’s a game that benefits significantly from its theme – a mixture of nostalgia for Mickey Mouse, and the associated professional art style that comes with it – that elevates it into a surprisingly fun game. Simply, you select a tray based on your character, where you hold food. You’ll then roll dice, which will allow you to fling (or place, depending on how adult you’re feeling), the relevant food pieces in the quantity and direction confirmed on the dice themselves. You’re aiming to have no food left on your plate, by passing it…

Apuzzle-y monstrosity (I say with some level of affection), Witchstone is a game that uses its pretty colours to disarm the concerns of your strategic brain into thinking this will be a straightforward affair, before offering choice after choice of options and point scoring opportunities. In fact, you could argue that the game is a collection of mini games, with small links to each other, and precariously held together with the magical theme. That sounds rather like a disparagement of the game, where instead it’s quite impressive to have done so lightly. To rewind a moment for context, Witchstone is a Reiner Knizia game, designed with Martino Chiaccheiera – but if his name wasn’t on the front, I wouldn’t immediately assume it’s a Knizia game, as it feels rather different.…

Oltréé might be one of the prettiest games we’ve ever played. Lush and deep colour abounds. Stained-glass shades flow through the design. The huge knighton-a-horse meeples have drawn many ‘oh, these are very nice’ comments across the various tables I’ve strewn it across. The crusade, of whatever sort it might be, is over and your group of rangers are returning to their home castle to find it in near ruin. Around it, the various villages are beset by incidents (a type of card), and problems (another type of card) and beyond the reach of their realm there are events that they are simply not able to effect from here. And then, it is from here that the story begins Based on a roleplaying game of the same name by…

Over the years there have been a number of games getting tidily trimmed and tweaked for the two player market. My entrance to the hobby was in fact the increasingly rare Carcassonne: The Castle – a two player only powerhouse duet from Reiner Knizia and Klaus-Jurgen Wrede. Since then games such as Caverna, Catan, and Codenames have followed suit, offering compelling distillations for tabletop twosomes everywhere. It’s a Wonderful Kingdom is the latest exemplar of this trend, condensing the action of It’s a Wonderful World into a svelte, fantasy tinged duel of cards and cubes. Players will be competing to seize the throne by developing the most efficient kingdom, using the same engine-building and resource management mechanics of its predecessor, but with some new and highly interactive additions to the…

One of the first Kickstarters I ever backed was Justin Blaske’s Mint Works – a simple but fully-fledged worker-placement game crammed inside a mint tin. Its success led to inevitable follow-ups, all retaining the game’s diminutive format and covering mechanics from pick up and deliver to area control. The latest addition to the ‘Mintopia’ saga is Mint Bid – an auction game for one to six players. Mint Bid has players participating in auctions to help rebuild the shattered city of Mintopia in the wake of Mint Cooperative’s battle of good versus evil. It’s a tenuous link, but nonetheless provides a platform for players to literally build upon. Each round will have one player acting as the auctioneer, who will choose between holding an open or closed auction for one…

I’m very partial to city-building games and Cape May does not disappoint. The action occurs on a large map showing the streets of downtown Cape May, the oldest seaside resort in America. Players are entrepreneurs building residential and commercial property around the town in order to gain income and prestige. There are four different zones – gravel, grass, dirt and sand – and as you might expect, the price and value of property increases the closer you get to the sea. Bonus cards, which give prestige (victory points) if certain conditions are met at the end of the game, provide much-needed direction and help shape your strategy. Players will also win prestige for each cottage they’ve upgraded into a Victorian house or landmark, achieving a majority of buildings in a…

Mushrooms love company, as the saying goes, and that’s your goal in this Hanabi esque set-making game. Kinoko feels like a somewhat more mature box for Helvetiq. It’s not got the almost-educational feel Karimba or the universalness of building tunnels in Bandido, instead it has something a lot more dinner-party about it. Players are attempting to make a set of three of their colour (known only to them), whether that’s in their hand (which they can’t see, holding them outwards), in the other player’s hand (which they can see), or in one of the two sets of face down cards on the table (which neither player can see). It doesn’t matter where that set ends up, but players are attempting to move and manipulate cards between these sets using the…

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 hexes, this is a game that needed…

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 as they mischievously attempt to rally up the most believers in the…

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 Detective – which this game obviously reimplements –…

The boom of roll-and-writes has begun an interesting trend in board gaming: certain board games have acquired a roll-and-write sibling. These are the same games, but their mechanics are reimagined with the use of dice, pencil and paper. Think Catan and Catan the Dice Game, or Patchwork and Patchwork Doodle. Animal Kingdoms, a family-oriented area-control game has also recently acquired a roll-and-write counterpart, Roar and Write!, although perhaps this game is more like a distant cousin than a sibling. Roar and Write! takes place in the same universe of Animal Kingdoms, retaining the same gorgeous aesthetic as its predecessor. However, unlike Animal Kingdoms where players would compete for dominance of a certain area, Roar and Write! is mostly a solitary experience. Each round the dice are rolled and players select…

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 abilities you have. You build up your success, gain rewards, use those rewards to…

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, depending on your rolls – and how smart you are. Indeed, having…

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 score more, but their risqué design means you need to roll equal…

Idon’t know if it’s just me but I feel that the romanticism usually associated with piers has dwindled over the years. Perhaps it’s their proclivity for falling into a state of disrepair, or maybe it’s just Piers Morgan. Nevertheless, Pier 18 is reigniting this romanticism admirably and all within the limiting confines of just eighteen cards. Designed and illustrated by Rory Muldoon (Skora and the upcoming print at home roll and write Voyages), Pier 18 is a leisurely card drafting set collection game tasking players with constructing the greatest Victorian seaside pier. From game to game players will be attempting to attract various visitors and workers to their piers such as Poets and Fisherman, and scoring points for arranging them in particular ways. Flower Sellers for example will score points…

There are fewer things in tabletop gaming more frustrating than when you draw a game tile that doesn’t match up. Be it digging through the tower of tiles in Carcassonne for that final city section or hoping for just one matching crown symbol in Kingdomino that will finally make use of your empty fields, it’s always maddening to be unable to match up perfectly. What if I told you about a tile laying game, where even if you mismatch, it can still lead to a bounty of points, as well as a game with one of the most charming themes I’ve seen in months? Dollars to Donuts is a tile-laying donut-making game for 1-4 players. Each turn players will add a rectangular tile to their game board, with the goal…

Phil Walker-Harding games have their very own feeling about them. A light, enjoyable engagement, a cute concept, a tiny bit of friction, a warm and satisfying feeling. Like freshly baked bread, or a new duvet cover. Recent outings had left us a little cold however, with Llama Land being perfectly fine, but lacking in focus. So with Neoville, a town building, tile laying game, we weren’t ready for what turns out to be one of our favourite little puzzles of the year. Players get a starting tile, set up a market of tiles and then a few draw piles. Two of the modular ‘utility’ types are chosen, randomly chucked next to the board with the appropriate towers, and you’re away and building a new elementally-themed empire of your own. Each…

Right off the bat, Ruination faces steep competition. In the realm of ‘dudes-on-the-map games’, it has to contend with the godly presence of Ankh: God of Egypt and Mezo, not to mention the everlasting rule of Risk. The post-apocalyptic theme has been usurped by Mad Max associations, while games like Posthuman Saga or Zona: The Secret of Chernobyl vividly paint the picture of the world after the end in all drab but bloody colours. But Ruination will not be a game that is lost in the wasteland. In part, this is due to incredible artwork by Roland’s Revenge. It is colourful, energetic, and captivating but also distinctly end of the world-ly. It consistently sets the scene through every part of the game, whether it is the board design or character…

Elector Counts is a card game set in Games Workshop’s Warhammer universe, as presented by Cubicle 7’s Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. You are the titular – uninspiringly-named – Elector Counts, ambitious nobility vying for control of the Empire during a bitter and bloody civil war. To win, you must have control over the most valuable selection of territories by the end of the game. Play involves setting down location cards, which earn you money immediately and victory points if you still control them at the end of the game. You can also assign defenders or attackers to a location. If your rivals have no cards attached to the location, these are played face-down, meaning no one knows the exact strength of the forces you’ve committed. If you play multiple cards as…

Like Mad Max with airships, CloudAge conjures up a scorched future world where water is a precious commodity and nefarious militias have occupied most of the surviving towns and cities. However, soaring out of this grim eco-nightmare are heroic dirigible pilots (one-to-four of them, in fact), who strike at their oppressors from the skies and seek to bring fresh, green life back to the planet. It’s a novel set-up built from familiar elements, whose mix of themes (air travel, world-rebuilding, post-apocalyptic survival) is reflected in the game’s pleasing blend of mechanisms: engine-building, deckbuilding, bag-drawing, hex-hopping and soft-Legacy campaigning. Each player starts with an airship that requires judicious upgrading, with a tableau to build from potentially synergising Terraforming Mars-esque Project cards. They also explore the long, four-segment board which depicts this…

What does the popular children’s book Dear Zoo, and Wonder Book have in common? They’re both pop-up books, though thankfully the latter is a game and not inclined to send me non-domesticated animals through the post. And whilst my first instinct when presented with Wonder Book was to wrinkle my nose a little and mutter about gimmicks in board games, actually, I’ve come away rather delighted with it. Wonder Book takes you through the story of an ancient dragon civilisation, the portal to which is between its pages. The story is broken up into sections, which are told by overturning cards. Not only is the pop up tree itself rather impressive – it has a delightful height to it, and plenty to look at and interact with – but the…

Sometimes the theme in board games are just shiny coats of paint used to bring the whole presentation together. Other times it drives the gameplay, allowing players to transport themselves into a new setting and take on different roles. In Canopy, the theme is an ethos. It is primarily a two-player game (with one-player and four-player variants) about building an ecosystem in the rainforest. Through the course of three rounds – seasons – players will be drafting cards to build their ecosystem of gigantic trees with sprawling canopies, beautiful delicate plants and gorgeous animal life. For any fellow arachnophobes out there, the latter does include the Goliath Birdeater spider, but their ability is just too good not to add them to your rainforest. Every card contains a little factoid about…

Do you want to know who built the pyramids and pioneered the processes of agriculture? Me. Last night. Turns out all it took was some dice, some cardboard, and a friendly chat with some aliens. This is essentially the premise of Origins: First Builders, a dice worker placement game that reimagines the dawn of civilisation through an intriguing science fiction lens. Players assume the role of archons, tasked with leading their citizens to prosperity through the acquisition of knowledge and resources from the Builders: a benevolent alien race who have popped down for a visit. As a competitive game though, only one meticulous archon will definitively steer this interplanetary relationship toward their immortalisation in the annals of mankind. For designer Adam Kwapinksi, Origins: First Builders marks a bold shift from…

Last One Alive is a quick and light dice game from Champions of Midgard designer Ole Steiness. Using a zombie apocalypse theme, the game sees players rolling dice to battle the undead, equip themselves, and direct hordes upon neighbouring players. Each turn has the active player rolling four dice of their choice plus a number of zombie dice equal to the ‘apocalypse level’. Any ambush results are assigned in front of them whilst standard zombies are dumped straight upon the player to the left. Depending on what was chosen, remaining dice will dish out damage, weapons and other items, alongside barricades used for deflecting further zombies onto neighbours. To avoid death, a player must be zombie-free at the end of their turn. After an admittedly slightly awkward rules teach, it…

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 – players must alternately lay hex tiles, placed in such a…

“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 key from essentially the other…

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 by five grid through the drafting of contiguous terrain types, but there’s now the option of layering on some subtle changes…

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. The actions on the buttons, however, are not visible, and players…

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 comprising the central display before choosing to take any stack of biomes from either…

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 by a secret objective chosen from a couple of options presented at the start of…

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 across Paris, which is the exact premise of the former two as well, just with a changing timeline. Instead of an evidence…

We’re suckers for spellbooks. Much like a bestiary, they can tell you a lot about the world that you’re inhabiting – if done right. Often overlooked as mechanically useful, but a bit like pausing a fighting game to look up how to do the special attack, they can suffer from excessive crunch. The Book of Gaub does not have this problem. The Book of Gaub is a mix of spell mechanics, fiction, and fragments focusing on the lore of Gaub’s seven fingers. Each finger is a ‘school’ of magic, offering on-theme bouts of stomach-churning spells. They’re all undeniably creepy, powerful, and subjective. There are times when a spell giving another character hypochondria, or one where the victim must walk away from you for as long as you follow, might seem…

Stuffed with darkness, danger and ever-present doom, the first major campaign for Soulbound is an avalanche of interlinked adventures centred around a mist-choked port rife with corruption in every sense of the word. Though some may chafe at the rather linear design, the simple and direct structure lends itself to some delightfully pure gamemastering. The general idea behind the Shadows in the Mist campaign is that the heroes – a bunch of divinely-appointed agents of order – are sent off to try and sort out some of the many, many problems plaguing the city of Anvilguard. This sets them off into a parade of mysteries and battles that act as a kind of whistle stop tour of the setting’s most iconic baddies, including lizardfolk, the forces of chaos and…

Five minutes ago I finished my first solo run-through of all three scenarios contained in Lucky Duck Game’s Sea of Sand expansion for Destinies. As I write, there’s a familiar twinge coursing through my mind. Not quite that feeling one gets upon finishing a good book – but perhaps more akin to emerging, eyes asquint, from an uncharacteristically spellbinding blockbuster. Could I be exaggerating? Maybe, but regardless, Destinies: Sea of Sand weaves a certain kind of narrative tabletop magic that is both engrossing and concise. In this decidedly more exotic expansion to the excellent app-based adventure game, characters are exploring, investigating, and surviving the scorched deserts of the North African Sahara. Its opening scenario will put players right at the forefront of the Crusades, as they forge and force their…

Blood Orders has no right to be as enjoyable as it is. The first release from a studio only just entering the hobby (p52 for more about that), with a background only tangentially related to ‘geek stuff’ doesn’t always go well. You’d expect a cash in, but what we have here is the first steps towards something that might end up being great. You and your fellow vampires are disgraced, forced out of the ancient fang club you once belonged to, and are now starting anew in a fresh city. You’ll be attempting to take control of locations, scoop up victory points and improve your coterie with new meat. The board is a grid representing three time periods, dawn, dusk and night, and a number of locations. Player secretly select the…

It wouldn’t be far from the truth to say that I saw fatherhood as an opportunity to introduce a convenient third player to the family unit. Alas, for the first year of my son’s life he was nothing more than a glorified first player marker. Now, at the age of three, we’re ready to take things up a notch. Enter CoraQuest – a fully fledged dungeon crawler aimed at the younger tabletop crowd and the adults in their life. What started out as a lockdown homeschooling project for designer Dan Hughes and his daughter Cora, soon morphed into a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign, garnering over 5000 followers and a devoted community of fans and art contributors. Through the application of a slick and simple ruleset and an art direction based…

One of the greatest lures of the Pathfinder RPG has always been its setting. Golarion is a complex kitchen-sink of tropes and cliches that gleefully rip off everything from Conan the Barbarian to Les Miserables, and at the heart of everything stands the metropolis of Absalom. As befits a world built on adventure, this vast and storied city is packed with countless ideas for games and quests. You could easily guide a party of heroes from their first brush with danger through to their ascension to legends without ever crossing the walls. Every corner seems to be alive with intrigue and crime, and every park is a potential battleground. Conveying an appropriate feeling of both scale and depth for a city as dense as Absalom is no easy feat. It’s…

Colorful is a ‘you know what I mean’ kind of game based on Match Me! with the careful production care that Jordan Draper brings to all of his boxes. Players take a set of cards depicting colours, and then take turns turning over category cards, the active player says a single word or phrase and everyone plays a colour face down that they think matches. At the end of five categories, you compare and see how everyone did. Each category card gets harder for the later rounds, and is carefully balanced in a way that you’ll simply appreciate. There are tons of games like this, but the inclusion of a category card that asks you to think of a word related to an RPG or board game (or abstract game…

Where some games sprawl and spread their focus across potentially infinite themes, the compact and beautifully illustrated ARC: DOOM comes with a single, delightfully simple premise. The world is about to end, and you’ve got to stop it. Okay, so sometimes these apocalyptic events aren’t quite that widespread. The doom might befall a single village or person, for example, but sometimes there’s a demonic cult forcing open a door to hell. If the heroes don’t act, and act fast, everything burns to the ground. It’s hard to spread this kind of tension out over months and months of gaming, so ARC builds itself around the idea of burning brightly but briefly. An average game will probably be settled – for ill or for good – within three sessions, and the…

Y’know that part in Indiana Jones when they open the Ark of the Covenant and everyone starts melting? That was me prising open the box of Bitoku, mouth agape at the sheer volume of stuff contained within. Over 170 wooden counters, 14 double-sided die-cut pieces that slot into the board to fully complete it, in total there’s 565 components not including the board. It’s a lot. But thankfully, it’s also a very rewarding and delightfully designed board game set in a magical forest inspired by Japanese mythology for 1-4 players. After reading the wonderfully laid out but daunting rulebook (which practically says “Don’t be concerned with the size” on the first page) or watching the succinct video tutorial (which again, constantly reinforces to not be worried) the actual game is…

Becoming an architect is a long and arduous journey. There are years of study: learning of regulations, standards, best practices and even law. Tabannusi: Builders of Ur, where players are architects building the Great City of ancient Mesopotamia, unintentionally (we assume) recaptures that ponderous process in its initial introduction to the players. It is an intimidating game to face – the board is littered with iconology and every item you add to it during set up, whether a tile or a card, seems to add even more signs to decipher. It is also not uncommon to get an action that is resolved in a six or seven stage ‘procedure’. Add to that all the rules for a randomized set-up together with a mountain of components and you might as well…

Running a dinosaur theme park can be thrilling, but fraught with challenges. Each new dinosaur raises the excitement but also increases the threat. Hire specialists, build attractions and introduce new species without losing too many visitors! There’s a lot going on in Dinosaur Island: Rawr ‘n Write but it all gels together delightfully. You gain dinosaur DNA, coins, roads, attractions and security by rolling and drafting unique custom dice. But all players are forced to take the threat level shown on the undrafted dice and unmanaged threat means death! So the dice drafting has a strong undercurrent as players not only take what they want, but consider what is left and wonder whether anyone will ‘take one for the team’. After drafting, players use their dice as workers to select…

With its cut-down ruleset and murderous combat, Death in Space is a starkly beautiful take on old-school roleplaying. It takes the kind of peril normally only found in deep, dark dungeons and propels them into the void between the stars, revelling in a grimy, industrial aesthetic that makes the horrors of the Alien universe look like a pleasant holiday. If you’ve been paying any kind of attention to the realm of old-school gaming for these past few years, it’s not hard to see where Death in Space draws much of its inspiration. Everything from its ruleset to its punkish aesthetic pays homage to MÖRK BORG, the current bloodspattered darling of the indie scene. However, though Death in Space shares many similarities with its illustrious predecessor – including its publisher and…

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 a perennial zone. The second sheet houses an apiary, goods storage,…

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 to pick up cheap cards and then build…

In the high-octane world of Alley Cat Games, dice like to live dangerously. First, they were at death’s door in Dice Hospital, now they are screaming in a good way at Dice Theme Park – possibly because there’s no morgue. Employing a similar dice-management mechanic as before, the thrill seeking takes place across five rounds that each contain six phases. This generously affords players time to puzzle together their hexagon-based small, small worlds, all in the aim of creating the most exciting park – wryly tracked on a car-park scoreboard. Along the way is a host of actions and decisions to enjoy, whether it’s acquiring new attractions, upgrading existing ones, hiring mitigating mascots (more on those later) or flogging junk food to afford everything previously listed. It all begins with…

Your aim is to earn the most stars by playing nine different mini-games over three rounds. Each player has their own set of eleven mini-games on cards, with one player selecting three at random each turn for everyone to play. The variability is huge as there are over 15,000 possible combinations of mini-games. As optimum dice rolls vary for every mini-game, each combination of three selected will provide different challenges and synergies. All mini-games are named after one of Stonemaiers big release games and there’s a nod to the theme or mechanics of each game, though some nods are more subtle than others. In Wingspan, for example, you’re filling squares with numbers and scoring bonus points if the sum matches the target wingspan shown. In Tapestry, polyomino shapes must be…

In First Rat, junkyard rodents are racing to build a rocket bound for the moon where they will gorge on cheese. While the premise is at times holier than a chunk of Emmental (isn’t it mice that love cheese?), this game has real charm. The cover box suggests a family affair with lightweight gameplay. In actuality, it’s loaded with easy-to-learn strategy that tests all ages, and any patronising thoughts about “letting the kids win” soon vanish. First Rat is anyone’s for the taking. Unlike in traditional family games, there isn’t a clear way to triumph. Using multiple score trackers, points can be earnt in a variety of ways from collecting cheese for the journey to building the most rocket parts. Whoever is the first to place eight cubes across the…

In the fourth expansion to the living card game Marvel Champions, the Sinister Motives, new heroes are swinging in to save the day: Ghost-Spider (Gwen Stacy) and Spider-Man (Miles Morales), joined by other spideys from across the Multiverse. Following them in tow are also new villains – Sandman, Venom, Mysterio, the Sinister Six and Venom Goblin. Lessons learnt from designing The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game and Android: Netrunner, were all incorporated by Caleb Grace and Michael Boggs into Marvel Champions, creating gameplay that is both incredibly slick and adaptable. The main loop remains simple. All villains have a main scheme that they are trying to complete. Villain decks are filled with minions, abilities and side schemes. Heroes, on the other hand, play cards from their hand to…