Table of contents for Issue 66 in Tabletop Gaming

NOW PLAYING… Mille Fiori We’re talking about the nerdiest thing in the world this month – that’s right, sports. Well, nearly anyway. We’re catching up with Blaseball (which I’ll not attempt to explain here) and the sports-anime-inflected Blaseball: The Card Game from Wayfinder Games. Flick to page 28 to dive into this internet sensation’s translation to our tabletops. Taking a darker turn, we’re turning to the world of the Roman empire – but this time, it’s got a Cthulhu twist. Richard Jansen-Parkes talks to Modiphius about their roleplaying game set in a world of centurions vs tentacles, and the spin-off miniatures game that’ll be following on its heels. And finally, we dive into the weird world of terrain, maps, and miniatures for roleplaying games. We explore some of the options out…

1 DOMINION This is a given in any list about deckbuilding. Everyone’s go-to example of what the genre can do, it defined the loop of buying cards from a market to make your deck better (or just to allow you to buy better cards next turn), with the ultimate goal of having the most points. While the theme might creak a bit underneath the weight of the mechanics (or feel a little superfluous) the many, many, expansions for the game make it an excellent pick for those who want a game that can last them a lifetime. A game of great depth with an accessible core. 2 AEON’S END This boss battler of a deck building game offers up enticing challenges, especially to those who are willing to explore its depths. Players…

I’m frequently ask by players of my Valiant Defense series of solitaire wargames what books they should read to gain a better understanding of the represented conflicts. To help frame my response, it might be helpful to have a bit of background on my origin as a game designer. I grew up as an avid Dungeons & Dragons player, not a board gamer. I stuck with D&D until I got married and had children in the mid-to-late 2000s, which is when I transitioned to playing board games. In 2014, when I moved from the US to Cambridge in the UK, I joined a play-test group that included some fantastic designers. With their guidance and mentorship, I began to see my designs turn into a reality. For the first few years,…

When I was a boy my uncle Tomas used to come and visit us during the holidays. He was a biology professor teaching in London which made it extra exciting as he not only brought tins of biscuits and treats but also told us about films he’d seen that hadn’t come to Sweden yet. I have an especially fond memory of him relating the rough plot of Star Wars to me and drawing sketches of TIE fighters and R2D2 (except, with castor wheels?!). He loved science fiction and when reading classic sci-fi even today I sometimes come across a story that uncle Tomas had told me, in abridged form, as a kid. He cribbed a lot of Bradbury and Clarke (and some Twilight Zone episodes). When I was about eight…

Two thousand and five may not have been a great year for the world at large, with environmental devastation by Hurricane Katrina and the London terrorist bombings in July, but it was thankfully a much better year for those who love all that is geek. Doctor Who returned to television to massive success, the Xbox 360 kicked off a new era for video games and Star Wars Episode III would see George Lucas directing his last film set in a far away galaxy. Tabletop gaming also saw a delightful array of new releases with editions still entertaining thousands of players today. Join us now as we look at the biggest releases of 2005! TWILIGHT STRUGGLE Let’s pull out the big guns first and they don’t get much bigger than this…

I admit to being more excited about game components than the average human, but it takes something for me to exclaim ‘oh my’ out loud as I open a box. Glow looks glorious – from the moment you crack the lid there’s this pop of colour as you encounter a trove of custom acrylic dice in red, orange, green, purple and blue. They even come in two sizes – regular and mini! This explosion in a Skittles factory particularly stands out against the stark black-and-white illustrations of Glow’s fantasy world – a realm where, once a generation, the light retreats and chosen adventurers must set out to beat back the darkness. They do this by travelling the world – represented by a double-sided board offering two distinct game modes –…

Ahastily scribbled idea could be worth millions or at least should be presented as such, in The Million Dollar Doodle. This is a semi cooperative party game, in which players create brands and then vote on which will get an imaginary, but no less deserved, million dollars to launch their business. Everyone begins with two randomly dealt cards as an inspiration for their logo. The cards contain words or phrases that are generic but when added together inspire hilarity. It is up to the players to decide how to combine this into a single logo and, as the rule book warns, it is not about drawing skills but the idea. The logo gets passed to the next player to create a company name, then to another to create a slogan,…

Sometimes a fancier version of a beloved game is just the thing to complete your collection, but does that mean it’s the best way to start? Wise Wizard Games look to answer this question with their gorgeously decadent Star Realms Box Set. Star Realms is a fast paced deck building game for 1-4 players, seeing you assemble fleets of ships and bases to reduce your opponent’s Authority (i.e. life total) to zero. Everyone begins with the same deck of eight scouts (which provide Trade power used to buy new cards) and two vipers (which add to your Combat Pool, letting you pick off enemy bases and/or damage them directly). Each turn players must use their entire hand in any order they wish, ending their turn by drawing back up to…

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…

Theme or mechanism? It’s the classic board-gaming dichotomy. Are you someone who cares most about theme, an evocative setting you can immerse yourself in as you find your gaming flow? Or do you prefer the abstract rhythms of a game’s structural genre, whether it’s worker placement, trick-taking, deckbuilding, or whatever? Whichever way you lean, Tom Vandeweyer’s Rulebenders will challenge your preference. After all, it’s a game where mechanism is the theme. And vice versa. The rulebook comes with a bemusing back story about a retro sci-fi machine with vague abilities (“the device has the power to bring the past back to life and even make wishes come true” – huh?), but you can and probably should skip that. The point here is each player is competing to earn chips (aka…

Back in the early nineties Codemasters released Micro Machines on Nintendo and Sega consoles. Based on the popular line of miniature toy vehicles, Micro Machines saw players speeding around tracks littered with household items, across pool tables and kitchens, and generally revelling in its addictive gameplay. At around the same time, I – and probably many others – received the first of what was to become an annual inclusion in my Christmas stocking: a plastic sliding puzzle, destined to fall apart before the end of the holidays. Fast forward a few decades and we have the folks at Horrible Guild attempting to merge these two nuggets of nostalgia, and transfer them to real tabletops in the form of Tiny Turbo Cars. The adorably tactile Tiny Turbo Cars is a programmable…

Designers Kristian Ostby and Eilif Svensson have been on my radar for a while now. Back in 2017, the criminally overlooked midweight Eurogame Santa Maria swiftly slipped into my ‘top five games ever’ and has stayed there since. The duo have also demonstrated a breadth of complexity across their releases; from the light flip and writes Kokoro: Avenue of the Kodama and Trails of Tucana, to 2019’s weighty The Magnificent. With the addition of designer Kenneth Minde, Bad Company expands this breadth further still, as a game somehow possessing the scope and sense of reward of a heavier title yet with the utterly smooth mechanics of a gateway game. In its simplest guise, Bad Company is a dice-based tableau-building game – in the same vein as Mach Koro and Space…

First Empires imagines an alternate history where five early, less well-known civilisations rise to become the great empires of the world, and proceed to replicate the violent struggle for territory and power of our more familiar ones. Rarely has a little game looked so impressive straight out of the box – custom meeples for each civilisation, asymmetric player boards with recesses for your tracker cubes to slot into, custom dice for the game’s resources. Each civilisation gets its own deck of little achievement cards with – get this – its own deck box that holds its tokens and meeples as well. Yes, these are small matters of aesthetics, but it makes such a difference when you start the rules explanation and you get hand new players their own little deck…

PAINTS & TECHNIQUES » Abaddon Black » Blue Horror » Celestra Grey » Daemonette Hide » Dark Reaper » Dawnstone » Dechala Lilac » Dorn Yellow » Dryad Bark » Eshin Grey » Fenrisian Grey » Incubi Darkness » Mournfang Brown » Night Lords Blue » Pallid Wych Flesh » Pheonician Purple » Rhinox Hide » Russ Grey » Slaanesh Grey » Sotek Green » Steel Legion Drab » Tau Light Ochre » Thondia Brown » Thunderhawk Blue » White Scar » Wild Rider Red » XV-88 Each model is split up into 4 stages, each with a list of colours and the corresponding paint that was used for it. Each stage uses a different technique to achieve a similar effect on each element but with different colours. Normally we…

TABLETOP GAMING LIVE 2022 IS LESS THAN 150 DAYS AWAY The countdown is on, as it’s less than 150 days until Tabletop Gaming Live takes place in Manchester, and we’re ready to reveal a few of the exhibitors at the show. Over the weekend of 17th - 18th September 2022, join us in welcoming a huge range of tabletop enthusiasts – as exhibitors, as guests, and as players. Thanks again to our sponsors, Steamforged, Hall or Nothing, Tabletop Manchester and Fanboy Three. Steamforged will be bringing their huge range of miniatures games to the show, while Hall or Nothing will be showing off 1815, Scum of the Earth. Fanboy Three will be demoing for a range of publishers including Pandasaurus Games. We’ve also got a ton of our favourites exhibiting…

PAVLOV’S HOUSE AND STALINGRAD HOW THE RED ARMY TRIUMPHED BY MICHAEL K. JONES When I first started working on Pavlov’s House, I believed that it was a story about a small group of Soviet soldiers defending an apartment building in Stalingrad for three months. There’s a good reason I believed that — because it’s what the Soviet propaganda would have you believe. I discovered during the research process that the successful defense required contributions from all across Stalingrad — artillery, air defenses, resupply, and more. The challenge with Pavlov’s House was to navigate the Soviet propaganda and western circular reporting based almost exclusively on original German accounts. Fortunately, the fall of the Soviet Union provided western researchers access to archive materials for the first time in the early 1990s. Many…

Q. Dear my dearest aunt Benny, Please listen to me! I beg you! And if you look out of the window, drum your fingers on the table or, god forbid, look at your bloody phone I will happily be responsible for my actions in front of a judge. I apologise. I’m a little singed around the edges at the moment. I feel like too little Philadelphia smeared over too much bagel. But, you know what? I don’t deserve the treatment I’m getting. I’m a charismatic person. At work, for instance, people barely roll their eyes when I sidle up to their desks in an attempt to throttle some time. In the evening, in front of the telly, my partner’s grunts of affirmation imply listening and I can’t remember the last…

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…

Fungi is like the essence of an autumn forest: full of warm colours, slightly damp mossy ground and, of course, delicious mushrooms sprouting after a gentle rain. Players are walking through the forest collecting all the edible mushrooms they can find, to cook later over their open fire. This is a fast-paced set collecting game with endearing artwork by Jarek Nocon. Mechanically, it does not stray away too far from the path made for it by the games of the similar ilk. Although, this is not entirely fair as Fungi is a rebrand of Morels, which debuted back in 2012. Nonetheless, ten years later the gameplay feels very familiar, albeit not in a negative way. It is smooth and fast-flowing, as you pick up mushrooms from the row of available…

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…

We’ve all been there. You’ve moved in with someone and found that their tastes are, suddenly, and inexplicably, wildly incompatible with yours. You try and make it work and hold your tongue, but when they bring in the final yak-fleece beanbag, a noise of displeasure escapes you that gives the game away. Not enough to bring anything to a head of course. And anyway, they seemed really put off by your collection of antique chrome lamps in the shape of famous butts from history. Don’t they know that the Stalin buttock angle-poise lamp is considered a ground-breaking design piece? Décorum is a game of communicating how you feel, but not why. Players take a card with their agendas on it, and take turns adding, replacing, or removing items from the…

Sobek: 2 Players is the slightly clunkily named duelling version of the much loved 2010 card based market game by Bruno Cathala. This time he’s joined, as he often is, by Sébastien Pauchon to put some refinement in to the two player rework of the game. The lovely and sometimes slightly amusing artwork by Xavier Gueniffey Durin is fabulous, updating the game with a bright modern feel that steps away from the classic dustiness of a market Eurogame – which seems to be the intention all round. Rather than cards, this time we have tiles, laid out in a spiralling pattern on the board. This is important to mention, not for the production upgrade, but for the fact we’re now picking the goods available to us, not from a row of…

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…

All roads lead to Rome, which could well be why there’s so many war games on the subject of its shifting powers. Here we have Pomey vs Caesar in a classic game of out-manoeuvring one another in the boxing ring of a city. Caesar! is a sequel of sorts to Blitzkrieg, the Paolo Mori hit that claimed you could sort out WWII in 20 minutes, and claims much of the same. This box contains a couple of modular ‘mini-expansions’ and also a solo mode (by David Turczi, who else?) which are excellently implemented. Rome is divided up into various slices for the players to attempt to take control of using their influence tokens. Each token is split down the middle with a number on each side, meaning that if you…

Tunnelling is a mucky job, but someone has to do it. In this case, we’ve got a few moles looking to claim the most victory points for creating the biggest molehills. Mountains out of Molehills is an interesting mix of area control and action programming, all wrapped up in an incredibly neat and accessible package. It’s a board-in-the-box game where the lower level (underground) where the moles do their digging is complimented with the above ground area (supported by four corner struts above). Usually this sort of game inevitably leads to comments of “it’s a bit dark on the lower level” – but of course, here, that’s just bonus theme. Players take turns picking a bunch of movement cards from the shared market and then forming them into a little…

BACKGROUND “Outside of gaming, my day job is working for the US Department of Defence as an intelligence analyst. I started gaming early on, mostly as an RPG guy. Then in the mid-2000s, I decided to start working on my own board game, taking inspiration from things like Blood Bowl and Mage Knight – the Clix game. That game became For What Remains [eventually published in 2020]. In 2014 I moved to Cambridge, which has an unbelievable playtest and design community, and within a few weeks I went to my first meetup, where I met Trevor Benjamin [co-designer of Undaunted] and Chris Marling, who proposed we collaborate on something. The game that ultimately became Armageddon was Chris’ idea.” COMPONENTS “Thematically, the game didn’t change a lot from Chris’ original concept…

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Just under a day’s drive south-east of Jordan – the focus of last month’s column – is the small peninsular country Qatar. Doha, its densely populated capital, is an architectural marvel whose glistening towers – themselves an amalgamation of futurism and anachronism – peer down upon a region rich with culture and ludic history. Qatari historians believe that there were once more than 100 games being played across the peninsula, owing in part to the country’s diverse ethnic populations. Today though, many of these games have been lost to time with only a select few creeping past the country’s contemporary preferences for digital entertainment. Demonstrating the biggest resurgence is Dama: a checkers-like game with its roots most likely originating in Egypt. In ancient Qatar the game was commonly played by…

Shiver Me Timbers, the debut design from Michal Vitkovsky and publisher Weltflucht Verlag, is a great big old mess of an adventure. I mean that in a positive manner, as this large box is stuffed to the gills with just about every option an ambitious pirate could desire. This is a sandbox adventure game where you begin with a modest ship and crew. The goal is to amass the most victory points before the end of game is triggered, and you are awarded for pursuing many different vectors over the course of play. You can board and rob merchant ships for all their wares. You can attack fortresses and duel adversaries to the death. Maybe you want a safer life, instead delivering goods to needy ports. Nah, you’re no coward,…

Streets of New Capenna takes many of its art cues from the arts movements of the early 20th century, with spectacular uses of abstraction, colour and light. This card design is expressed when comparing the main card art for those from the alt art series. Here’s a few examples. The Brokers Ascendancy card lets players make their field stronger by generating loyalty while the enchantment is active. The main artwork, lovely as it is, is nothing as exciting as the Picasso-esque if-Guernica-was-about-a-bad-contract of the alt art. The land cards also get a beautiful upgrade. Both the forest and mountain alternative art cards give off the vibes of 1920s art-deco travel posters inviting you to New Capenna.…

Any ‘serious’ board-gamer will assert (correctly) that the joy of playing isn’t about winning. Winning is just one of the potentially satisfying ways that the story of a game will conclude. What board-gaming is really all about is the creation of that story. Few games exemplify this philosophy better than Adam Kwapinski’s Nemesis: Lockdown, and its 2018 survival-horror-sci-fi predecessor Nemesis. Winning as an individual in this game is, of course, possible. But you might not be the only winner; it is feasible, though unlikely, that everyone could win – even though this isn’t strictly a co-op game (unless you play the full co-op variant). More likely, there will be no winners at all; make no mistake, this is a brutally harsh game. As Kwapinski notes in the rule book, Lockdown…

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…

Mushrooms love company, as the saying goes, and that’s your goal in this Hanabiesque 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…

I don’t know if this game is smarter than me or not. I enjoy myself a good brainteaser and have a particular soft spot for duelling games, but for some reason I just cannot click with this perplexing cube shuffling game for two players. In Cryptid: Urban Legends (a small box spin-off from the 2018 game Cryptid from the same designers) one player will take the role of an investigator looking for a potentially terrifying creature of unknown origin, whilst the other will be said creature, who in reality is a big moth in dire need of some peace and quiet. The board is set up in a checkerboard pair of rows, with alternating empty and city card spaces. Each round players will be playing cards to distribute sensor cubes…

Everyone loves the land. It’s where pizza was invented. Most of YouTube gets filmed there. Everyone loves the sea. It inspired a whole musical genre: the shanty. It contains multiple walruses. But which is better? There’s only one way to find out… In Land Vs Sea you play as either land or sea, drawing hexagonal map tiles and placing them to form islands and oceans. Islands score points for land players, while oceans score for sea players. Some tiles have an icon that lets you play a second tile immediately afterwards or steal one of your opponent’s tiles. Additional rules give you bonuses for connecting mountain ranges or coral reefs, or joining caravans or ships together into trade routes. And that is pretty much it, as far as the rules…

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…

Vivid Memories combines abstract, pattern-making Azul-like gameplay with the whimsical and heartfelt theme of collecting fragments of childhood memories reminiscent of Pixar’s Inside Out. Players assemble patterns of memory out of colourful shards on their individual player boards representing the mind, while, of course, earning victory points to see who will win the game. It is easy to get swept away by Andrew Bosley’s beautiful artwork the second you start playing the game. While the main board is made up of simple symbols and brightly coloured shards, the eye is immediately drawn to the artwork of the moment tiles. Each side of the tile captures an impressionable moment in a child’s life. For example, one side could show a child playing with a paper airplane. If you perform the action…

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 zombiefree at the end of their turn. After an admittedly slightly awkward rules teach, it…