Table of contents for Issue 65 in Tabletop Gaming

Welcome NOW PLAYING… Caesar! This issue has been a long time in the making, much like the time travel we’re offering over the next 100 pages. The Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game is celebrating 20 years since its English language release, and we take you back to the start to find the heart of the cards. Next, we take you back to the 80s that never was in Tales From the Loop: The Board Game (also reviewed on page 54) – we explore latchkey kid vibes and getting a lift home in time for dinner on a giant robot. And finally, a game 65 million years in the making – a new Jurassic World legacy game from Funko Games. We talk to the designers and get the inside scoop on extracting…

FIRST TURN JOHN D. CLAIR The LA-based creator of Mystic Vale and Rolling Heights casts his mind back to his food-flinging 2013 debut Rumble Pie Interview by Dan Jolin BACKGROUND “Rumble Pie was published just a few years after I left college. I was working in data analytics at the time, but I’d always wanted to do game design. My parents home-schooled me, so I had a very loose academic life growing up, and I was intrigued by games from a young age. My mom has saved a maze I drew when I was five, and my first actually playable game was called Monster Cards, which was my response as an eight-year-old to Pokémon, knowing my mom would not buy me Pokémon cards. In my little home-school friend group, other…

my favourite game ALAN PAULL The co-owner of Surprised Stare Games offers us a glance at the 70s miniatures-meets-boardgame war experience of Seastrike Nineteen seventy-four. Bell-bottoms, platform shoes, Abba’s Waterloo wins Eurovision, and Happy Days is on TV. Board wargames are burgeoning with the mighty publishers Avalon Hill and SPI. Ah, happy days, indeed. For me, a 17-year-old wargamer, the most striking game was brought to our club in a ziploc bag with its name emblazoned above a picture of a Type 21 frigate. This was Seastrike, ‘The Game of Modern Naval Warfare’, by Robin Wyatt, published by Ariel (the publishers of Kingmaker, see p14). It quickly became my favourite wargame, though I bought the boxed version rather than the one in the baggie. It even outcompetes the excellent Atlantic Chase…

YU-GI-OH! TRADING CARD GAME AT 20 20 YEARS OF YU-GI-OH! We look back on a game that’s still going strong after 20 years Words by Christopher John Eggett Artwork courtesy of Konami Two decades on since its release in English, the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game, based on the popular manga and anime, is still going strong. We spoke to Dom Galizia about the game in the hope of piecing together why there’s still so much love for the competitive monster-based card game. Galizia has been with Konami in the European HQ in Windsor for some nine years now – we last spoke to him in 2019 for the launch for Speed Duel a fast version of the full game that hoped to lure in more players. Since then we’ve seen the…

PLAYED PATHFINDER: ABSALOM CITY OF LOST OMENS Explore the Big Smoke Designer: Various | Publisher: Paizo 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…

PLAYED MASCARADE Designer: Bruno Faidutti | Publisher: Repos Production There is something delectably exciting about the mystery of a masquerade. Who is behind the mask? Can you tell their identity from their gestures or manners? Maybe they will give themselves away in a careless conversation? Bruno Faidutti’s Mascarade raises the stakes: not only that you don’t know who other people are, most of the time you don’t know your own identity under the mask! Mascarade is a game of hidden identity and bluffing, where each player starts as a certain character with a unique power but almost instantly becomes someone else. To win the game, a player will need to gather 13 gold, which they could easily do if they are, for example, an Empress who takes three gold from…

PLAYED OLTRÉÉ Happy homecoming Designer: Antoine Bauza & John Grümph | Publisher: Studio H 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 knight-on-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…

IT’S A WONDERFUL KINGDOM Sometimes less is more Designer: Frédéric Guérard | Publisher: Ori Games 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…

FAMILY BUSINESS Designer: David B. Bromley | Publisher: Lookout Games Take That games can be brutal, but Family Business is on another level. This is the game where all players could turn on one. This is the game where you can plead, or scheme, or attempt to make deals to no avail. This is the game where each turn you draw a card, hoping you get something that can save you. But when you are playing as one of the mob families out for blood, what else could you expect? In Family Business, each player is the head of a mobster family, attempting to take out members of the other gangs, while keeping their own alive. Each turn they will aim to put a contract on the members of the…

PLAYED ARC: DOOM It’s the end of the world as we know it Designer: momatoes | Publisher: Exalted Funeral Press 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…

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10 OF THE BEST FAMILY GAMES Families come in all shapes and sizes, and so do the games we love to play. Whether your family is trying to be considerate of Grandma, or little ones who’ve graduated from My First Board Game, we’ve got something in this list for everyone. Words by Charlie Pettit 1 A GAME OF CAT & MOUTH With a game that takes only a few sentences to explain, a Game of Cat and Mouth is a dexterity based game that feels like one day we’ll see a giant version of it in an arcade. While we wait for that though, we’ll fire tiny balls through the mouth of a plastic cat, in the hope of sending it’s teeth or nose cascading through to the opponent’s side.…

The Soloist GETTING THE SOLO BUG We explore the world of solo gaming one move at a time. This month: catching the solitaire gaming bug, and learning to love it. Words by Ben Maddox I can feel it growing under my skin. Give it a go. Go on! Get your index finger and rub it across my forehead and you’ll feel it too. That little bump? That’s my egg tooth and it’s growing because I’m getting ready to headbutt my way out of the sickly coloured shell that’s been this sodding pandemic. We’ve had bubbles and clusters and legally mandated physical recreation and yet, after all of the dystopian nomenclature I’ve managed to come out of the pandemic with a mental state that does a passable impression of “okay”. As…

PLAYED TALES FROM THE LOOP: THE BOARD GAME The tallest of tales Designer: Martin Takaichi | Publisher: Free League Adapting a board game from an RPG, without wildly veering into the territory of just slapping on a theme, is tricky. RPGs are good for their complete freedom. Board games thrive on their mechanical parts interlocking. Here we spend our time as kids of the 80s in Sweden attempting to investigate what’s going on at home, school and between. We have an action point system for moving and doing stuff, and each character has their own specific strengths and weaknesses. Players move point to point on the map, and can use the bus route, or the help of a parent to get to any of the safe areas of the islands.…

DINOSAUR WORLD Putting the ‘Bit’ in ambitious Designer: Brian Lewis, David McGregor, Marissa Misura | Publisher: Pandasaurus Games It makes sense that running a theme park full of prehistoric giants would be a headache. Your inner mad scientist will just want to resurrect that which time forgot, but when you factor in your accounts as well as health and safety regulations, it feels like bureaucracy killed the beast. Dinosaur World is a park building Eurogame, where 2-4 players vie to become the most celebrated dinosaur park in the world, creating cretaceous creatures and balancing thrills and kills (after all, accidents will happen when punters meet pteranodons.) Each game is played over five rounds split into five phases. Players will draft workers, putting them to work in public actions followed by…

KINGLESS Designer: Alex Kenworthy-Neale, Nathan Brown, Sebastian Roberts | Publisher: Two19 If you have ever wondered what happens when a dwarven kingdom is left without a king and a whole bunch of contenders are vying for the post, well, let me tell you: chaos, it’s utter chaos. This is Kingless, a twenty minute, take that style card game, where everyone is out for themselves. In Kingless, players are trying to get the most influence points. To do this, they will need to play dwarf or item cards in front of them. If they ever get five cards down or the deck runs out, the game ends and whoever has the most influence wins. Players can also play event cards which, while not contributing to their influence, will be a much-needed…

ELECTOR COUNTS Count us in Designer:Martin Wallace | Publisher: Cubicle 7 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…

PLAYED CLOUDAGE Bring out the blimps! Designer: Alexander Pfister, Arno Steinwender | Publisher: Nanox Games/DLP Games 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, postapocalyptic survival) is reflected in the game’s pleasing blend of mechanisms: engine-building, deckbuilding, bagdrawing, hex-hopping and soft-Legacy campaigning. Each player starts with an airship that requires judicious upgrading, with a tableau to build from…

LEVEL 20 Designer: Dylan Dirtolo | Publisher: Gale Force Nine Level 20’s box has all of the artistic love you’d expect from a game with Pathfinder’s name on it. It’s got an amusing central premise – players take the roles of not the mighty heroes, but of kobolds attempting to stop said level 19 heroes levelling up. It’s got a banana-skin-alike premise in the use of slimy moss to send the heroes careening off somewhere they didn’t intend. It’s also suggested you’re not going to try and actually kill the heroes, just make them so embarrassed with their inability to murder you that they’ll leave. It should be very jolly. Sadly, it’s a bit of a slog. The game asks players to move their kobolds about on the grid, laying…

CAPE MAY Oh I do like to be beside the seaside Designer: Eric Mosso | Publisher: Thunderworks Games 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…

RAINY DAY GAMES UNDEATH We bring you a smorgasbord of roleplaying tools and ephemera, this month: undeath Who Made This? Rainy Day Games are a collective of indie games designers comprising of Anna Blackwell (DELVE, Apothecaria), Chris Bissette (The Wretched, Treasures of the Troll King), Jack Harrison (Artefact, Orbital), and Matt Sanders (Sealed Library, Have You Heard About The Beast?) SOME LESSER KNOWN NECROMANCY Ask ten strangers in a village what a necromancer does and ten of them will respond “raises the dead for evil purposes” and they aren’t entirely wrong. Necromancy’s dark past has been full of undead armies and twisted creations but it doesn’t have to be this way. To show the true breadth of necromancy, here are some useful spells that are often overlooked by the pearl-clutching…

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THREE SOLO GAMES TO GIVE YOU THE BUG UNDER FALLING SKIES Under Falling Skies is magic. It wonderfully emulates Space Invaders and there’s a reason that Space Invaders was so successful. You felt like you were doing what you were supposed to be doing. On top of that Under Falling Skies has the admirable quality of putting science at the core of success (there’s a lesson to be learned here). Under Falling Skies is a machine that creates tension. At the start you happily increase the size of your base and push towards your research victory and those gnats that occasionally swish by are easy to bat away but, as you play, the tension ramps up as the ever-present mothership descends, previously simple tasks become dangerously time consuming and victory,…

around the world in 80 plays JORDAN Words by Chad Wilkinson Just under three and a half thousand miles east from Morocco, the subject of our last tabletop travelogue, is the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Teetering on the edges of Asia, Africa, and Europe, this fascinating country has existed since prehistoric times, but what part do games play in regard to Jordan‘s antiquity? Over a dozen of these games pepper the streets and mountains of Petra – most resembling the pitted boards of various mancala type games – and are still visible today. The most commonly recurring layouts display either a four by twelve or four by fourteen grid although there are examples of smaller and larger boards. There is speculation as to the actual age of these game boards as…

COMING SOON MEEPLES & MONSTERS The peaceful city of Rowan is surrounded by dangerous monsters. It’s up to the citizens to fortify the city, train up warriors, clerics, knights, and mages, and defend Rowan in Meeples and Monsters! Meeples and Monsters is a big, beautiful bag-building engine builder by designer Ole Steiness (Champions of Midgard and more). Depth, replayability, beautiful components, and a splash of meeple humor will have you coming back for “just one more play” game night after game night!…

PLAYED CULTS OF CTHULHU The creepiest church in town Designer: Brendan Conway & Mark Diaz Truman | Publisher: Magpie Games 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…

ARKWRIGHT: THE CARD GAME Beige: the base-coat of big business Designer: Stefan Risthaus | Publisher: Game Brewer In Arkwright: The Card Game – a somewhat condensed take on its weightier, older sibling – players are businessmen at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. As the overseers of up to four factories, players will be attempting to grow their industries and boost their share values above those of their similarly ambitious rivals. Across three rounds representing the decades of 1770, 1780, and 1790, each business will expand through quality and distribution improvements, hiring of staff, and the imminent replacement of workers with efficient machines. Certain development paths will be chosen, making particular actions more powerful, and crucial decisions will be made each turn regarding the price of goods versus their appeal…

WE CARE Doctor, Doctor, I feel like a co-operative card game Designer: Fabien Riffaud and Juan Rodriguez | Publisher: CMON We Care is a co-operative card game in which 2-4 players take on the roles of beleaguered medical staff in a hospital during the pandemic. With just seven beds left in the hospital, you must work together to manage the influx of patients while helping your colleagues to keep going in the face of burnout. Along the way, your healthcare professional might be exposed to infection or quarantined, the hospital might run out of beds, and you might collapse under the pressure. The team’s goal is to keep the hospital operational until clinical trials begin and they’ve got no more cards in hand – then, with the promise of a…

MINT BID Designer: Ben Chang | Publisher: Poketto 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…

PLAYED THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE CARD GAME – REVISED CORE SET We’re going on an advent–Oh wait. We’re dead. Designer: Nate French | Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games Following on from last year’s revised core set of 2016’s Arkham Horror: The Card Game, Fantasy Flight has now given its five-years-older, fantasy-classic sibling the refresh/refine/re-release treatment. If you’re already a committed player of this enduringly popular living card game (LCG) there is, in all honesty, not a huge need to fork out the rather whopping £70 for Gandalf and Pals 2.0, as pretty as that box is. There is a campaign mode, which brings in new Campaign, Boon and Burden cards, and while this is clearly designed for experienced players (the campaign making things considerably tougher) it’s such a slim…

WONDER BOOK Don’t judge a book by its cover Designer:Martino Chiacchiera & Michele Piccolini | Publisher: dV Giochi 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 –…

COLORFUL Designer: Ohtani Tadashi | Publisher: Jordan Draper/Colon Arc 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…

THE DUNGEON MASTER'S GUIDE TO ROLEPLAYING THE THREE FEATURES OF A GOOD BATTLEFIELD Stopping battlefields going fallow Words by Richard Jansen-Parkes Art from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay courtesy of Cubicle 7 Sometimes, as we sit upon our GM thrones – you do have a GM throne, right? – contemplating the encounters we’re going to spring on our unsuspecting parties, we can easily fall into the trap of viewing battles as nothing but a list of stat blocks. We place a manticore in this room, a group of goblins in another, and, if we’re feeling spicy, a list of random encounters for when the party thinks they’re safely riding back to town. However creative we are with our monster compositions, though, the nature of the foe is really only one half of…