Indholdsfortegnelse for Issue 79 i Tabletop Gaming

Welcome to Tabletop Gaming, guiding you towards a better gaming future and (probably) a much emptier wallet once you’ve seen all the cool games reviewed in this issue. We’ve got Frostpunk, we’ve got ISS Vanguard, we’ve got 12 indie RPGs reviewed all at once. But most importantly, we have a chance to say goodbye to Klaus Teuber, the creator of Catan, and in many way, the industry as we know it now. It’s likely that if you’re reading this, Catan has something to do with it – even if it’s only an echo. After 43 issues as the editor of Tabletop Gaming I’m about to pack up my board, dice and collection of poorly painted miniatures and ride off into the sunset. Thank you for all of the in-depth chats,…

Almost 50 years since the original publication of Tunnels & Trolls the fine people at Rebellion Unplugged (publishers of Sniper Elite: The Board Game) have picked up the game to publish a new version. Tunnels & Trolls was published in 1975 as an answer to some minor game called ‘Dungeon & Dragons’ – the goal of this game was to introduce a more ‘player friendly’ approach which streamlined the systems seen elsewhere. Interestingly, one of the core draws of Tunnels & Trolls is the way it supported solo play. Considering the current boom of solitaire roleplaying games there’s few that don’t owe a little something to the original in the genre. Beyond Tunnels & Trolls Rebellion Unplugged have also taken on the whole line of Flying Buffalo games including Citybook,…

BACK IN THE RED (AND BLUE) AFTER 20 YEARS The Pokémon Company announced a new set in Japan this month which is to be called Pokémon Card 151 and feature all 151 Pokémon from the Original Red and Blue video games. This means we’re getting our first Kadabra card since Skyridge released in May 2003. Also confirmed for the set were Alakazam ex (to go with Kadabra) and Mew ex, which features on the booster pack artwork. Although no English-equivalent set has been announced it is normal for sets to be announced in Japan in advance of a western reveal and it would be a huge shock were the set not to see a release in some form in the west. Pokémon also held its European International Championships in London…

A horrible virus is spreading across the planet and… hey, hold on, come back… I am not talking about events of recent years, but instead, the 2008 classic Pandemic by Matt Leacock. You get to be the heroes of the piece anyway, so that’s a start. Players will be taking cards into their hand and then spending them to do things like clear up an outbreak in the city they’re in, move to other locations, build research stations, share cards and cure a disease once and for all. You’ll take a pawn to represent your character and a role to give you a special power. This special power will usually be related to an action you can take in the game, making it cheaper or easier to carry out. For…

I was totally ready to dislike Challengers. A sort-of capture the flag game with very variable set-ups and a Fortnite ‘wacky but somehow a bit bland’ aesthetic. Then I realised what Challengers actually is: it’s an ‘auto-battler’ in the style of Hearthstone’s ‘Battlegrounds’ mode. It’s a tabletop version of my favourite extremely lazy gaming experience. During the early days of parenthood it was a vital way of staying awake while on ‘shift’. These games offer a kind of ‘hands off’ card game experience where the combat isn’t directed by the player, and is instead random. The fun comes from creating good combinations of cards and general team composition. The strategy is what comes before the luck-based ‘battle’ – the key is making sure that battle makes sense too. In Challengers…

It’s time for your day in the sun. Or at least, that’s until someone decides to grow on top of you like an unwanted underwater parasol. Coral sees each player take a bunch of L-shaped wooden pieces (like three connected cubes) and build up their own little reef. You want to have as many pieces facing up, so as to get points at the end. Players will also be moving their little coral pawn around to give them better placements – as you can only place your block to a cube next to piece you’re on. At the same time, this pawn can’t be placed on your own coloured coral. All of this makes a tricky little puzzle with that classic ‘Sunday afternoon game’ vibe mixed with a good excuse…

VOODOO FOREST, HOLLOW PRESS A total collected work from over ten years by the king of weird grimdark John Blanche. John Blanche is the definition of the Warhammer 40,000 world’s vibe. For those of you who enjoyed the art of the third edition of Warhammer 40,000 in that sketched and decaying style, then this is a real treat. Originally hosted as part of Lucca Comics & Games in Italy, this is a perfectly curated collection of weird gothic stuff in that metal style that we love from an absolute master. If you’re looking for a gaming application, there’s a story on every page (in the form of a picture, which is 1000 words apparently). Spice up your RPG sessions with these as a bit of a setting guide. Get it…

Deep within the elves’ magical forest, light industry shatters the tranquil sylvan idyll. A series of rival carpentry concerns spring up, competing to transfer centuries of ancient growth into tables, violins and artisanal crates. Over a worryingly small number of rounds, you’re going to grab wood from the lumber yard and open market, pick up orders from prospective customers, chop, glue and bodge your wood to the necessary side and earn some sweet sweet profit, which in this world comes in the form of blueberries. The player who, at the end of it all, has the most victory points (represented, logically enough, by hazelnuts) will be the winner. Woodcraft is a game of picking actions and managing an economy tighter than an expertly-cut half-blind dovetail joint. Each action, like buying…

For most of us, becoming an architect of societal change is unlikely. Within the realm of gaming though, civ-building titles have allowed budding idealists/megalomaniacs to tinker with these societal playgrounds to their heart’s content. In Rise, this complex process has been conveniently condensed down to the merest push of a cube - or ten cubes to be precise. With ten modular tracks, representing everything from culture to bureaucracy (and eight other facets presumably important to society), Rise tells the abstracted story of up to four players’ personal utopias. But only one will succeed in gathering the influence to steer civilisation toward its final course. Over twelve rounds players will be taking turns plopping down their factory meeple below one of four action cards and triggering the movement of cubes. Typically,…

We fully support any game designed off the back of a thin premise. Here it’s answering the question of ‘Do android dream of electric sheep?’ – the one posed by the title of the Philip K Dick novel that would eventually become Bladerunner on the silver screen. The answer is, predictably, ‘no, but we could probably build some sort of points-scoring factory to make it possible.’ And so we have Mech A Dream – a literal dream factory, but for robots. We’ll be doing exciting things like placing meeples and tableau building. Each turn you’re going to place meeples to gain resources, buy stuff, or get resources of different types. Each turn offers three rounds (morning, day, and evening) to give you the chance to get the resources you need…

With some games, it’s love at first play. Blazon, a design-your-own-crest venture about medieval heraldry, isn’t one of them. It takes several plays for its charms to come forth – a grower rather than a shower, if you will. Once revealed there is much to covet. Deceptively simple, this is a set collection game with the expected requirements of hand management and communal drafting. At set-up, players possess a shield-shaped board with ten empty squares for cards. The aim is to fill the board with a mix of device and tincture cards to create a high-scoring design. Tincture cards? For many, such highfalutin speak will be unfamiliar. Novices will learn a fair bit about heraldry from Blazon – not enough to win Mastermind, but enough to pass respectively through a…

In 1985, archaeologists excavating a Roman villa in Germany discovered several pieces of copper-alloy plate. They subsequently found these plates fitted together to form a miniature turret, complete with a flight of steps at the bottom and three slanted platforms in its hollow interior. They had found a 1,600-year-old dice tower. The Vettweiss-Frotzheim Dice Tower – as it is now known – is identical in its core design to the ones I showed my 6-year-old daughter at a recent games convention. The Romans more or less nailed dice tower technology in the 4th Century, the projecting baffles ensuring dice turn in a functionally random way on their clattering passage to the exit. In fact, if anything, our modern dice towers are slightly less flash – the archaeologists concluded the original…

Horror is an interesting genre. For some it is too much; too “on the nose”, too difficult or triggering to engage with; others find it hilarious, a mirror to life that is absurd enough to be stress relieving. I’m not sure where I land, a little of one, a little of the other, I suspect. Wherever you are, I think its unlikely you’ll find a game in the genre that manages to be quite so approachable as Shiver. Shiver sets itself up as an RPG system that allows you to “play out your very own horror movie with your friends”. Unlike many games out there, Shiver doesn’t use numbered dice, but instead uses custom dice with thematic sides. Instead of rolling 1-6, you are rolling custom moulded dice with symbols…

Notorious is a role play game that knows exactly what it’s trying to achieve, and it manages to do so very well. You are cast into the role of a Nomad, part of a select guild of bounty hunters, whose job is to hunt down a target hiding deep on a planet. Along the way will be mishaps, misunderstandings, and interactions with individuals who may well wish you harm. The game book itself is striking, from the gold foil on the cover, to the crisp and colour-coded rules layout. The green first section contains rules and setting, the blue setup section creates your mission, your character and the world you will encounter, and the final purple section contains the tables for playing the actual game. This section ordering is just…

Bastards. opens with a note explaining exactly what it is – “my synthesis of ‘dragon games’ into the one I want to play and run. This is not a complete system. […] I believe in you.” Readers might focus on the first part, the “this isn’t a complete system” part, but they shouldn’t. It’s the final part, the I believe in you part, that’s important. The rules total less than half the book, and this is a good thing. Roll dice when things are risky and failure is interesting and do your best to stack the deck in your favour so you don’t need to roll. In combat, make things as unfair as possible or avoid it, because “characters are squishy, and enemies do massive damage”. Characters have three Stats,…

Batrachian Swamps is a fantastic OSR adventure that takes you on a tour of a murky bog and its strange inhabitants, featuring frog cultists, pearl farmers, and magical squid seeking a final resting place. Despite only having eight keyed locations, the vast swamps are full of enticing weirdness that makes you want to keep exploring. The encounter table is massive and detailed, making the whole place feel alive and teeming with activity. The adventure’s confidence is evident from the outset with the Town of Ulck, which sets up a compelling conflict in just three sentences. You could easily spend multiple sessions unravelling the mystery of the vampire among the townsfolk, or helping them fend off the newt pirates who steal their pearls. It doesn’t waste time and space with unnecessary…

MEET THE NEW EDITOR OF TABLETOP GAMING MAGAZINE Please welcome long-time contributor, and now Editor of Tabletop Gaming magazine, Matthew Vernall. Matthew will be taking over from Chris from issue 80. Want to get in touch? Email him at: matthew.vernall@warnersgroup.co.uk Here’s an introduction from Matthew: “Good day to you all! I’m Matthew Vernall, some of you may recognise me from various reviews, articles and my regular feature “Encapsulate.” If I’m being professional, I’ll talk about how play is such a core aspect of what makes us alive, being free to experience and enjoy life vicariously through the roles of general, entrepreneur or adventurer. If I’m being me, I’ll talk forever about niche games that make my heart sing but make anyone else stare enraptured at my ramblings, as if they…

You said… Actual Plays that teach you how to play/run the game @milnermaths People reading the books. @pangalactic An ending @Wyrd_Science How to play videos. Victory points. Mid-game changes to how things work. @_simeonsmith The action/turn order system in Olympos could make for an interesting way of doing initiative. @_ScruffyLooking Starting with a rules summary/play overview rather than char gen or lore (I’ve been saying this for years). @spaceseeker19 Boxes @spezbaby Normalize talking about whether a game’s mechanics support the theme, and vice versa. @zwodder The game being done at some point. You ever been stuck in a bad campaign for year but you also kind of want to find the macguffin, even tho you aren’t having any fun doing it? Boardgames end at some point. @HODAGRPG Get in touch…

With many on the hunt for their ‘new Dungeons & Dragons’ after the various public relations missteps from Wizards of the Coast, we thought it was time to shed some light on what we consider to be the best option if you wanted to keep as many dungeons in your game as possible. Dungeon Crawl Classics is the answer for those who want a big book to throw at people, plenty of fun ways for things to go wrong, and a big focus on the ‘adventure into a dungeon and hope not to die’ end of things. We spoke to Brendan LaSalle from Goodman Games about Dungeon Crawl Classics and what makes it stand out. Hello! Would you mind introducing yourself? Who are you and what are you known for?…

Sometimes we beat around the bush when it comes to talking about games; I’m not going to do that here; Flick Fleet is brilliant. Let me give you an example. Two nights ago, I had some friends coming round to play board games – it will not surprise you to hear that this is a fairly common experience for me. One friend arrived, and with an hour before our third player was due, I pulled out Flick Fleet, and we played out a little scenario. We were visibly having so much fun, that when our third player arrived, and we began get out the evening’s planned ‘proper’ game, our new player said, “I mean, we could just play this, if you want”. Flick Fleets stole our entire evening. We had…

There’s many places I hope to visit one day; be it the 230ft Darvaza gas crater in Turkmenistan, burning hot since the 1980s, or perhaps just a slightly interesting tree alongside the A32. Close to the top of my list though, is the beautiful Lofoten archipelago in Norway. Alas, Lofoten isn’t really about these dramatically jagged mountainous coastlines. Nor is it really about the equally dramatic lives of its historic Norse residents. In truth, what designer Sebastien Dujardin has created here is a vaguely viking themed exercise in carefully loading sheep and fish onto boats; he couldn’t have sapped more theme from it if he tried. But, hey, we gamers are used to this kind of thing. Featuring hand management and a unique take on pick up and deliver mechanics,…

I Would Destroy the Ring is a standalone expansion for the game I Would Kill Hitler. Self-described as a ‘party game of hilarious hypotheticals’, the original included 450 cards and a sand timer. I Would Destroy the Ring has 200 cards and no sand timer, but we’re sure you can work around this glaring omission if you just want to play this (again self-described) ‘nerdy version’ without bothering to pick up the original. If you’ve played Cards Against Humanity, you’re on familiar ground here. Not that it really needs a rules video. One player (this round’s judge) reads out a Hypothetical Card, and the other players choose one of their hand of Plot Cards with which to answer the hypothetical. Hilarity (presumably) ensues, after which the judge gives a point…

They say you should always learn from your mistakes… but clearly someone hasn’t told humanity. Planet B propels us into a future where Earth is long gone and it’s time to colonise a new planet. You would think that destroying one planet would stick in the memory, but things quickly deteriorate and the dodgy rulers of humanity’s new home are more concerned with greasing the wheels, than preserving our future. Luckily, you’re one of these corrupt governors and through dubious deals or rigged elections you’ll (literally) attempt to pocket the most money (aka ‘billies’). We say literally because you score VPs by shoving the paper money into your pocket throughout the course of the game. It’s a fun touch that mirrors the overall tongue-in-cheek nature, which is complimented by references…

I’m not sure what the ratio is between original roll and write games and those based on extant designs or franchises, but I’d guess it’s rapidly creeping toward 50:50. It’s not surprising; pairing a popular (and often cheap) style of game with something already popular or recognisable is a smart move. Dice Kingdoms of Valeria is a recent addition to this trend, offering a compact take on 2016’s Valeria: Card Kingdoms. There’s at least nine standalone titles in Daily Magic Games’ Valeria family, and surprisingly this is the first roll and write. But, whilst players familiar with the original deck-builder should feel right at home with the theme here – and, to some extent, the mechanics too – does this render Dice Kingdoms of Valeria somewhat unnecessary? In the game,…

Magna Roma is what would happen if you took Carcassonne, dipped it into marble and only built at right angles. It is also a drafting and a tile laying game, only the pastures and the forests of the French countryside have been replaced by the strictly engineered Roman city grid. In Magna Roma, players are competing to build a city that will rival the beauty of Rome. They will be working on their individual cities, building a complete five-by-five grid of city tiles and scoring the points along the way. Where Carcassonne could turn into chaos (who hasn’t built a never-ending deformed castle while looking for that one perfect tile?), Magna Roma likes order, pre-planning, building in sequences and combos. Each tile has an illustration of the Roman neighbourhood but…

The City of the Great Machine is a game of cat and mouse set in a technocratic Victorian steampunk flying city. On one side, is the Great Machine, a dictatorial AI that controls the city, its life and its laws. Opposing it, are the daring rebels who are trying to take their city back by rallying its citizens and causing unrest. Each side has its own goal to win the game: the Great Machine wants to execute a Master Plan of total dominance, while the rebels need to free the citizens and cause riots. However, they also have a shared goal: prevent their opponent from completing their objective by any means possible! And this is not an easy task. The AI player starts with a bit of support. They have…

Re-imagining video games as board games has historically been a rocky endeavour. Some in pursuit of authenticity make the transformation too literal. Others rely only on artwork and setting to play into fan’s nostalgia. Yet, occasionally, a game finds that sweet spot that satisfies the most fervent video game and board game fans and Frostpunk: The Board Game is that occasion. The developers of the video game, the polish studio 11 bit Studios had previous experience in bringing a video game to the tabletop, with the survival game This War Is Mine, which saw players as non-military survivors living in the besieged city. The studio’s interest in darker and morally grey themes continues with Frostpunk as well. Here, players are transported to an alternative reality of the 19th century, where…

From the creator of ‘game book that still lives in our heads years later’ classic Hypertellurians comes another somewhat bonkers book of daring do and generally messing about with magic stuff. A wizard has gone missing within a world within a magical cloak. Your job, brave system-agnostic adventurers, is to go find him. Much like the previously mentioned outing, this is a book of weird ideas and overarching adventure. It reads like a more ‘grounded’ Troika! – there’s specific sky islands to explore, characters to meet and items to discover. Naturally there’s a bunch of fashionable cloaks to wear, with a load of specific tags to apply to give them power and meaning through interpretation. It’s designed to be a bit of a fashion game, although how deep you go…

Vermis: Lost Dungeons & Forbidden Woods is a funny book. Not ha-ha funny, but more in a ‘oh god, something’s gone wrong’ kind of way. A low-fi art book by horror imaginer Plastiboo the book is designed to be a guide to an old school videogame that just doesn’t exist. Fuzzy low fidelity horrors, dungeons, maps and characters stare out of from every page. It’s not a game as such, but more of a ‘vibes book’. Good for those sessions where you want to pre generate some characters (photocopy those portraits and backgrounds, get some horrible heroes), use some particularly horrible monsters. There are set-pieces galore in here and beyond that, a source for cutscenes and introductions. There are somewhat playable dungeons and adventures in here – although you’ll need to…

The sun exploded, and humanity is struggling to hold onto what is left. Your job is to don an exosuit, known as a Spark, and dive into the dark remnants of the earth, hoping to find technology or anything, really, that can help us in our current sorry state. Not quite as bad as Brexit, but it’s undeniable close. NOVA is a rules-lite game with a combat speed that runs at lightspeed. The Sparks have various combat abilities that player characters can trigger using Fuel - avoiding even rolling dice. Defeated enemies drop Fuel, providing the demand for a delicate dance; keeping enough fuel to keep your Suit powered up but also keeping those attacks flying. Unlike many games, the combat is built for real time action; choose your response;…

Roleplaying is about becoming other people, to a degree. It helps when this is done in the context of a contained world that isn’t ‘real’ in any meaningful way. So what then, when we’re presented with a game about being queer in the 1970s? Simple, you can be a witch, shapeshifter or alien at the same time. There’s an easy connection to be made here about the ‘othering’ of queer identities in the time period, but that’s missing the point – this is a game of a gay safe space at a beach resort island where there’s little police presence, no cars, and no mobile phones. Solving all of the problems of a modernish mystery game all in one, Moonlight thrives on a kind of Call of Cthulhu cosiness, a…

Brought to you by Hello! Can you introduce yourself to our readers? Hi, my name is Ryan Byrd. I am an Engineer living in the US. I grew up right outside of Washington DC and am approaching 50. I left home in early 1993 and have lived in 35 places, including Britain for a couple years in the late 90s (South Wales and the South West), but now live in the US with my wife and four kids. I was the youngest of 4 kids growing up, which explains a little about the condition of my childhood games. What game have you found in your attic? My Mom brought me about a dozen of my old childhood games she found in her attic about 12 years ago on a visit…

Deciding on the first player is an important part of any game night. Often there’s a willing victim ready to hop in and ask the first silly question about what something does on the board, but other times you want something a little bit spicier. This is where the humble ‘choosing the first player mechanism’ comes in to play. If you’re like me you’re always a bit disappointed when the rulebook just says ‘select a player’ or ‘roll a dice, the highest rolling player goes first’ when it comes to who starts a board game. Why not then, instead, use one of these 20 ways to pick the starting player. And hey, if you’re not sure which one to pick, you can always roll a 20 sided dice. 1 “Dragon…

1 HANABI If your greatest fear is letting other people down, then maybe this isn’t the one for you. Hanabi is a co-op card game where you work together to create a flawless firework display, but don’t let the light-hearted theming fool you – it gets intense. Having the ability to see everyone else’s cards but not your own, you give each other clues as to what it in their hand in the hope of igniting fireworks (or playing cards) in the correct order. Clues are limited and earned back by discarding cards, but some cards are unique, meaning this game gets explosive in more ways than one. Will you manage to hold it together when your friends misinterpret your totally obvious clues? Prepare to have your patience, memory, deductive…

When I first picked up Look at the Stars, a slight flutter of anger arose as Coldplay lyrics materialised inside my head. Thankfully, the gentle puzzle soon to unfold across the game’s lovely monochrome boards provided just the antidote for such a malady. In this stargazing flip and write, one to eight players gather to document the night’s constellations before dawn breaks. Equipped with a dry-erase board and a pen, players will flip a card and draw the depicted lines in any orientation they choose as they attempt to create or expand constellations. Each constellation scores a number of points equal to the number of lines it’s composed of, with any adjacent planets and the odd shooting star scoring too. But there’s a couple of twists: Firstly, players will be racing…

“There’s thirty seconds left on the timer! You need to defuse it NOW or everyone is going to die!” The final moments of a countdown timer are pivotal to many 80s pulp action films, and ripe for exploitation in the world of games. FUSE brings that to the table in the guise of a fistful of chunky custom dice and enough nervous energy to power a Liz Truss government. Now, FUSE: Countdown is technically a standalone expansion to 2015’s FUSE. Given that both share nearly identical mechanics and contents, you can play with them together (if you want to deal with 9 people in a frantic realtime game of dice grabbing?!) or separately. Countdown adds some additional, sweat inducing cards to the mix. The basic premise is that you, the engineering…

Oh dear, that pesky Captain Hook has kidnapped the lost children. Now it’s up to Peter Pan, Tinker Bell, Wendy, Tiger Lily, John and Michael to travel across Neverland to track them down. Unfortunately the only thing that will help them in their search are - often unhelpful - visions that make finding kids in Neverland more difficult than hunting down a wayward toddler in ‘Big’ ASDA on a Saturday morning. Peter Pan – aka Pan’s Island after a post-publication name change – is a co-operative hide and seek game, with a little bit of Mysterium or Dixit thrown in for good measure. As mentioned, the children have gone missing and are spread across a beautifully illustrated map of Neverland, complete with mermaids, volcanoes, giant mushrooms, etc. In order to…

The grey area between board games and RPGs has been a fertile ground for at least a decade now, with Kickstarter giving younger companies an opportunity to join stalwarts Fantasy Flight in the narrative board game sector. What started with the likes of Arkham Horror has developed into fully fledged campaign games, where players can co-operatively take on a deep ‘saveable’ campaign with a group of improvable characters, leaving DM duties to the game itself. Publisher Awaken Realms has been at the forefront of this trend, following 2019’s Tainted Grail with the arguably even more epic ISS Vanguard. With a box weighing more than five kilograms and a replayable campaign promising up to 60 hours of gameplay, there is an awful lot of game packed into this huge box. But…

Hamlet is not a game of madness, fratricide and the tragedy of a man who cannot make up his mind. Unless, I suppose, you have a particularly eventful family games night. This is ‘hamlet’ in the English sense – a village with a church. When the game starts, your community aspires to become a hamlet by constructing said church. In game terms, this means that each turn you’ll be assigning workers to different locations to do the associated action, maybe filling the quarry with stone, or visiting the town hall to recruit extra workers or buy blueprints for new buildings, or constructing whole new areas to use in future turns. Apart from money, all resources are communal. Produce grain at the farm, and anyone can use it in future turns. The…

Just like trains and wars, pirates rank pretty highly on the list of done-to-death themes. Whether it’s doing Queen Elizabeth I’s dirty work in Francis Drake or hiring shipmates in Port Royal, us board gamers are often to be found upon the seven seas. Some of us have even been at it since childhood, innocently stabbing swords into barrels until pirates pop out – straight into the Royal Doulton. All of this is enough to make you wonder if the theme is a little bit… stagnant. Can anything be done to scrub down the decks for a refresh? Plunder has an idea. Why not give players upgradable boats to traverse a randomisable board? And why not send them on a voyage of conquering islands and blowing the opposition to smithereens?…

Have you ever wished you could manage the sales and marketing of a large mobile phone brand? Of course you have. It’s every child’s dream. And now you can, via the magic of cardboard, in Mobile Markets. Though it unjaws onto your table as an intimidating four-section board riddled with text and surrounded by decks of cards, Mobile Markets is not as hellishly complex as it first appears. The central board is, in fact, just an elaborate aide memoire that walks you through the process of a round, summarising the rules for each phase. Here’s the full ride, beginning to end: Each round, an event card gets drawn, tweaking market conditions. Maybe R&D costs are temporarily more expensive, maybe consumers aren’t interested in phones beyond a certain price. Then, potential…

In August 1914, Ernest Shackleton led a British expedition to cross Antarctica overland, from sea to freezing sea. It did not go well. In January 1915 his ship, the Endurance, became trapped in pack ice and was eventually crushed to splinters. During the following two years, he and his 27-man crew (along with their sled dogs and a cat named Mrs. Chippy) suffered sub-zero temperatures and malnutrition as they struggled to survive and seek rescue. Astonishingly, by the time Shackleton secured the recovery of his crew, not a single man had died. In the long, painful history of disastrous expeditions, it was nothing less than a miracle. The sheer unlikeliness of the Shackleton expedition’s 100 percent survival rate couldn’t be better rammed home than through a game of Amabel Holland’s…

Black Sword Hack is the game I wish I had been handed by someone when I was ten. A fantasy world where Law and Chaos battle it out, and there’s not too much mucking about with different flavours of elves or 4000 pages of lore (more like snore, right?) or other directly Tolkien-derivative stuff. If the mistake of fantasy is thinking the cool part is that the books are very long, history complex, and that every sword has a name – Black Sword Hack cuts a different path. (You can still name your sword if you want though). This Ultimate Chaos Edition is, in our opinion, the final boss version of this popular Black Hack system. Like its ancestor, the main feature is a D20 roll-under system and sexy and exciting…

I’m used to games that involve rolling dice. I’m less used to games that punish me for doing so. ENI, the “anything” RPG - “ENI”, “Any”, get it? - is a deliberately setting-agnostic game from Japan that requires you to choose carefully between the dice available to you. ENI is a novel framework that you build your stories around. The basic structure is this: each player has one of each normal polyhedral dice; usually a four, six, eight, ten, twelve and twenty-sided dice. When a character butts up against a challenge, they pick one of the dice and roll it. Success is a four or higher; so it’s very likely on a D20, failing 75% of the time with a D4. Thus your character has varying ability, based not on their…

The standard deck of cards is criminally underused in RPGs. Unfortunately, much of that probably lies at the feet of a certain fifth edition of a well known game which ignores their existence. It’s a shame, because whilst dice are brilliant randomness generators, cards have both numbers and suits to really mix things up. Games like Savage Worlds apply this with great effect for initiative, whilst the story game Apothecaria uses this for thematic prompt generation. Zilight! is a solo zombie survival game with both cards and dice. To be honest, much as in any good zombie apocalypse, death is near inevitable in Zilight! Success is marked more by how long you survive than living happily ever after. The gameplay “loop” begins with turning over a card. The suites define…

Hello, would you mind introducing yourself? I’m Richard, and I created R. Rook Studio back in 2019. Previously, I’d been a writer and editor for White Wolf Publishing, written for the reparatory gay romance comics series Young Bottoms in Love, and published games and OSR scenarios in Gauntlet Codex. I’ve been twice nominated for the IGDN Groundbreaker Award for Best Setting: in 2020 for my mini-game Dark Designs in Verdigris and in 2021 for Barrow Keep: Den of Spies. What is Moonlight on Roseville Beach? How do you introduce it? Moonlight on Roseville Beach is an RPG about summer workers in a queer beach town investigating the occult conspiracies and cosmic horrors that threaten their community. The tagline I›d been using since I started work on the game in 2019…