Indholdsfortegnelse for Issue 108 i Tabletop Gaming

We’ve got our plane ticket, we’ve packed our bags and we’re scanning the highly anticipated lineup for Lucca Comics & Games 2025 as our excitement builds! Two headline debuts have us the giddiest: Critical Role’s Matthew Mercer and Marisha Ray make their first Italian appearance. The duo, guests of Acheron Games, will headline presentations, signings and a massive multi-table session of Daggerheart, the RPG from Critical Role’s creative hub, which receives its official, much-anticipated Italian release at the festival. “My team wants to create the festival they would like to attend. So we try to follow the things that we love and Matthew Mercer and Critical Role, we have tried to bring them to Lucca in the last few years, and it’s the same with Hideo Kojima,” says Emanuele Vietina,…

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DEAD OF NIGHT Dead of Night is the first horror game I ever played. Designed by a friend, Andrew Kenrick, it emulates lots of different genres of horror but is firmly rooted in the cinematic, with loads of advice to that effect. Character creation is broad strokes, allowing personalities to come out during play. What really makes Dead of Night tick is its Tension mechanism – a pool of points that ebbs and flows over the course of a session. The GM can spend it to mess with rolls, and as it increases they’re encouraged to lean into the tropes of the horror genre in their narration. It acts as a great guide to play and it’s terrifying to watch it creep up and up! THE TERROR BENEATH Call of…

1 CTHULHU: DEATH MAY DIE Some people would put Zombicide on a list like this, as the archetypal action-horror game, but Cthulhu: Death May Die easily edges it out. It’s far better. The design pitch? “What if you could shoot Cthulhu in the face with a shotgun?” The game is modular – you choose a Great Old One, a character and a scenario, and mix them up however you like. As your character grows increasingly insane, that madness also makes you stronger in combat. It’s fast, furious and gloriously unhinged, often building to an epic, self sacrificial climax. It’s less atmospheric than Arkham Horror: The Card Game, but easily more explosive. 2 MANSIONS OF MADNESS You play this one with an app, and it works very, very well. The experience eases players into…

Trading Card Game (TCG) tournaments are getting big. If you want some examples, how about the recent Pokémon TCG Frankfurt Regional Championship that attracted over 2,400 players (nearly four times the number that attended an International Championship in the same city just three years earlier). Or how about Disney Lorcana, which ran its events in 2024 with a cap of 512 players – before raising it to 2,000, a number that still left players disappointed due to the overwhelming popularity of the game. The thing is, as sad as it might be, a lot of players don’t have a good tournament run. Frankfurt might have started Phase 1 with 2,431 Pokémon players, but only 430 players made it to Phase 2. So, what are the other 2,000 players supposed to…

As of 2025, Wizards of the Coast is 35 years old! That’s relatively fresh-faced in comparison to some veteran tabletop developers but across the brand’s youthful run thus far, it has made an undeniable mark on the industry. Its fantastical name has been associated with arguably the most important RPG of all time, alongside its ground-breaking foray into the trading card game space. Wizards of the Coast is a major player, yet the studio’s complex history isn’ as widely known as its parent company Hasbro. THE BEGINNING Back in 1990, Peter Adkison, a long-time fan of Dungeons & Dragons and a systems analyst for the Boeing Company, put together a plan. His passion for the tabletop space was enough to inspire his own ambitions and so he and a…

Designer: David Yakos | Publisher: Mindware Like it or loathe it, there’s a reason UNO has been a bestseller since the 1970s. The standard version has bold colours that are easy to recognise and the rules are so incredibly simple they can even be grasped by grandma on Christmas Day after a few sherries. Why mention UNO? Well, Ringer feels like an attempt to hit that same sweet spot but not quite with the same success. The first thing you notice about Ringer are those snazzy cards with a big hole surrounded by a golden circle in the middle. In fact, the whole design of the cards is very striking, particularly on the wild cards, which have concentric circles emerging from the golden hole (hang on, that sounds a bit…

Designer: Steven Dast | Publisher: Thunderworks Games It’s gamble o’clock, and everyone’s invited to the party! In Emerald Skulls everyone gets to wager all the time. During your turn you can enjoy pushing your luck with a big stack of dice, trying to claim your share of the prize; but even when it’s not your go, you’re invited to place a bet on the current player and how well they will (or won’t) perform. The aim of the game is to secure the highest proportion of the pool of gears, the goblin’s preferred currency. You do this by paying some of your gears to roll a number of dice, then placing those dice on the central skull board following some simple rules. The most important of which is that you…

Designer: Karl Lange | Publisher: Sit Down! Occasionally trying to engage the kids to play a game can be a chore. After all, you’re competing with seemingly endless Minecraft videos on YouTube, opening fake packs of football cards on FC26 or even (shudder) going outside. However, sometimes a tabletop game will have a hook that’s so compelling the TV remote or games controller goes straight out the window. In the case of Octocube the temptation for youngsters is… the magic of magnets! Admit it, now even you’re intrigued. In Octocube you’re an octopus scouring the sea bed for valuable objects (diamonds, pearls, sextants, amphora and starfish) left behind by pesky humans. The starfish is an odd one – but we’ll let that slide. Anyway, your octopus is represented by a…

Designer: Phil Walker-Harding | Publisher: Maestro Media We’re in a remarkable age where 58-year-old avant-garde films are receiving mainstream board game releases. I say mainstream as this is a Maestro Media title intended for big box stores and a broad market. It’s a straightforward ruleset with minimal fuss, focusing on a narrow scope of the movie’s iconic scene where the AI system HAL attempts to neutralise the crew of the Discovery One spacecraft. What this looks like as a board game is a simplified one-versus-many affair, with one player taking on the role of the cold supercomputer and the remaining participants controlling the stalwart crew. Despite its austere ruleset, this design conveys a tense experience that captures some of this sequence’s essence. Mechanically, there is virtually no fat. Players take…

Designer: Hugo Frénoy | Publisher: Studio H Charge forward! But not too fast, there’s enemy agents everywhere. Leaders is a stylish two-player head-to-head strategy game in which your gameplan has to change every time. Each player initially controls a single piece, their leader, on a desolate, white hexagonal board. Each turn, players first move or activate their characters, trying to position themselves towards victory, before adding a new agent to the board from the selection available. Each non-leader agent is a unique character with a special ability or rule that only you can use, so after a few turns, each player’s squad is vastly different. Instead of moving a single space, some pieces can jump, some can drag opponents towards them, and some can even lock down enemy pieces. This…

Designer: Josh McCrowell | Publisher: Exalted Funeral The megadungeon is the holy grail to many GMs. A complex interweaving of biomes, monsters and challenges. It pushes players to fight, innovate and puzzle. In recent years the lustre has faded from this once revered form, but not for designer Josh McCrowell. Josh’s game His Majesty the Worm sees characters venture from the City into the catacombs below, digging deep to get to the Worm at its heart. At the core of this game is the world that the book inspires you to create. Using a Tarot deck you start above ground, creating the City. As you pull cards you arrange a spread to divine the nature of this sprawl. A governing body forms, districts and sub-districts appear, and factions vie for…

CONTAINER Designers: Kevin Nesbitt, Franz-Benno Delonge, Thomas Ewert  Publisher: Allplay Artists: Adam Allsuch Boardman On its first release, Container only had a print run of a few thousand copies. It’s been out of print, a grail game for years, available only if you were lucky enough to find a copy and rarely for a reasonable cost. New publisher Allplay is excited to be offering a version that’s both available and affordable (as a $39 Kickstarter). The new game looks great – full of bright, colourful pieces, boards and cards. Including mechanics of auctioning, bidding and negotiating, this is an economic game where everything is decided by the actions of the players in this tight, closed economy. Players construct warehouses and build containers, set prices to sell containers to opponents and…

Over the weekend of the 13-14th of September, I found myself in the castle city of Carcassonne, a gorgeous historical landmark in the South of France. While the name will be familiar to anyone who has visited the stunningly preserved medieval old town, it is also a very recognisable title for tabletop gamers – Carcassonne is the name of the beloved Klaus-Jürgen Wrede-designed board game, a current staple of publisher Z-Man Games’ library. To celebrate the incredible city and its connection to this famous tabletop experience, the UNESCO World Heritage Site hosted its latest incarnation of the Carcassonne Game Festival. The fourth edition of this event was bigger and better than ever and was not aimed solely at lovers of the board game but also those who were new to…

This month we’re off to chilly Norway for a taste of Nordic gaming. From its Viking past to a surprisingly prolific present, games have always been prominent in Norway’s culture – so let’s look at some of the best examples, alongside an overview of the state of the country’s tabletop scene today. Alongside their strength, artistry and seamanship, the Norsemen of the Viking ages were known for their love of games. The most popular of these was Hneftafl, an asymmetric strategy game for two players. No definitive rules have been found, but gameplay likely revolved around one player using their 24 pieces to capture their opponent’s ‘king’. Setup sees the attacking player arranging their pieces on each edge of the gridded board, while the defender places 12 pieces surrounding a…

In early September, Disney Lorcana dropped its ninth expansion, the appropriately titled Fabled. What made this set different was that it was largely reprints. In fact, of the 204 cards in the set only 33 (16 per cent) were actually new cards. Surely that wouldn’t be enough to make a big impact on the meta? Might I introduce, Dumbo. DUMBO – NINTH WONDER OF THE UNIVERSE According to InkDecks (a popular, unofficial Disney Lorcana site that tracks tournament results), by far the best deck in the Fabled metagame is Amethyst/Sapphire. It’s currently taking up 29 per cent of the metagame, with the second-placed deck at 17 per cent by comparison. That’s pretty dominant. Now, I’m not saying that Dumbo is integral to that archetype, but I am saying that I…

Designer: Luca Bellini | Publisher: LEGO This game brings the magic of LEGO into the world of tabletop gaming. It is a remake of a previous game – Brick Party – from a decade ago by the same designer, but this time with LEGO’s official involvement. Updated and now with real LEGO pieces, Brick Like This! is bright, colourful and contains a huge amount of variety, but is it worth getting to the table? In teams of two (or three when there are an odd number of players), you compete to score the most points over six rounds. Team members take turns to describe and build the shapes on the cards. This task seems incredibly simple when you choose a five-point card. An abstract shape is drawn, built of five…

Designer: Marcus Carleson | Publisher: Jumbo Hitster is a super fun music trivia game where the main goal is to correctly order songs chronologically (from oldest to newest) on your own timeline. The goal is to be the first player to collect 10 music cards by getting the songs in the right order, crowning you as the winner – aka, the Hitster. Hitster: Guilty Pleasures is a standalone version of the original game, with a cheesier selection of music to place – you’ll almost certainly be embarrassed by how many songs you know! Its cards can also be added to the original to create a super-sized set. To play, each player (or team, which was our preferred option) gets one music card, placing it face-up in front of them to…

Designer: Matt Leacock | Publisher: Z-Man Games It starts how all memorable fantasy books should start; with a good map to pore over. Upon opening Fate of the Fellowship’s weighty but not unwieldy box, and letting its rulebook slide upon the table to be dealt with later, we are met with a portion of the game’s glorious map board. Before it’s even unfolded, the memories of Tolkien fans will be jogged by the author’s knack for creating associative place names: Eriador, The Shire, Bree. These are regions occupying the comparatively ‘safe’ Northwestern region of Middle-Earth, and consequently my mind fills with the colours of summer – blue skies and green hobbit-holes – alongside a sprightly earworm courtesy of Howard Shore’s work in Peter Jackson’s cinematic adaptations. Fully unfurling the board,…

Designer: Max Anderson et al. | Publisher: IV Studio Sometimes I really fancy playing something a bit like chess. A game that’s strategic and completely without luck; a two-player puzzle where we can outwit one another. I just don’t want the overwhelming complexity and requirement to rote-learn a thousand different openings that chess requires. Mythic Mischief aims to fill that space, and does it while wrapping the experience into a very more-ish theme. You play as naughty students in the Mythic Manor boarding school, trying to sneak around the library without getting caught by the terrifyingly solemn Tomekeeper. The vibe here is a U-rated Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with teams of Monsters, Wizards, Vampires and Ghosts competing to trick the Tomekeeper into catching their opponents. Gameplay is deceptively simple, with…

Designers: Brian Kirk, Daniel Greiner, Mike Mulvihill | Publisher: Ravensburger A quick admission. We’re a big Disney household. Mickey Mouse pyjamas. Disney Halloween decorations. A ridiculous amount of Lorcana cards. Stitch waffle maker. Trips to the parks. You name it, we’ve likely got Mickey Mouse on it. As a result, we’ve picked up numerous Disney-themed board games, including the original Villainous. However, despite repeated attempts, the original just bounced off the kids. It went on too long, there’s too much nuance between the characters, etc. So, does this reimagined Villainous finally open up a Whole New World of gaming? Or is it more like the Snow White live-action remake? There are some similarities with the original, of course. You play as one of four villains (Hades, Maleficent, Scar and Ursula)…

Designer: Aske Christiansen | Publisher: Ludonaute Correct me if I’m wrong but, to my knowledge, there’s no copyright on subtitles, colons, player counts and box sizes. Consequently, Living Forest: Duel literally and legally fits right alongside other two-player classics such as 7 Wonders: Duel, Caverna: Cave vs Cave and Patchwork. This alone should satisfy the completionist and perfectionist regions of the average tabletop enthusiast’s brain, but I suppose we should also take a deeper look at the game. Like its award-winning predecessor, Living Forest, this is a deck-building game that shares several of the original’s notable quirks. Drawing and playing cards from the deck still utilises a push-your-luck mechanic, whereby cards can keep being drawn until a number of Solitary symbols are revealed, immediately cancelling whichever action a player was…

Designers: Dave Semark, Matthew Tyler-Jones | Publisher: Effekt Publishing 300 Tales of the Old West is a Wild West RPG, built on the same Year Zero engine that’s used to run Free League games like Alien and Tales from the Loop. Aiming to pull off some kind of game design trick-shot, the writers have set out to combine lightweight rules, historical accuracy (with a nod towards modern cultural sensitivities), all while retaining the gun totin’ free wheelin’ vibe of old Westerns! Do they pull this off? Surprisingly, the answer is a solid “Yeehaw!” You begin in character creation, with two modes available, either picking an Archetype (such as “Lawman” or “Grifter”) and selecting a number of Abilities and Talents, or using the fantastic Lifepath system at the end of the…

Sometimes when coming up with ideas for games to feature as part of the Unboxed series, you think of something a little wild. Over the past few months, we’ve had classics like Cluedo (honestly, it’s not as bad as you remember), fairly recent games like Sky Team and plenty more in between. So when it came to thinking of this issue’s Unboxed feature, I wanted to try something a little different. Instead of unboxing just one game… let’s unbox an entire category of games! What could possibly go wrong? Recently I seem to have been playing more and more trick-taking games. Whether it’s co-operative trick takers like The Crew, old favourites such as Skull King or slightly more obscure titles such as 9 Lives, trick-taking games are taking up a…

Designer: Gricha German Publisher: NorthStar Game Studio In Biomos, you are a developing young planet. This game sees you drafting tiles with different geographic features, trying to complete and score points. It’s a simple game with a nice theme and some pretty artwork to boot. Family mode, standard mode and solo mode give you plenty of options to play, but is it your next favourite puzzley little game? Unfortunately, the answer is no. The rulebook is fantastic – it’s well written and sounds like something I’d love to play. Referring to the draft bag as the “cosmic pouch” is great. Step one of the set up being “Recreate the primordial chaos” is nothing short of genius. And of course, the passion of the creators is evident. They wanted to make…

Designer: Fumiko Shimizu | Publisher: Cinematrick Dying Message comes in a small box, reminiscent in size of a video cassette – if anyone remembers those. A bit bigger than a DVD? It’s a cinematic feeling that the game is going for from the off, as it invites you to remove the sleeve and open up the ominous box, before diving in. It’s a game that needs a good crowd, willing to throw themselves in. Ham it up a little, for the cameras. The concept is that one player has been murdered and in their final seconds they left a scrawled message to point a bloody finger at their murderer. The other players are detectives, either working together or in some kind of argument over jurisdiction that leads to them competing…

Designer: Jon Perry | Publisher: CMYK Some games reward strategic thinking and careful planning. Then there’s other games, like CMYK’s Hot Streak, which compel incessant hollering and raucous laughter. This is an exercise with little strategic consideration, one which instead elicits smart gambits and reckless betting. It’s part event and part comedic relief from the bean counting of more sophisticated games. If nothing else, it’s unusual. The first thing to note with Hot Streak is the product itself. It’s ridiculous. The box is a rectangular case with a transparent window showing four mascots. These portray people in suits, represented by full-colour miniatures that betray their purpose with little beady eyes protruding from their masks. Inside the top lid are the colourful cards, paper money and rules. It may take you…

Designer: Fabien Gridel, Yoann Levet | Publisher: Scorpion Masqué Expectation, as Billy Bob Shakespeare once mused, is the root of all heartache. Yet while it is important to be open-minded when testing board games for review purposes, it is a challenge at times to avoid problematic preconceptions. This was unavoidably the case with Turing Machine, its title referencing mathematician Alan Turing’s invention – a strip-tape spectacle often credited as fathering computer science. Knowing a little about Turing’s work at Bletchley Park during World War II (as a local to the area), I imagined this to be a game of complex mechanics built around cracking codes and solving puzzles, featuring multiple layers of narrative, intrigue and historical nods. Discovering that the game is completely abstract with no war-time theming at all…

Designer: Uwe Rosenberg | Publisher: Spielworxx Who is the greatest modern tabletop designer is a frivolous and unwinnable debate, but were you to undertake such a folly, you wouldn’t be laughed out of the room for introducing the name Uwe Rosenberg. His brand of mostly pastoral, mostly worker-placement-ish games has given us Agricola, Caverna, A Feast for Odin, Patchwork and Bohnanza, among many others. Now Kanal, a mildly rejigged version of 2023’s Oranienburger Kanal, offers familiar Rosenberg mechanisms themed around industrial German waterways. Kanal seats exactly two players (though it includes a solo mode), both of whom are going to be constructing buildings representing workshops, factories and warehouses, and connecting those buildings via canals, train tracks, roads and bridges. Buildings appear each turn from a deck, spread out in a…

Designer: Kirsty Buley, Phil Fox | Publisher: Ludes Vulpes In Forest Folk, you play as witchy denizens of the sylvan realm, using magical powers to cultivate an arboreal sanctuary fit for pilgrims to seek enlightenment within. In practical terms, this involves placing cards in both a central tableau representing the forest; and a second tableau representing your personal domain, a separate copse. Cards drawn at the start of the game tell you your pilgrims’ desires in the form of end-game scoring criteria. These are different for each player, meaning plans for each forest may be quite different. Forest Folk’s artwork is atmospheric and individual – the weird palette of purple, turquoise and swooning russet does a great job of evoking eerie wonder, and the images of wolves and a Mari…

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