Innehållsförteckning för Issue 70 från Tabletop Gaming

NOW PLAYING… Blood On The Clocktower Welcome to an issue of TabletopGaming full to the brim with big ideas. We’ve got Dungeons & Dragons in space with Spelljammer, the biggest Undaunted box yet lands with Stalingrad (with a bonus peek at the upcoming Undaunted: Battle of Britain too), and we celebrate 40 years of Fighting Fantasy with an interview with the series’ creators – and those they influenced. BUY TICKETS And we’ve got our Tabletop Gaming Live 2022 preview too – see what you don’t want to miss out on in Manchester. Including hot new games, great bargains, and even an exclusive launch. We’re looking forward to seeing you there. Plus, a huge 32 games are reviewed in this very issue including So, You’ve Been Eaten, Into The Odd Remastered, Batman:…

Solo roleplaying games should have one end in sight, one constant beacon on the horizon, one simple guiding principle: play itself. This sounds pretty obvious, after all we’re talking about games here, right? You know, games, those things you play. But the reality is that the act of running a solo game can be a strange, stop-start mix of immersion, improvisation and rules-referencing, not to mention note-taking. Every one of these ingredients in our gameplay punch can throw up snags, frustrations, things that potentially get in the way of play. If you play a tabletop game all by yourself and don’t make any notes, did it really happen? It’s a resounding yes. Play is not note-taking, but note-taking can be potentially a big part of the way you play. Given…

10 THE WARLOCK OF FIRETOP MOUNTAIN The original and still one of the best. OK, that Steve-Jackson-designed maze still tests the patience as you try to get to the evil wizard Zagor’s domain (and, rather unheroically, nick all his treasure) after all these years, but this is where all the quests began. 9 ARMIES OF DEATH Ian Livingstone advanced FF’s standard lone adventurer narrative and gave the hero, flush with cash after winning the Trial of Champions, an army to manage. The battle section is a lot of fun, as you steer your troops against an undead horde. 8 SEAS OF BLOOD Andrew Chapman’s third book in the series also switched from the lone traveller. This time, the reader takes on the persona of a ruthless pirate captain, travelling the…

Hot on the heels of Undaunted: Stalingrad is another game that takes an equally different direction from the core Undaunted series – and that’s Undaunted: Battle of Britain That’s right, this time the team are taking to the skies over Blighty to engage in battle between the RAF and the Luftwaffe. Here’s what Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson had to say about how they’re changing up the classic Undaunted flavour. Trevor Benjamin: We want to keep pushing the game in different directions and we decided on a very different direction. It’s aeroplanes flying around – which is very different from anything that the game has done before. So it’s much more tactical because we wanted to model the dynamics of flying planes around. Tabletop Gaming: So have you added altitude and…

Hold it or fold it is the first and maybe most important lesson to learn from Spies, Lies & Supplies, a sequel to the original Air, Land & Sea. Like the original, players set out three Theatres (this time Diplomacy, Intelligence and Economics) to compete over using their hand of cards. You play a card into the matching zone on your side, and then the opponent does the same on theirs. To work out who has control over any region we simply look at who has the highest total power by adding up the numbers on the cards they’ve played. Simple enough, except the game is exquisitely balanced. It has the same sense of back-and-forth play of a classic card game that you might play with a standard pack. Most…

Set in a frozen fantasy world, Brian “Winterborne” Suhre’s latest presents its players with a distinct thematic challenge: when you live in a realm where winter means 13 weeks of night-black darkness, how can you keep its heroic adventurers stocked up on crucial equipment? The answer is, pretty much, to be more adventurous than the adventurers. Unlike similarly flavoured economic games (Bargain Quest, say, or Guild Master) Merchants of the Dark Road isn’t about fantastical shopkeeping. It’s about hitching your trusty steed to your wagon (aka your player board), loading it up, picking up some heroes at the tavern, and setting off out into the treacherous, rimy gloom. Given it’s the turn of wagon wheels that keeps your business rolling, Merchants of the Dark Road is replete with rondels. Its…

Publisher: Boosterbox.nl Not so long ago, we all suffered through a global pandemic. Life filled with quarantines, discussions of Infection Level and news reports of moronic governments flailing to buy PPE. Immunowars is a game of biowarfare, partly inspired by that increased medical prevalence in our world. The game pits players against each other’s immune systems; infecting one other with viruses and bacteria whilst trying to survive attacks themselves. A trigger warning may be warranted – there’s plenty of healthcare related tragedy here. The game toes the line between scientific accuracy and comedy. Infect someone with Ebola, for example, only to see them desperately drinking bleach, curing their infection but causing a huge loss of HP at the same time. The foundation of Immunowars is simple; each player has a…

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

Fans of Phil Eklund know that he’s not one to embrace the light and breezy side of game design, and perhaps this is even more evident when beholding Pax: Emancipation. This grand game in its trademark tiny box attempts to gamify the global struggle for freedom led by abolitionists between the years 1776 and 1917 – and mostly, it succeeds. Pax: Emancipation is a semi-cooperative game for up to three players assuming the roles of parliament, evangelicals, and philanthropists. The antagonistic core players must defeat is the grim conglomerate of slavers, anarchy, pogroms, and stubbornly entrenched political barriers and laws. To do so will require the slow and coordinated worker-placement style installation of agents – on both the map and on a market display of idea cards – to launch…

The (sort of) roll and write Distant Suns presents a 1960s vision of the future, where a race to the stars is on. Players have only a hexagon-littered sheet and Ikea pencil to map their way across the universe, where there are many victory points to be won by completing as many objectives as possible. These objectives come from a shared mission board that has five randomly paired mission and exploration tiles that make for great replayability. Each tile has a shape or icon that, when used together correctly will earn points. Everyone takes turns to pick a shape, as well as an adjacent one for the other players, and goes about drawing it on their maps – ideally in the best places to score and win. Pleasingly, there is…

Three towers, many hands, some of which are not team players: Hand-to-Hand Wombat comes to the table with a fun sounding idea – blindfold some people and give them 90 seconds to build pyramidal towers out of various squares while one (or more) players are trying to sabotage the group by hiding blocks, removing them from the towers, placing them in the wrong places, and whatever other nonsense they can come up with. On paper it sounds like a blast but unfortunately it stumbles in the design. First off, each game is a ‘best of three rounds’ with the Bad Wombat team getting points purely for the Good Wombats failing to complete all of their towers in time. This is important because it’s not too hard to notice who the…

Among the ever-growing series of other Mesoamerican Eurogames, Zapotec has an immediate advantage: it has an easily pronounceable name. It also has another advantage, although this one is less obvious: for a Eurogame that comes with all the trappings expected of the genre, Zapotec is a fast-flowing game. Zapotec is roughly divided into three strands of gameplay. There is the main board, where players compete in light area control by constructing buildings in various areas of the board and picking up tiles that will assist them with setting up their resource production engine. That happens on the individual player boards, where the tile is added to one of the spaces on the three-bythree grid. During their turn, players can select certain lines of that grid earning all the resources from…

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?) D8 WEIRD FESTIVALS You roll into town to find an air of jubilation and celebration as people get ready to celebrate an obscure festival nobody who lives more than five miles away from the place has ever heard of. Their preparations look strange and you don’t know exactly what they’re celebrating, but it’s hard not to get caught up in everything. What exactly are they doing? 1 Sweeping the beaches for seaweed, which they dry in long strips in windows up and down the village. They fashion it…

For the latest news from the world of gaming visit tabletopgaming.co.uk/news TABLETOP GAMING AWARDS 2022 FINALISTS ANNOUNCED A s this magazine hits your doormat (or shopping trolly, or inbox) you have one week left to vote in the Tabletop Gaming Awards 2022. Our finalists have been chosen in each category, and it’s down to you to vote for the winners. The winners will be announced at Tabletop Gaming Live in Manchester on the 17th-18th of September – join us there to find out who goes home with an award. Best Board Game 2022 Crescent Moon (Osprey Games) Bitoku (Devir) Ark Nova (Capstone Games/Feuerland Spiele) Best Wargame 2022 Lion Rampant Second Edition (Osprey Games) The Silver Bayonet (Osprey Games) Oathmark (Osprey Games) Best Miniatures Game 2022 Gunfighters Ball (Knuckleduster) Sniper Elite:…

Sir Ian Livingstone: “That’s like asking me which is my favourite child. Therefore, my four favourite Fighting Fantasy gamebooks are The Warlock of Firetop Mountain because it was the first book Steve and I wrote together, Forest of Doom because it was the first book I wrote on my own, City of Thieves because of Port Blacksand, and Deathtrap Dungeon because I really enjoyed writing a dungeon crawler with a cruel twist. And of course, the latter three originally all had covers painted by my favourite fantasy artist, Iain McCaig.” Jonathan Green: “Deathtrap Dungeon is a classic that is hard to beat and Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! series is a masterpiece. I was also a big fan of Stephen Hand’s books, such as Dead of Night (which he co-wrote with Jim…

On the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea lies Estonia, the focus of this month‘s tabletop tour. A century ago, as trade opened up between Estonia and Great Britain, something else besides timber and bacon traversed the Baltic Sea. Koroona took inspiration from carrom; a game the British had themselves adopted from India, and it soon became Estonia‘s national game. Using a metre-squared, typically birch board – pocketed in the corners – and several coloured discs, Koroona sees players flinging a puck with a small cue stick as they attempt to pocket eight of their object discs. Sailors from the port city of Tallinn developed the game during their repeat trade voyages, seeing it as a perfect and much more stable alternative to billiard type games which, of course, were…

When you bring a Big Potato game to a fun gathering of friends, you’re usually guaranteeing yourself to be the MVP of the night. There’s an almost immediate expectation that these represent the best of party games, ones which can be learnt in moments, and lead to much hilarity. As a result, I was borderline smug when the group pulled Sounds Fishy from the assorted games stuffed bags for life. Sounds Fishy is a bluffing style game, where you provide answers to a question. Depending on whether you’ve been distributed a red herring, or a blue fish (it’s never made clear why blue fish are more inherently trustworthy over say, a rainbow fish, but we move with the choices made), you either provide a false but convincing answer, or you…

The fourth Azul instalment, Queen’s Garden is probably the furthest departure from the series. Sure, you still have deliciously chunky tiles that you draft onto your player board to make patterns and score points, but that’s where the similarities end. Queen’s Garden has a lot more component parts than a typical Azul game and they end up being the weakest part of the game. The tile iconology is confusing (luckily there is a reference on the player board) and some of their colours are unnecessarily similar. The game also comes with several cardboard components that feel flimsy and, even unnecessary, like the tile tower and wheel that marks mid-gaming scoring. As for the main components, along with the player’s board, the garden, Queen’s Garden also comes with honeycomb-shaped cardboard tiles…

It’s Mesoamerica and there’s a city of historic proportions that needs designing. Fear not, there aren’t any pedantic planning officers to appease, just pyramids to lay, temples to plan and buildings to… build. In Founders of Teotihuacan, players take on the role of architects vying for the privilege to design an epic pre-Columbian metropolis. The architect with the most victory points at the end gets the job. This game starts with a blueprint for success, but does the end vision live up to its grand promise? Players start with their own board, which represents the city’s districts and central pyramid. Over the course of three/four rounds, depending on who’s at the table, everyone takes turns to interact with the main board, choosing to lay buildings, temples and pyramid tiles. As…

The English countryside needs a few train lines on it. The only problem is that the local planners have some really specific demands. But that is often the way with these things. Village Rails is a sort-of-sequel to last year’s Village Green although with a different set of designers and a crunchier feel. Players are given an inverted L of jigsawed-together border pieces, creating a grid area of 12 below, three above, and four to the left. The area inside the L is where the tracks are laid themselves, while the areas outside above and to the left are where the scoring ‘trip’ cards are added. Much like its predecessor, it’s down to the players to pick what goes in each column and row, and how each of those will…

Pauper’s Ladder is a charming indie adventure game about dashing around the countryside trying to become the most virtuous by dealing with random encounters and completing trials associated with wealth (giving it away), strength (beating baddies), or knowledge (crafting loads of cool stuff). You also get a pet bird, which tends to be a major draw. The Moon Towers adds a ton of new biome cards, most importantly the regionally-effecting moon towers themselves. The towers might give certain monster types in the region more powerful attacks, or provide some kind of limiting effect. Talents, one of the other major upgrades, offers players a simple bit of asymmetry – your pauper gets a minor power, like being better at unarmed scraps for example. What we have always loved about Pauper’s Ladder…

So, You’ve Been Eaten is a colourful, two player game with an unusual concept: one player takes control of a Miner heading down the alimentary tract of a giant Beast, the other player acting as the aforementioned Beast. The two roles are asymmetric, with completely different actions and aims. On the Miner’s turn, they roll three dice and use them to activate or upgrade sections of their console. Their aim is to capture nine crystals, along the way picking up useful tools and batting away bacterial attacks from the Beast. The Beast, on the other hand, is aiming to digest the Miner, either by maxing out bacterial growth or by deploying five Immune Response cards. At the same time, they can try to steal back crystals, downgrade the Miner’s console…

When it was first released in 2014, Into the Odd blew fresh air into the world of rules-lite, danger-heavy roleplaying. It transplanted the feel of old-school dungeon-crawling into a world that riffed on Victoriana more than Vikings and rules that presented themselves with a little more wit than grit. Now, wildly successful Scandinavian publishers Free League have worked with author Chris McDowall to revamp, re-visit, and re-issue the game for a new generation of gamers. The changes aren’t particularly sweeping – some new art, a few expanded rules, a fleshed-out starter dungeon – but they do just enough to warrant the new edition. The result is a beautiful little slice of gaming that plays almost as well as it looks. And as trite as it may seem to a world…

In Termite Towers, players control rival termite colonies laying eggs, burrowing into decaying wood piles and constructing impressive towers from the chewed and digested remnants. They do this by rolling dice representing their termites and assigning them to various tasks. Termite Towers has some beautifully-realised components – the double-layer player boards with gaps for placing eggs, dice and cubes feel both luxurious and practical. On the right you’ve got a grid for placing your termite wall sections in Tetris-blocklike style, and in the centre there are slots for marking the minor bonuses you can score for completing lines. The termite dice too are appealing – four sets of custom dice in player colours, with termite heads for the pips and big versions for the ‘soldier’ dice, which can bump smaller…

Being a traitor is one of our favourite things in games. Often though, we like it when offered up as a strategy – a choice you have to make about stabbing people in the back. But there is another way, where becoming the bad guy is forced on you – and for many this is much better. We don’t all want to be as mean as I do at the table. Instead, if the game flips your win condition into ‘murder your friends’ what choice do you have really? Betrayal at House on the Hill is the perfect game for this – it’s got that mix of being a little bit old school in its design (sometimes feeling a bit clunky, charmingly so) while also being simple enough that it…

Forty years, 26 different languages, and 20 million books sold. Fighting Fantasy’s stats paint an impressive picture; figures that are as impressive as rolling a fabled 12-24-12 score for skill, stamina and luck before setting off to give some orcs a damn good thrashing. There’s much more to the series’ legacy to gaming than sheer numbers though. The role-playing gamebooks, set mainly in the medieval, magical realm of Titan, launched on August 27th 1982 with the release of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Almost sixty single-player books and a host of spin-off publications were released to a global readership, before original publisher Puffin dropped the title after 59 editions in the mid-1990s. After a few years off the high-street’s young-adult bookshelves, publishers Wizard, and then Scholastic, saw a chance to…

In a matter of weeks, a new version of Spelljammer will be landing on UK players tables – reviving the setting and campaign for Fifth Edition adventurers. We chatted to Wizards of the Coast about the upcoming boxset of books – and what they have in store for us. BEYOND THE STARS Dungeons & Dragons in space. That’s the pitch. Leave the world of relatively mundane fantasy and leap into the stars. Jump on a big space boat (the titular spelljammers) and go and enjoy a life of piracy amongst the spheres. The Astral Plane – the Dungeons & Dragons version of space – naturally sets us up for some strange goings on. To enlighten us Chris Lindsay, the product marketing manager responsible for Spelljammer: Adventures in Space and published…

The value of play in child development is universally acknowledged: games of varying structural sophistication help build social skills, physical coordination, numeracy, logic, planning skills, spatial reasoning and creativity, as well as supporting a child’s emotional wellbeing. A growing body of research also suggests that playing games confers all sorts of benefits as we age. For example, observational studies – where researchers look at different groups within a population – and experimental studies – where researchers assign groups of participants to different conditions – conducted everywhere from Bordeaux to Taiwan have found that older adults who play board games show improved cognitive function, lower depression, and lower risk of dementia versus those who don’t. We value and encourage, then, a hearty game-playing habit in children and pensioners. And there’s no…

It’s nearly here. As you hold this magazine in your hands Tabletop Gaming Live 2022 is a matter of weeks away. Join us as us we explore some of our favourite bits from the upcoming show. WHERE: Victoria Warehouse, Manchester, M17 1AB WHEN: 17th-18th September. The show is open from 9am Saturday until 6pm for retail and publisher stands, with the bar and open gaming running until midnight. On Sunday the show is open 10am until 4.30pm HOW: Buy your tickets here: ttgami.ng/tickets_ttgl22 MORE INFO: ttgami.ng/ttgl2022 ttgami.ng/tickets_ttgl22 TABLETOP GAMING AWARDS 2022 We’ll be revealing the winners of our annual awards at the show – so keep your eyes peeled to spot the winners in attendance. You’ve got one week to pick your favourites across 13 categories including Best Board Game,…

INSPIRISLES Hatchling games have made a name for themselves with their ‘roleplaying games that will teach you sign language’ – and Inspirisles is the culmination of years of work on the subject. A game that’s designed to encourage storytelling, empathy and deaf awareness makes this a great one to see face to face. BOARDGAMES: THE BOARD GAME (THE CARD GAME) Naylor Games brings us their cheeky take on the entire industry. The game sees players take on the role of a game designer who is attempting to make the three defining games of their career. Players have to explain what mix of mechanics and art has gone into their game for points. Each card has individual art, with reference to a game in the industry – can you spot all…

Legends of Sleepy Hollow comes in a large box. Dauntingly large, some might say, but unlike other shelf-space dominating titles – it’s not so crammed that it needs a “how to fit the lid back on” section in the manual. That size is explained by the inclusion of large, colourful playboards, custom dice, a bucket-load of detailed miniatures and… cards. Lots and lots of cards. Maybe not as many a behemoth like 7th Continent, but far more than most games, all split into multiple intriguing decks – each emblazoned with warnings not to sneak a peek, for fear of engendering “the Curse of Sleepy Hollow”. Legends of Sleepy Hollow is a campaign game based on the classic American story by Irving Washington, a gothic tale of headless horsemen at Halloween. The…

Full Throttle is a betting and drafting race game from prolific designer Friedemann Friese, with the novel theme of souped-up, low-powered mopeds. Driving the action around the board’s simple circuit is a deck of racing cards, each one determining how far one of the six vehicles will move. Players don’t individually own any of the mopeds and instead play the part of spectators betting on the race. A number of racing cards will be drawn and activated each turn and, once movement ends, the small pile will be drafted. At this point each player will choose one card to retain as a bet with each card being worth a number of points depending on whether the corresponding moped finishes first, second, or third. Clearly the gameplay and mechanisms in Full…

How do you distinguish humanity, from artificial intelligence? Can machines think? Can they play the Imitation Game? Turing gamifies this question, leaving you asking if you can detect false intelligence from the intelligence of fellow players. In the pleasantly small sized box are a ton of cards containing abstract art, in the way you might link to something like Dixit. One is laid out as essentially the base card, and the interrogator then adds to one side of it the computers card (randomly selected) and their own choice to the other. Fellow players over subsequent rounds must then vote on which they believe is picked by the human player, as a way to find independent thought within. With the abstract images though, comes the fun of the game, The premise…

New trading card games come and go. Often they’re attempting to take on Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh! in some way – and fail spectacularly (even if they’re loved by their individual communities). So MetaZoo, with its sometimes charming artwork and somewhat basic presentation feels like a standout from the usual crowd. In MetaZoo the basic system is a mix of Magic (play Aura and tap it to spend it to summon creature) and Yu-Gi-Oh! (there’s a kind of trap card feature) and Pokémon (they’re funny little critters with elemental damage modifiers). But what the game is best known for is the location and situational effects. Players can play these effects into a central, shared, row – these might be cards like ‘night’ or ‘rain’ etc. Once these are played,…

The Dwarves (from the novels of Markus Heitz), originally released ten years ago, has finally got the ‘big box’ treatment. This means we get some new versions of the miniatures, a unified look between the various books and expansions for the game, and lovely box. The core loop of the game is one of quests and dice rolling. Each statistic on your character sheet shows the number of dice you’ll roll to overcome a quest or a monster in your path. Those quests might be a little specific however – having you dash all over the board in an attempt to even have a go at completing them. And this is a board that is being overrun by orcs, trolls and élfar who perish the land as they move through…

As the sun slowly dips below the treeline, our weary band of adventurer’s finally see an end to their quest. The battle ended an hour ago, as the [spoiler] of [spoiler] and its [spoilers] were dispatched into the [spoiler]. As legacy adventurers, that was just half the battle. But now, with envelopes opened, experience points spent, and ill-fitting stickers poorly placed on various components and pages, home was in sight. For the uninitiated, the original Aeon’s End deck-building card game arrived in 2016. Multiple expansions have followed, with Aeon’s End: Legacy arriving in 2019. This latest edition integrates with earlier editions, while also acting as a base set – so it can be played standalone once you’ve completed the campaign. It’s set in a unique fantasy world where one-to-four players…

It’s been some time since the zombie apocalypse, to the extent that survivors are left with only elastic bands to wield against the undead fiends. At least that’s how it appears upon first glances at World-Z League. In truth, players are members of the Zombie Shooting Association, tasked with eradicating the zombie threat whilst simultaneously competing for points. On the tabletop, deadly firearms have been replaced with (slightly) less deadly elastic bands, which will be eagerly pinged at the rotting targets, with the winner being the player to net the most points after two rounds. Starting a game of World-Z League will require the assembly of the four included cardboard buildings – which unfortunately stand no chance of fitting back in the box once built. Following this, each player will…

Crime is rife in Gotham city, a new gang is on the rise and I guess Batman is busy. Under the guidance of Commissioner Gordon it’s up to you to save the day where the corrupt system has failed. Batman: Everybody Lies is a coop investigation game that features a short introductory case and three main cases for you to solve (I played everything in about eight hours). Players will be asked a question at the start of each case and they must then pursue leads to deduce the answer. Each lead pursued is a card that offers a short written scene from the point of view of one of the playable characters. Leads will also give access to various computer files (a phone, tablet, or laptop is required) and…