Innehållsförteckning för Issue 72 från Tabletop Gaming

NOW PLAYING… Explorers Welcome to the cutest issue of Tabletop Gaming, where we introduce you to the charming world of dragons crafting desserts, coffees and the odd barbeque or two. We speak to the designer about creating a kinder kind of game with Flamecraft (p26) and then give you our verdict (p58). If that’s a bit too fluffy, how about a game focused on the crumbling of human civilisation and the emergence of horrible monsters from the depths of the wood? If so, Oathsworn is here to sate that particular desire – and in one of the biggest boxes of the year to boot. And live events are truly back – come relive Tabletop Gaming Live 2022 with us in our In Pictures special, and then take a trip over to Essen…

With a slew of new gaming announcements coming out of Essen of all kinds, we wondered about refreshing the older ones. We asked you which games you wished would announce a new expansion? You said… Spirit Island, honestly would like an expansion with no new mechanics just give me more interesting spirits and powers and enemy nations. Nathan Gula War of the Ring. I would love it to cover the wars at the end of the Second Age of Middle Earth. Or even a complete first age game. Jeff Stokes Mansions of Madness, there are still no ghouls for the game, I am going crazy waiting!  Christopher Baron Hilton Cutthroat Caverns, 5 Minute Marvel, Bad Bones Leigh Firth Elysium Vadim Deylgat They’ve been announced years ago but I really want to see…

A little over a year ago, my wife, toddler, and I were on vacation in Florida with my parents. We had rented a little condo near the beach so we could walk down everyday (we thought) and relax by the waves. The weather had other plans. For about three and a half days out of our week-long trip it rained in sheets. The timing was in a way, perfect, because we had already spent two days on the beach and the “work” of getting my son ready, fighting to put sunscreen on, getting him dressed, fed, and then loading up and carrying all the toys, towels and snacks down to the beach, only to pack him back up in an hour so I could get him down for his nap,…

As an art student, you aim to impress your professors, but money is tight so a canvas must be shared. Cards, which are split into quadrants, are placed in a communal tableau, creating colour blocks of different sizes. Random assignments and professors determine the scoring conditions players are competing over; while each player has a personal inspiration card that gives them a further opportunity to score. Each player’s scoring zone consists of the two rows closest to them. However, the boundaries of the tableau are not predetermined, but instead will be defined as the maximum column and row length is reached. So as you lay cards, you’re attempting to manipulate the tableau to your best advantage, while making life as difficult as possible for your rival(s). It’s a nice idea,…

In Successors, Alexander the Great’s 13-year reign has come to an end and you are one of a handful of generals vying to inherit control of his empire. But you can’t just draw your sword and go marching off to war – well, you can, but it’ll make you look like a ruthless megalomaniac – which you are, of course, but you don’t want the public to know that. Not until it’s too late, anyway. What ensues is a fascinating, sometimes migraine-inducingly fastidious simulation of a struggle that happens half on the battlefield and half in secluded courtyards, the wheels of power greased by wine, flattery and bribes. You’ll be advancing across territories while also securing the endorsement of ancient influencers and heirs. Phalanx have done a phenomenal job with…

Sometimes you thumb through a rulebook and find yourself thinking, ‘Oh, no!’ And your reaction and the resulting play experience correlate. Thankfully that’s not the case with Hungry Monkey. My initial misgivings were due to the games unnerving similarity to the classic card game beloved by students everywhere, 'Shithead', and while it cleaves pretty closely to that classic format it makes a couple of tweaks that makes it a surprise for a Shithead veteran like me and ensures a fun time for those new to the system. Players are dealt three hand cards and four face-down cards in front of them. Cards are played to the centre of the table with the requirement that they be higher than the previous card played. They then draw back up to three hand…

If it was a part of your childhood, even to a tiny extent, any mention of Thunderbirds will likely summon a smile of reminiscence. To reminisce through the medium of board games though is a true privilege, one which YAY Games have faithfully realised with Thunderbirds Danger Zone: The Game. This cooperative card game blasts players into the roles of International Rescue members as they navigate their way through seven episodes, each one taken from the original series of this marionette puppetry classic. Players will likely begin by tackling the introductory ‘End of the Road’ mission as they guide Alan, Virgil, and Scott through a daring cliff-edge rescue. Doing so requires them to each travel up a column of cards representing the Journey and Danger Zones, fulfilling resource requirements as…

Armada is the latest release in Mantic’s range of tabletop miniature games. Set in the world of their tabletop combat game Kings of War, it replicates the swashbuckling and cannon-fire of naval warfare. If you’ve ever wanted to push boats round a table with your friends, this may be your chance. Armada applies the ruleset from Warlord’s Black Seas game, but with a fantasy approach rather than the historical accuracy of its older sibling. This opens the door for magical Kraken, Orc ships with huge rotating fists on the bow, and Undead Sorcery. Say what you like about Napoleonic warfare, but it generally suffered from a disappointing lack of flying Elvish Dragons. The core mechanic is deliciously uncomplicated; each ship has a speed that it can move up or down by…

Having thrown us into the desperate maelstrom of the Normandy invasion, then the dust and heat of the North African theatre, designers David Thompson and Trevor Benjamin now transport Undaunted players to the Eastern Front of World War II and one of the bloodiest and fiercest conflicts in modern history: the Battle of Stalingrad. Between late August 1942 and February 1943, as the Wehrmacht focused its formidable artillery and air force on the Volga-hugging industrial hub named after the Soviet leader, more than 2 million people perished (both civilians and combatants) in a critical struggle characterised by brutal close-quarters clashes and urban devastation. It was the turning point of the entire war. As in their previous Undaunted games, Thompson and Benjamin take their heavy subject matter seriously and treat it…

Blending the neon-tinged aesthetics of cyberpunk with the rugged crime drama of noir, Crescendo of Violence offers a simple, stylish kind of near-future adventuring. The game - delivered in a sleek, thin rulebook - is set in the mid-2090s. It throws its players onto the streets of a Neo-New York that blends The Great Gatsby with Blade Runner, where they act as gangsters, cops, and civilians caught in the crossfire between organized crime and corruption. There isn’t exactly a set path for the adventures to flow down - it’s not explicitly a game about playing as mercenaries, not as a cyberpunk-esque gang - but it’s not hard to pick up on the vibe the game is laying down. If nothing else, the ‘inspirations’ section of the rulebook book is almost…

Sometimes, you just wanna take over a planet. You just get that itch to completely rule over an alien world and best everyone you know with your military and political might. But for me, it’s the wargames that encourage players to work together as well as fight each other that really stand out. Each player is the chief of a Fremen tribe, the people who call the spicy dustball of Arrakis their home. The planet is mostly desolate with few scattered resources providing the essentials needed to not only survive, but to stand tall as the proud owner of three Sietches (think cave villages) and win the game. Every round is split into phases, with a dice roll determining whether players will be able to gather resources, trade them with…

After an enforced three-year hiatus, Essen Spiel’s return was a source of trepidation and excitement for many. On Wednesday, amongst the whine of power drills and the clatter of forklifts delivering palettes of shrinkwrapped games, several exhibitors wore T-shirts from Essen ’19 like relics from a forgotten age. If they were worried that the biggest event in the tabletop world’s calendar might have lost some of its popularity in the intervening years, they needn’t have been. By the time the doors opened to the public on Thursday, the thousands of waiting punters gave a cheer and round of applause before surging into the event’s six vast halls. With such a long wait since the last one, there was a sense of making up for lost time, as many publishers showed…

Thank you to everyone who attended Tabletop Gaming Live 2022. It was brilliant meeting you all over the weekend – many for the first time in person and seeing everyone enjoy a true celebration of gaming in Manchester. We hope you had fun, played everything you wanted to, and even picked up an exclusive or two. If you missed the show this year, don’t fret, you can enjoy the show from the comfort of your own home with our Tabletop Gaming Live 2022 In Pictures Special.…

Nearly 15 years ago a family in Glasgow took me into their back garden and showed me a log suspended over a mud pit. They hosted students studying social work from all over Europe, and at the end of the students’ stay, they would stage a pillow fight: both parties sitting on the log, over the mud. ‘You can tell when they’ve really formed a bond,’ said Colin, the dad of the house, ‘because they beat the crap out of each other.’ Games create an – on the face of it – odd space where we sit round a table and invent a conflict to experience with other human beings – often our very favourite ones. But whether we’re working together to curb a global outbreak as in Pandemic or…

Of all the riveting moments in adult life, shuffling around a hardware shop thumbing through those bookmark-esque paint swatches in the midst of a decorating binge probably ranks pretty highly. So much so, it seems, that there’s now a game about it. Well, not quite. There’s actually no theme at all in Scott James’ Swatch, but as it’s abstract simplicity demonstrates, that’s not such a bad thing. In this one to four player game players are racing to mix up the three colours needed to satisfy the paint combinations found on their ‘scheme’ card. By playing cards, players will amass the foundational cubes of cyan, magenta, and yellow needed to create the cylindrical reds, greens, and blues which form the basis of each swatch card. When spent in specific ratios,…

In Bequest, players take on the role of aspiring supervillains that divvy up the possessions of their villainous mentor after his untimely death following an experiment gone wrong. Bequest would have been an unremarkable card drafting game if not for the addition of ‘I Cut, You Choose’ mechanic. Just like in a typical drafting game, players get a hand of cards, only instead of choosing one and passing the rest along, in Bequest players divide their hand of five into two piles, where one pile must be at least one card or more. These piles are then passed onto the neighbour, where they decide which pile they will take and the remaining one goes back to the original player. Everyone goes through the same process, resulting in one player always…

Following on from their 2017 title Little Town, husband and wife design duo Shun and Aya Taguchi have scaled things back further with the diminutive Little Factory. First released under the name of Goods Maker – and more recently in Japan as the oddly titled but far prettier Firm with Brownies – Little Factory is an entry-level engine builder for one to four players. Aside from a few victory point tokens, cards are the only components here, representing everything from basic resources up to advanced goods and buildings. Considering this, alongside the bucolic theme and setting, it’s hard not to think of Alexander Pfister’s excellent Oh My Goods!, but with a mechanical simplicity leaning more toward the family-weight end of things. Each turn players will either produce or trade goods,…

The first time you play this it’s likely one of you will be bad at it. It’s a natural misjudgement, the war theme often makes us assume there’ll be time to dig a trench, or plan a large offensive. In The March of Progress, there often isn’t time to do any of that at all. It’s a brutal game of snapping offences and retaliations where single bad choices are the moment where the war turns against you. This micro-wargame creates battlefields out of three cards, two home cards and a contested territory which you and your opposing player will be fighting over. The game has each player take a bunch of cards into their hand, and play one of them each turn simultaneously. These cards will let you perform actions…

Villains are almost unquestionably the most interesting part of any story, and whilst sometimes their motivations can seem a bit wooden, thank goodness there’s always another film available to flesh out the villain’s backstory completely. Arguably, Darth Vader got three (plus various seasons) to truly try to make him the worst, but it’s no surprise that when you’re playing a game, it may be that you want to be the villain. Villainous has been offering us this from the Disney franchise for some time, with Marvel Villainous doing the same (but Marvel, of course) and it seemed only a matter of time until Star Wars was given the same treatment. First impressions – captured on our YouTube channel – were great. The characters span different caveats of the Star Wars…

The next stop on our worldwide tabletop tour takes us across the Baltic Sea and in to Lithuania on its eastern shores. Archaeological data confirms that a Lithuanian interest in European staples such as chess, backgammon, and alquerque has endured since the 13th century, with card games arriving later. Despite a period of bans, card games were headily enjoyed by the wealthy, and later – from the 17th century onwards – by the proletariat. In regard to suits on cards, bells, hearts, acorns, and leaves were used and typically in the colours red and green as opposed to today’s common red and black suits. Often these cards featured full-art images which, oddly enough, became inspirations for 16th century home decor: a furnace tile in the Palace of the Grand Dukes…

Q. Dear Ben, I sometimes, with dampened eyes, harken back to the carefree days of my youth. I giggle as I reflect on the multi-coloured fimo beads that hung from my dreadlocked hair. In those days I was a great fan of chemistry and spent many misty Sunday mornings, lay in piles of friends watching the sun clamber above the hills. All too regularly my weekend fuges would result in me stumbling late into my Monday Morning English Lit class. A half coherent mumble would emerge from a protective fringe as I slumped into my seat but, and I can’t stress this enough, that was 1995 and I was 19 years old. Ronald is in his forties. He has a decent job, a couple of kids I don’t care to…

Twilight Imperium is the behemoth of board gaming; a vast, sprawling testament to the competitive willpower of players. No other game commands quite the same dedication of table space, time and human tenacity. In many ways, having played “TI” is seen as a badge of honour in our community, a mark of one’s commitment to the hobby. The problem is: how often do you really have time for a 12 hour battle of politico-economic galactic warfare? The strengths of Imperium’s size and complexity are also huge weaknesses; a failing that Fantasy Flight have aimed to correct with their new roll & write game set in the same universe: Twilight Inscription. Twilight Inscription sets out very clearly to tick all the boxes of the genre of “4X”. If you didn’t know,…

As a form of escapism, board games allow us to take on different roles and transport us to worlds of our imagination and beyond. Sometimes, we want to be a dashing hero fighting evil monsters or a cunning merchant of jewels or spices growing our fortune, or even an enigmatic detective set on solving the dark mysteries. However, sometimes we want to escape to a simpler setting, one where you can take a relaxing walk in a park with a four-legged friend, and Dog Park is here to oblige. Dog Park has 163 different dogs (with more available in the separate expansions), with breeds ranging from proud little Chihuahua to the majestic Bernese Mountain Dog, and everything in between. The beauty of every dog is captured by artists Kate Avery,…

Pirates of Skydock takes place in Paizo’s Starfinder RPG universe – basically Dungeons & Dragons in space. You play as one of a group of space pirates who are sneaking aboard the flashy ship of someone who is enough of a cad that you don’t feel too bad stealing their ride. To decide which of you gets the ship, you’re competing to prove who is the best swashbuckling plunderer – but if you collectively take too many risks and draw too much attention to yourselves, you’ll get caught and no one will get the ship. What follows is a theme-rich game of exploration and stealth, moving round the ship, avoiding alarms and guards, and trying to outdo your rival players. You’ll each start as your own pirate, each of whom,…

Joss Whedon’s space-western Firefly first hit television screens back in 2002 only to disappear later the same year. But if there’s one thing to be learned from the shortlived show and its cult status, it’s that fans don’t forget their fandoms. It was fans who helped secure Firefly’s DVD release and generate enough postairing interest to expand Whedon’s cherished ‘verse’ through the 2005 film Serenity. Later, in the board game sphere, fans boosted the longevity of products such as Gale Force Nine’s Firefly: The Game and Upper Deck Entertainment’s Legendary Encounters: A Firefly Deck Building Game with custom scenarios and content. Thanks largely to these two decades of unwavering adoration, here we have the latest tribute to the franchise; Firefly: Misbehavin’. Sub-headed as A Factions Deckbuilding Game, Firefly: Misbehavin’…

The egg wibbles and wobbles. That, if you saw the game at UK Games Expo earlier in the year, is probably all you need to know about whether Dodo is a game for the youngest person at your gaming tables. Dodo is a cooperative memory game – roll a dice, find the matching materials amongst a bunch of face down tokens, and, if you find the right one, use it to build. But what are we building? The path for a wibbly-wobbly egg that is slowly, in real time, wandering down the mountain out of the dodo’s nest and toward a boat at the bottom of the mountain. It’s not entirely clear what you, the players, are planning to do with this egg now you’ve got it, and it might…

The Wild West is a familiar setting for games, with the opportunity for quick-draw shoot-outs, yelling “Varmint!” at each other, and eventually riding off into the sunset on your trusty steed. Cactus Town does its best to squeeze all of that rich theme into an impressively small box. The aim of the game is to achieve the specific goals set out for your character. The sides are asymmetric, with different goals, abilities and numbers of characters they control. The Sheriffs, for example, get three standees, and win if they stun and capture two of the Outlaws. Whereas the Can-Can Dancer only has one piece on the board, and wins by paying back debts and winning three shoot-outs. Play takes place on a five-by-five grid of location cards, which start face…

Platypus is best described as a gateway game into Codenames. It is also a cooperative deduction game, where one group of players are giving word clues to another group of players. Only instead of finding a group of specific words, in Platypus, players, called the explorers, need to gradually eliminate wrong words from the starting eight nouns down to just one. The clue givers, known as guides, will play down adjective cards that describe that noun, assisting explorers with their choices. Explorers are allowed to talk and discuss their choices, the guides, however, rely on the cards they have in their hands and can’t give any other verbal clues. Like Codenames, Platypus plays with the idea that a single word may have different meanings and associations with different people, which…