Innehållsförteckning för Issue 77 från Tabletop Gaming

NOW PLAYING… Dimension Welcome to Tabletop Gaming, your ultimate guide to board games. We’ve mixed things this month with a brace of new features and a new look. If you’re brand new to board games start with The Gateway on page 32. For those of you looking for a little bit of nostalgia, try What’s In Your Attic on page 84. Or if you’re looking for a next step, check out Connect 4 (p90). And if you’re just here for the reviews, we’ve made this a little bit easier to navigate, breaking the reviews up into loose sections around family and party games, strategy games and roleplaying games. Our main features this month focus on serene space combat game Homeworld’s arrival on our tabletops (p24), and an investigation into traditional…

POKÉMON SCARLET & VIOLET SEES THE END OF VMAX POKÉMON The Pokemon TCG is gearing up for the launch of their Scarlet & Violet expansion on March 31st and this is the most important new set in three years. This moves the game from Sword & Shield into the new “block” of Scarlet & Violet and brings several big changes to the game including the retiring of Pokemon V, VMAX and VSTAR in favour of ex and new Tera ex Pokemon. Illustration rare cards are also coming as a staple in this new block, showcasing some of the most spectacular art ever seen in the Pokemon TCG and giving collectors as well as players a reason to get excited. The price of booster packs IS rising slightly but a move…

SATURDAY 20TH MAY 2023 Join us at Nene Valley Railway for a two-hour ride on a heritage steam train, and play some games too. Leaving from Wansford Station, Peterborough, the train will travel in both directions through the countryside, offering views and the excitement of rail travel. And if you don’t want to play Ticket To Ride, or even a game about trains, we’ll forgive you for going off track. Bring your own games to the event if you wish, or none at all if you just want to enjoy a ride on a classic engine. FIND OUT MORE HERE: www.ttgami.ng/nene-valley…

East of the coast of Venezuela sits the dual-island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. Perhaps an oddity amongst other surrounding Caribbean islands, Trinidad and Tobago possesses a wealth accrued through industry rather than tourism. But, with all sharing a complex history of indigenous displacement, colonisation, and demographics tied to a lineage of slavery, aspects of the islands’ culture have evolved in tandem – including games. As is typical for such nations, much indigenous knowledge has been lost. In the case of Trinidad and Tobago, recognition of the islands’ gaming history doesn’t seem to appear until the 1800s, when ‘labourers’ from India played games that had become popular during their migration. Filling the labour gap left by African slaves following abolition, Indian workers played a mixture of physical, gambling, and word…

Designer: Richard Garfield | Publisher: IELLO Oh I see how it is, when we’re trashing beloved capital cities we’re “monsters” and “need to be stopped,” but the moment something threatens to bury the whole world in magma, we’re now “titans” and “actually quite cool?” Well since you asked so nicely, I guess we can put aside our city stomping activities and various past grudges to defeat the King of Monster Island. It’s been a few years since Richard Garfield has explored the delightfully silly King Of… series, with Monster Island taking the original’s battle Yahtzee concept and shifting your attention away from destroying your friends, to instead facing a new cardboard creature from the depths of Earth’s molten core. Each player is a giant monster (with five new B-Movie beast…

Designer: Lucas Hedgren & Divya Hedgren | Publisher: Bezier Games Moisturized. Happy. In My Lane. Need Cards. Panicking. Work together to complete an increasingly complex swimming routine in this Co-op real-time card game. Supposedly a game about the precise art of syncronised swimming, Sync or Swim is a chaotic scramble to play the right cards within the time limit. While you can plan as much as you like, you can’t actually look at your cards til the time begins and the ‘performance’ starts. Then it’s a game of quickly assessing your cards, communicating what you have and what you need. Players can freely communicate and exchange cards but they can’t be revealed to the table until the end of the performance and you check to make sure they match what’s…

Designer: Rob Burman & Matt Gilbert | Publisher: Mantic Games Before I can really explore this game, it’s probably best to explain a little of the theme of Hellboy. Many of us have seen the comics and the films, but for the uninitiated, in the world of Hellboy, the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense is an international agency that sends investigators into unworldly situations to gather clues. When things get too tough, and an operative bites off more than they can chew, the B.P.R.D. can revive them, and send them on another mission. Hellboy: The Dice Game is a competitive push-your-luck dice game built around the theme of these investigative forays. Each player, on their turn, draws a card, then rolls a blue special dice with as many of…

Designer: Darrell Cannon | Publisher: Big Potato Games Being right is a powerful skill, and one that my (tediously opinionated) family excels at. The problem being, when you get five know-it-alls in a room, that only one person can be right. Sometimes not even that many. Shoot for the Stars is a party game, aimed at any group that enjoys guessing stuff. It comes with some chunky, absolutely beautiful illustrated meeples and a delightful cardboard spaceship and planet board. Sam Ailey’s artwork on What Next was wonderful too, and the thick-lined cartoons here remind me of Steven Tu’s high contrast designs in Factory Funner. Each round involves a player turning over a card and reading the question; sample “How old was Stephen Hawking when he died?”. That player makes a…

ZOMBICIDE: ALL OR NOTHING, ACONYTE Another entry in the Aconyte series of novels in the world of tabletop gaming. In this case it’s CMON’s Zombiecide that’s had the treatment, and this one caught our eye because it’s a bit twisted. What’s worse than becoming a zombie? Okay, the real answer here is that your loved ones become zombies, but other than that? That’s right, becoming a half-zombie who is aware of their undeadness. Our ‘hero’ Westlake is one to have unluckily rolled such a fate and is now at the centre of a plan to save the people of Atlantic City. It’s a pulpy zombie romp that does exactly what it promises on the cover. A great place to start with this series of board game novels. GET IT? YES…

Designer: Vital Lacerda | Publisher: Eagle Gryphon Games The reason games are said to be designed rather than composed, written or created is that they have an intrinsic utility. Magritte can paint The Son of Man with no thought as to whether the poor bloke can see with that apple in front of his face. Games are different, they are machines and machines must function to have value, therefore they’re designed. Good games though, not only have a machine that works but the user’s interaction with that machine is mediated by an interface. An interface that ameliorates the raw complexity of the machine and allows our limited cognition to manipulate it. Like a key that starts a car. Most people, when confronted with the naked componentry of an engine, will…

Designer: Reiner Knizia | Publisher: Trick or Treat Studios Human game factory Dr Reiner Knizia has designed a lot of titles over his – in boardgame terms – long career, and many of his older designs have been republished under new names with new themes. It’s possible for fans of his work to have conversations that go something like ‘Have you ever played Loco?’ ‘No, but I loved Botswana.’ ‘Hey you two should play Wildlife Safari.’ Before a fourth person points out they’re all talking about the same game. So, it is with Nightmare Productions, previously known as Hollywood Blockbuster and Dream Factory, but now rethemed from Hollywood’s Golden Age to horror movies. Along with your fellow producers, you’re going to be finding directors, musical scores and monsters for horror…

Designer: Ian Cooper, Jan Gonzalez | Publisher: Wizkids It’s been thousands of years since ecological catastrophe forced humanity to shelter underground. Finally, you and several factions of scientists are ready to emerge and restore the planet Gaia. The race is on to engineer a variety of habitats and populate them with appropriate animals. Mechanically, this involves moving your little Shaper figure across the hex-based board, plopping down restored ‘biomes’ which represent different types of terrain like water and forest, plus less familiar ones like ‘mushroom’ and ‘temple’. You can also place animals in biomes by spending resources appropriate to the terrain. This involves taking a token from your playerboard and placing it on the main board because yes, this is a game with playerboards, and yes, it’s one where taking…

Designer: Nathaniel Levan & Joshua J Mills | Publisher: Grand Gamers Guild In colonial Cartagena society, the design of door knockers could tell a lot about the family that lived behind that door, including their status and profession. Aldabas: Doors of Cartagena refers to that past in its tableau-laying card game. In this game, each card contains a door with a knocker icon that represents a different profession (thematically) and a different way of scoring the game (mechanically). Players will draft cards and play them down in the tableau in front of them to win majorities in categories and score the most points at the of the game. However, at the start of the game, every player will also place one door card face down in the tableau, keeping it…

Designer: Jon Perry | Publisher: Arcane Wonders I’ve always appreciated standalone expansions. When a title can deliver a complete experience as well as being able to bolster another game, it just feels like you’ve made away with a sweet deal, which is very much the case for this charming combat card game. Whilst Flies, Lies and Supplies (replace “Flies” with “Spies” and you’ll have the exact same mechanical experience, only with World War II theming instead of cuddly combat critters) doesn’t stray too far from its predecessor (Air, Land & Sea) there’s still an awful lot to like in this tense card-driven duelling game, where each player is battling for control over two of three different military theatres. The core mechanics are still the same; each player is dealt six…

Designer: Evan Derrick, A. J. Porfirio | Publisher: Van Ryder Games Blimey, the past is a nice place. Not, the real past, that was grim. I’m talking about the past we construct of our own lives in our memories. This is a past in which we knock off the rough edges of experience. Serendipity, for instance, is a function of the past. Misfortune, on the other hand, is a function of the present. There are so many factors that conspire during an average day of life and it is misfortune that can, so often, dictate how you feel when you put your head down at night. If board games have an educational value it is in their ability to model treacherous things in a safe environment. Final Girl, from Van…

Designer: Joseph Goodman | Publisher: Goodman Game From the instant you lay your eyes on this book, you know what you’re getting into. It’s inch-and-a-half thick with three bookmark ribbons, and the cover is a vivid gouache painting of a warrior staring across an impassable chasm at a forbidding stone door. Dungeon Crawl Classics is excessive. Do you like Dungeons & Dragons? What if there was more? More dice, more spells, more characters! It oozes confidence. The rules that power DCC should be familiar to anyone who has played D&D in the past 20 years. It takes the Third Edition engine and crams it into a van with a wizard airbrushed on the side. The core mechanics of the game fit comfortably on just one of the book’s 500 pages,…

Designer: Loke Battlemats | Publisher: Loke Battlemats Loke have been making excellent maps with the world’s most popular roleplaying game in mind for some time now, so you know you’re in safe hands when you crack open the magnetic claps on this horrors-on-the-coast themed box. Inside there’s a ton (some three hundred-odd) of cut out tokens (pleasingly old school) and 24 battle maps, which come in the usual and very useful wipe-clean format. These maps fold out and can be arranged for any number of seaside encounters, trips to the graveyard, or a bit of light dungeon crawling. As this adventure set is designed to work together it all flows really nicely, and most of the time you’re going to have everything you need for mucking about with monsters with…

Designer: Jurdic & Manuro | Publisher: Van Ryder Games The Graphic Novel Adventure series of books by Van Ryder are often known for their surprisingly complexity compared to the simplest of choose-your-path adventures. There’s often a dicerolling or disc-spinning component to complete tests. One even has you building an entire town and managing its resources. Another asks you to take you character from one book to the next, retaining your items and skills. Tears of the Goddess isn’t one of those. It’s one of the classic entries in the series that focuses on exploring the book against the in-game time constraint. Yes there’s a bit of health and equipment tracking, but it’s not something where you really need a character sheet (although there is, of course, one included). We play…

Q. Dear Ben, The 31st of December 1960. My, what a dark day in British history. Not only was it a day that was about to usher in one of the most sickly permissive decades in modern history but one of our great nation’s grand institutions stopped. National Service. Ah, I remember, as a boy, watching columns of men, draped in the olive drab, parading through our village and feeling a swelling. A swelling of pride. That our bright shores were defended by these swarthy Tommies and all Mummy and me had to fear was the clotted cream going off. What do we have now? A nation that even the dogs turn their noses up at. If the Prime Minister can’t summon up enough British spunk to comb his hair…

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. 01 The…

Solo games are one of the fastest growing and most accessible categories in tabletop gaming. Through crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Crowdfundr, and digital marketplaces like itch.io and DriveThruRPG, it has never been easier for independent designers to find an audience. Today, itch.io alone hosts over 2,100 solo tabletop games with around a dozen added each week. Journaling games are one of the most popular types of solo games. These games are storytelling engines where a combination of constraints and prompts help you create a unique and personal story impossible in group play. The prompts, often chosen with dice or a deck of standard playing cards, challenge you to imagine settings and characters, using a journal to take notes, write dialogue, and illustrate the story. Solo journaling games come in…

Is there anything better than sitting down with your family and friends for an innocent bit of fun at a civilized games night? I can’t think of many things I would rather do… except that our games nights don’t usually end up that civilized. It is fair to say that I like to win. Competition is deeply embedded in my family. Growing up, we would hold a tournament on our family holiday each year where we would split into teams and compete for “The Spence Cup” (a homemade trophy fashioned from a juice bottle, some ribbon, and a good imagination). When I was asked to write this piece, I really struggled to pick just one favourite game. There are just too many that hold my heart and for quite different…

The internet. We’ve all been there. For those who have been there a long time they might remember the world before social media and smartphone became the major way of engaging with it. Before that there were lots of websites where people were working out what the internet was for. This was long before the advent of easily streamed video, although it was the heyday of music ‘piracy’. Everyone knew it was going to kill all print, especially newspapers (that’s gone well so far hasn’t it?) and so looked at that for inspiration. It was just how people understood what the ‘content’ of the internet would look like. But it was vaguely anarchic, as much as anything can be sitting down in an office chair in front of a keyboard.…

Designer: John D. Clair | Publisher: AEG We forget, sometimes, when we sit down to our regular games, that these things can be events. They can have the pupil dilating impact of the big top. They can encourage all of those warm trembles that happen when you bathe your brain in delightful enzymes. Interface with any kind of art regularly enough and the majority of your time spent with it becomes normal. A gentle satisfaction rather than a blazing reverie. Then, sometimes, a game comes along that blows the bloody doors off. That rubber bands you back to those nerve-jangling days of the neophyte. All laughs and serotonin, wonder and grace. They remind you of why you got into these things in the first place, before calluses formed on your…

Designer: Evan Katz, Josh Roberts | Publisher: Evan and Josh’s Very Special Games Company How does one invent funny? Whilst AI software becomes scarily capable of not only performing manufacturing tasks but also “generating” visual art and music, there’s still no effective algorithm for generating jokes, much less funny ones. Being able to craft a game that not only meets the demands of the competitive tabletop marketplace by being fun, but taking that one step further by giving players the tools needed so that they can be funny, is a hell of a Herculean task. Thank god Ransom Notes makes it look so easy. A nonsensical giggling inducing party game for 3-6 players (or more if you can provide your own magnet surfaces), Ransom Notes is a comedy game in…

Designer: Julio E. Nazario | Publisher: Stronghold Games In Dulce the irresistible sweetness of the confectionery theme mixes with the puzzle and resource management mechanics to re-enact the process of making sweets. In the game, players compete to earn the most victory points by delivering the right type of ingredients to the local cafes. They will need to plant cacao, coffee, peanut, and vanilla seeds, harvest them and deliver to the cafes, trying to use every by-product of the manufacturing process to its full potential and avoid unnecessary wastage. While sweets themselves can be considered an exuberance, Dulce is a minimalist game. Its box has a slick stylish artwork that doesn’t give much away but sets the expectations high. The game itself consists of only a few multi-functional components. The…

THE FATEFUL FINISH OF A FAMILY FIELDING FAKE FIREARMS A single drop of perspiration rolled down my cheek. In retrospect, the Lowry family’s relentless descent into crime probably began when we first played Burgle Bros. That tight puzzle of security guards and safe-cracking gave us a taste for the darker side of the law. A taste that led me here. Facing down the blank barrel of a polystyrene gun, pointed in my direction by a nine year old girl. A girl with the ruthless eyes of someone simply itching to pull the trigger. Our game of Ca$h N Guns, began, as many do, with five friendly humans ready for a good time. The basic structure of play is simple: loot cards are laid on the table each round, and each…

Twenty fourteen was a year marked by social unrest and world shaking events, seeing Russia forcibly exited from the G8 (now G7) after its controversial annexation of Crimea, the first marches for the Black Lives Matter movement and Hong Kong protests which reignited a global conversation on equality, whilst in slightly more uplifting news, the first trending video for the Ice Bucket Challenge went live, with the trend going on to raise an estimated £200 million worldwide. The escapism offered by great games became all the more important in 2014. Let’s look back now at some of the most important releases and events for tabletop gaming that year. ASMODEE PURCHASES DAYS OF WONDER AND FANTASY FLIGHT Fitting for an industry where Monopoly is a major name, 2014 saw two of…

Designer: Jonathan Mariucci, Nathan Loos, Alkaterini Kimoundr | Publisher: Mariucci J Designs The villager gasped in shock. Perhaps it was her calling as a medium, or her dhampir origin. Regardless, she knew that her impoverished village was in mortal danger. Rousing her neighbour, a renowned witch, the two friends (and viper familiar) ventured forth… This is the fourth volume in the HEXplore It series, and the best to date. Players create a Hero choosing a Role (profession) and an origin. Up to six players are supported but I find it best with one or two controlling a couple of Heroes each. The Roles included in this box are particularly relevant to the horror theme, but may be used in any volume. Each Role has two unique Masteries which cost energy…

Designer: Paul Stapleton | Publisher: Bedsit Games If directors make films as love letters to the cinema, then board game designers – at least if BN1 is anything to go by – make games as love letters to places. In this case, it’s Brighton – the South Coast’s hilly home of sun, sea and supersized seagulls that nick your chips. For those who’ve had the pleasure, it’s hard not to be won over by the city’s mix of creativity and inclusivity, set to the backdrop of a pebbly beach and faded Regency architecture. But will the board game A) Satisfy existing dwellers and daytrippers? and B) Be enough to attract new visitors? The game positions players in the latter group, as a bunch of friends who can’t agree on where…

Designer: Paul Dennen | Publisher: Dire Wolf At the first glance, Clank!: Catacombs might look like just a new edition of Clank!: The Deck Building Game. The premise is the same: you are a band of adventurers searching for the artefacts in the dungeon, guarded by a scary dragon. The dungeon is deep and full of mysteries and monsters, and your every misstep or loud clank of a sword alert the dragon to your presence. As a simple explorer, you have no chance in a fight against the dragon, but you can try to escape the dungeon before the creature’s scolding fires make a BQQ out of you. The main mechanics are also the same: Clank! is a deckbuilding game. Each player starts with an identical hand of cards, which…

Designer: Sara Perry | Publisher: Weird Giraffe Games I can’t claim to know much about delftware, that iconic white and blue, Dutch pottery. In fact, the main thing this distinctive style brings to mind whilst handling Gift of Tulips’ lovely cards is the discrepancies between crockery found in the charity shops of affluent, rural areas versus those in the city. In any case, Gift of Tulips’ aesthetic and uplifting flower festival theme are a unique pleasure to behold in a tabletop game. In the game players will be exploring Amsterdam’s famous Tulip Festival and competing to assemble the most colourful and valuable bouquets. Amidst a market of fluctuating tulip values, players must keep their eyes on both the festival and their opponents if they hope to succeed. It doesn’t take…

Designer: Vegard Eliassen Stillerud, Eilif Svensson & Asmund Svensson | Publisher: Chilifox Games It’s the tail end of the sixties and a mixture of America’s coolest and most annoying young people want to listen to live music outdoors. For those in search of profit, this heady mix of revolution and free love makes for excellent campaigning weather. Thus you and your fellow players set out to stage rival festivals – apparently over the same weekend – in order to bilk sundry hippies, funk fans and country music aficionados for as much money as possible. Come Together is a game of worker placement and acquiring cards from a suite of tableaus. Over three rounds, representing a three-day festival, you’re going to grab cards that let you expand your camping capacity, construct…

Designer: Dr. Wictz | Publisher: Strange Machine Games The COIN series from publisher GMT Games is a fascinating look at historical counter insurgency efforts. It’s a brilliant collection of games that suffer from a high level of complexity and a general sense of unease due to the subject matter. Asking a friend to sit down and play as the Taliban for three hours is no small request. Robotech: Reconstruction seeks to remediate this ill on two fronts. Firstly, this is a shiny fictional property. While fans of Robotech will find joy in seeing Rick Hunter and Minmei, even those unfamiliar with the setting will draw some relief from the detachment to modern turmoil. Fans of the COIN system will likewise find comforting familiarity, as the four factions map to recognisable…

Designer: Christian Sahlen | Publisher: Free League If there’s any genre born to explore the bright, bloody aesthetic of Mork Borg and its cohort of doom-laden followers, it’s cyberpunk. Anyone hungry for proof of this need look no further than Cy_Borg’s ability to use its artsy progenitor as a jumping-off point for both slick visuals and solid gameplay. In case the name didn’t make it quite obvious enough, Cy_Borg is a cyberpunk take on Mork Borg’s own stripped-down blend of old-school dungeon crawling and punky sensibilities. Beyond the black-and-neon colour palette, this lineage reveals itself in the game’s simple rules, brutal combat, and love of random tables - used to determine everything from a character’s backstory to the details of the crew’s next job. As a default, the game sets…

Designer: Hinokodo | Publisher: Mimic Publishing Collective Can you kill a god? Is it worth a punt? That is the question of this exiting little book of hex-scribbling and dice rolling. Miru is a small indie analogue adventure with some really quite big ideas within. We often talk about the ability of little solo adventure games to pack a much bigger punch than we expected because of the way they light-up your imaginative landscape when playing them. It’s often about the idea that this is a tool for cracking open some of your own creative potential in an ad-libbing, unexpected way. That isn’t the case here. What we have instead is something entirely different. Something… cinematic. It’s 100 years in the future and your brother was just killed by a…

Designer: Luka Rejec | Publisher: Exalted Funeral I’ve long held it to be true that the platonic ideal of a roleplaying game campaign is one where you or your players intend to go and do something important but get side tracked immediately. Ultraviolet Grasslands is an intentional attempt at this – or at least, that’s what it feels like from the outside. The book is primarily a collection of 32 locations for adventurers to explore. All of them are weird, some of them are deadly, but most importantly they’re all very intriguing. UVG is a kind of ‘tourism simulator’ for an extremely weird world – and we mean this in the best possible way. The structure of the adventure is inspired by the Oregon Trail (a videogame most notable for…

I have to admit, right from the start, Bloodborne is the only ‘SoulsBorne’ games I haven’t actually played through the whole story of. While I could recount the whole ‘plots’ of the Dark Souls games (and Elden Ring I guess), Bloodborne isn’t a pub quiz speciality. But what all these games do really well is their environmental storytelling. Much about these worlds is obscured. Little of its history is given directly to players, but instead provided in snippets through the descriptions of items, or through cryptic conversations with the various peoples in the world. Bloodborne is a blindspot for me, which might make it a big of a mystery as to why I love this tabletop game so much… This is just to say we’re not here for the lore.…

EX NOVO Ex Novo by Martin Nerurkar and Konstantinos Dimopoulos puts you in control of a village, town, or metropolis from the moment of its founding. You decide how old and large your city will become. During the founding phase, randomly-generated prompts will help you create a map and give you background on why people settled here. In the development phase, your settlement expands and shrinks; factions rise and fall, populations migrate, old neighbourhoods decline and mighty edifices rise and crumble. Over 200 event prompts help you bring to life the districts, residents, histories, political struggles, and design of whatever type of city you can imagine. Available on itch.io and DriveThruRPG. DELVE In DELVE by Anna Blackwell, you create an underground dwarven hold, discovering riches and uncovering horrors as you…

You and your 3-4 friends are settlers in a new land, and you’re hoping to have a good and prosperous life. To do this, you’ll need to set out and make settlements where you can get the resources you need to survive. Once you have these resources you can expand your settlement by adding roads, and then build connected settlements at the other end. Each road and settlement costs a certain amount of resources to build, which are the cards in your hand. If you don’t have enough for what you need, you can ask to trade around the table – there’s really no limit on how this works, so if you can drive a hard bargain, you’ll probably come out on top. Or alienate everyone from trading with you…

Designer: Darth Rimmer | Publisher: Mondo Games Despite not being a huge Disney fan, this diminutive box intrigued me. With a moody aesthetic akin to Epic Mickey, memory elements, and allusions to The Mindlike silent gameplay, I had high hopes. This two player game – made up of a few cards and tiles – sees our beloved and be-gloved rodent sourcing Magic to help battle the encroaching threat of Doubt spreading across the land. This plays out – very much abstractly – across a grid of four facedown cards, which, during a turn, will be manipulated by either adding a card to push another out of a column where it will be ‘Discovered’, or slide one out of a row whereupon it’s ‘Dispelled’. Discovered cards will be taken, activated, and…

Designer: Simon Milburn & Caezar Al-Jassar | Publisher: Alley Cat Games Let’s get one thing out of the way before anything else. Catstronauts is cute. Like, weapons grade cute. From the customisable catstronauts themselves, to the tiny kitten meeples, this is the equivalent of a cat giving you those big, loveable eyes while they purr for more treats. However, is there any depth beyond the sweet little kitties? Well, the easy answer is ‘no, not really’ but the more difficult answer is a bit longer… which is a good job because I’ve got a word count to fill. Catstronauts is an incredibly easy to play reaction game that can be taught in seconds. You start by choosing your four catstronauts, which are numbered one to four (more on that in…

Designer:Mashiu | Publisher: Oink Games Quickity Pickity is a beguiling game. If I told you that it’s a simple matter of flipping tokens and making matching sets, you’d assume it was a game for kids only. It might even be considered a good one when I say that you have marketplace cards so each round has a different kind of scoring. Or a particularly nice to look at one as that there’s a little wooden stick to designate your area of the board (with no other discernible purpose). But like the best games that Oink put out, Quickity Pickity really reaches into your brain and turns on the whisking function. All at once players flip over tokens in the centre of the table, hoping to make matching sets that will…

Designer: Gerard Ascensi & Ferran Renalias | Publisher: Devir There is an oft-voiced criticism of Euro-style games; that “theme” is an afterthought. Designers will sometimes build a game entirely mechanically, waiting for the publisher to choose art, story and setting. I remember reading an interview with Bruno Cathala about the game Abyss, where he explained it could have ended up being set in any one of a dozen settings and still worked exactly the same way. Sometimes this flavourful lick of paint can be rather superficial, applying a theme that is only tangentially related to the underlying mechanics of play. Whether shearing sheep, arranging beach towels and hunting down dragons, the gameplay functionally ignores this in favour of players purely interacting with systems to score points. I’m not pointing any…

Designer: Jonathan Mariucci, James Spaid, Frank Calcagno Klik’s Madness is an adaptation of the HEXplore It exploration game Valley of the Dead King – turning it into adventure book form, or more accurately into a hybrid form as it requires the base game. The events of Klik’s Madness take place before those of Dead King as we witness the rise of the titular Goblin Emperor and understand why he appears as an undead Boss in Dead King. A brief tutorial introduces four chapters comprising a substantial campaign during which Heroes reach far higher levels than in a game of Dead King. To start, players pick a Hero to play, choosing a Role and origin. Each chapter will explain how to create the map for that chapter using hex tiles from…

Designer: Michael Dunsmore & Jordan Nichols | Publisher: Alley Cat Games Despite its ubiquity, representing warfare and combat on the tabletop is tricky, even under the creatively liberating guise of science-fiction or fantasy. Sure, certain formulas have cemented themselves in the hobby over the years – from the drawn out detail of hex and counter games to the slicker, miniature showcasing mayhem of skirmish titles. But whilst each format offers a fun or interesting simulacrum of conflict, few tackle the micro-moments of frantic tension and unpredictable chaos one associates with the throes of battle. In Star Fighters: Rapid Fire, designers Michael Dunsmore and Jordan Nichols seek to rectify this with a surprisingly logical approach: Realtime dice-chucking. Star Fighters: Rapid Fire is a quick-playing, tactical space combat game for one to…

Designer: Eric Dubus & Olivier Melison | Publisher: Holy Grail Games According to Wikipedia, an encyclopaedia is a reference work providing summaries of knowledge to a general or specific field. Offering extensive detail, one imagines putting an encyclopaedia together to be an often-laborious task. A bit like playing Encyclopedia. Set in the Age of Enlightenment, players are university scholars raising money to research animals around the globe, before publishing their findings. Everyone starts with two animal cards belonging to the same or differing continents, then looks to set collect. Sets can also be padded out by recruiting matching expert cards – a nice double-chance to build chunky collections. This next stage of play takes place using continent-corresponding dice for worker placement – picked from a blind bag fresh from the…

Designer: Yann & Clem | Publisher: Devil Pig Games Finally, a game that allows you to recreate the Second World War. While it’s true that Heroes of Normandie breaks little ground in its choice of theme – a theme that has shown no signs of declining in popularity in the years since the game’s original release – there’s a reason why Axis vs Allies titles continue to flood publishers’ lists. It’s an inherently dramatic, conflict-filled period that shaped the world we live in today. The wealth of options is a boon for us lucky gamers, but it means any title faces stiff competition. Heroes of Normandie is a scenario-based two-player tactical war game. You have a board divided into a grid, with varying types of terrain, then either side has…

Designer: Alan Wang | Publisher: BGNations Satire is in a bit of trouble. In a cultural landscape that feels eerily like the Victorian age, troops of self appointed internet based decency controllers are there to make sure we don’t taint the sunny uplands of corporate amiability. Woe betide anyone who doesn’t #benice. This kind of cultural beigeifacation has particular efficacy in a scarily small margin industry like board games where a stern word could send your fledgling publisher falling out of the nest hitting every branch on the way down. So grin and be happy as you are spooned endless buckets of goblins and trees and the never ending parade of games with cats. Satire has trouble surviving in a climate like this. When the reductivist guardians of newspeak will…

Recently I went with my daughter to a workshop about educational science boardgames. A games designer had worked with various researchers studying topics as varied as AI learning and genetics, then turned their research into tabletop games. The idea of the project was to create a fun new way to raise awareness of the research going on all the time in our universities, and teach some of the basic ideas to a non-expert audience. I love tabletop games with a zeal that makes people back away from me at parties. And I rarely go to parties in the first place because they get in the way of valuable cardboard time. I also feel passionately about the value of scientific research. We’ve made incredible strides in public health, information technology and…

Designer: Bully Pulpit Games | Publisher: Jason Morningstar Science fiction gives us a lens through which to view reality and come to conclusions unadulterated by our usual preconceptions and Durance by Jason Morningstar provides exactly that. The premise of the game is that the worst criminal scum from a dozen star systems have been dumped on a remote prison planet where they are expected to build a new civilisation under the watchful eye of the Authority. Sound familiar? Well, don’t worry if it doesn’t because Durance does well to explain at the end of the book that this is a sci-fi reimagining of the first European prison colonies in Australia and even explains that the sci-fi coating can be rubbed off to play a historical setting of the first such…

Designer: Chris Bissette | Publisher: Loot The Room There’s a certain subset of RPG gamers who just absolutely live for dungeons. They are an easy breed to spot; do they, near exclusively, call the person running the game the “DM”? The Dungeon Master. They’ll never use a term like “Games Master” or the “referee”, but solely preferring a title that honours the true pursuit, that of completing the Dungeon. I’m aware of it, because I’ll admit a sort of fascinated bemusement with the attraction. I enjoy pretty much all ‘theatre of the mind’, many systems and styles of roleplay, but when I hear of groups exploring a thousand room megadungeon? I wonder slightly where the appeal is. At what point do they stop being, you know, just rooms? Room after…