Innehållsförteckning för Issue 78 från Tabletop Gaming

NOW PLAYING… Moonlight on Roseville Beach Welcome to this expansive issue of Tabletop Gaming. We’re celebrating Gloomhaven getting a roleplaying game version – taking what was joked about as the world’s heaviest game that people didn’t finish, to one you simply can’t finish. We speak to Isaac Childres about creating the game, it’s use of Gloomnhaven components an how, in some ways, it the vision he had for Gloomhaven from the start. Plus it’s a mega issue for reviews. We have huge reviews of Splotter’s Horseless Carriage (another masterpiece?), the award-winning Ark Nova (does it live up to the hype?), and the elusive Sleeping Gods (does it reinvent storytelling for games?). On top of that we have a Dungeon & Dragons double-header, with the heist-focused Keys From the Golden Vault…

Do me a favour if you would? Take a minute to take a good look at the games in your collection and all the treasures that say they start at two players. It’s ok. I’ll wait while you do it. Now some of them, like your Blitzkriegs, Godtears, Ashes and Armadas of this world, are designed to be played with two players. They click with their back and forths, their tactical moving give and take. You feel like you are facing off against each other in a struggle of wits and intelligence and when you claim victory you have the right to be a wonderful bad winner. You are then allowed to remind your opponent at every point you can over the next few hours that you were the top…

THE POKÉMON TCG IS EVOLVING This month The Pokémon Company international revealed the second Scarlet & Violet TCG expansion: Paldea Evolved. This will release on June 9th and include over 190 new cards including more than 15 new exs. Pokémon confirmed for the set including the Treasures of Ruin legendary quartet and Pikachu making its Scarlet & Violet debut as a powerful ex card. In competitive news it was finally announced that League Challenges and League Cups (the store-level events) would be returning in April after being suspended during the pandemic. Update: Last month we mentioned that the Pokémon TCG World Championships didn’t have dates. Now they do! They’re happening in Yokohama, Japan between the 11th and 13th of August. ONE RING TO RULE THEM ALL Wizards of the Coast…

The first time I spoke to Isassc Childres, the creator of one of gaming’s (almost literal) monoliths, my daughter was ten days old. I had little sleep and was frankly, a bit nuts. I’ve listened back to our conversation about the recently revealed Frosthaven and laughed, it’s very clear that someone who knows what they are doing is kindly and deftly leading me through the interview. A year or so later, when, mid-pandemic and mid-lockdown, we were arranging a playthrough of Frosthaven on Tabletop Simulator to show off some new monsters for our virtual show (remember that? Virtual events?). I still call that mad collection of videos that we put live throughout that weekend (manually, by the way) ‘Tabletop Gaming Not Live’ in my head. During this call, Isaac was…

Qawale is another game in the line of wooden abstracts from Gigamic. Along with games like Pylos and Quoridor, these games offer a halfway house between chess and home décor. See, they’re very lovely to look at, they’re always made of wood, and often in pleasingly natural shapes – especially with the pebbles here. Dropping one of these pebbles on top of another produces a very happy little noise that is, in part, the charm of these games. They’re tactile, they’re asking to be picked up. There’s something naturally nice about a few bits of wood that you can move around. I’ve no idea what it does to people’s brains but it’s probably a bit like what TikTok does. They’re good looking enough to leave on the coffee table like…

Most people dream of encountering their favourite actors, musicians, or sports heroes. I, on the other hand, strive to meet the potoo bird; a strikingly odd and sinister looking insectivore from South America. Granted, if I met one down a dark alleyway, I would likely flee from its giant illumined eyes, haunting cry, and gaping maw in a heartbeat. For now, I’ll settle for this quirky little hand-management game. Featherlight follows the plight of Pauly the Potoo, who, after toppling from his nest, has scattered a mass of his (morphologically dubious) exuberantly colourful feathers. As players, we’ll be competing to score the most points by amassing a coherent hand of combo scoring cards based on their colours, and, occasionally, how they interact with cards in the central ‘nest’. (Potoo’s don’t…

Do you enjoy rolling dice? Do you like the idea of relentlessly rolling dice while listening to third-rate sci-fi sound effects? Perhaps you crave the thought of trying desperately to roll a particular number while increasingly staring into the infinite abyss of frustration? Well, boy on boy, have we got just the game for you! 15 Minutes to Self-Destruct is a bit like the classic pub game, Shut the Box – if Shut the Box had a wafer-thin theme slapped over it and far more tedious gameplay. In this co-operative game you and four other players take on the role of a spaceship crew trapped in deep space. Unfortunately, thanks to a pesky computer malfunction, the self-destruct sequence has been activated (perhaps because the computer played this game and decided…

Have you ever wondered what a helicopter with indigestion in a hurricane might sound like? What about a snorkelling firefighter using a frying pan? Can you only imagine what heaven sounds like on New Year’s Eve during an earthquake with some drunk people fighting? All of these questions and more will be answered in Sound Box – a cacophonous co-operative party game that you might want to be careful where you play. On paper Sound Box really seems like it wouldn’t work. In fact, it hardly appears like it would be a game at all. Each round, one person is blindfolded and becomes the ‘listener’ while the other players will be the Soundmakers. The listener must try and identify the sounds the rest of the team are making, e.g. a…

GAME MASTER SCREEN, DRAGON SHIELD There’s a lot of ways to draw the veil between your players and the adventure you’re taking them on. Few are as heavy duty as this latest offering from Dragon Shield. We picked up the lovely deep-coloured blood red version – and it’s heavy. The screen all snaps together with magnetic edges, so you’re never going to lose your notes from this one. There’s also the classic clear plastic holders within, so you can slip information in as you need to. A nice touch is the wipe clean pen and blank cards. These can be scribbled on and then slotted in the top of the DM screen, or, as I imagine, being scribbled on and chucked at the player who deserves it most. The backing…

Let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room: this review comes after hearing a year’s worth of gushing praise. Since its release, Ark Nova has won awards and become an instant fan favourite. It’s been labelled “Hottest game of 2022” and has a lofty BoardGameGeek rating of 8.5. Tabletop Gaming even crowned it game of the year. Now that the buzz is calming, it is time to assess. Usually, reviews try to answer the question, “Is it any good?”, but this one also begs, “Does it live up to the hype?”. If the title isn’t a giveaway, Ark Nova has an animal theme of planning and designing a zoo. Now, the very word ‘zoo’ may be enough to have some people exiting the room, such are the ethics around keeping creatures…

It’s always nice to see a great older game get the big box treatment and while Rattus may not have been an obvious candidate for it, this certainly came as a welcome surprise. Originally released in 2010, the game was embellished with more than 10 expansions, bonus card sets and promos, before finally going dark in 2018. But here we are five years on and its back once again. Basic Rattus is an accessible, fast-playing area majorities game. Each player has 20 citizens that they’re trying to get onto the board, which will trigger the end of the game. On a turn you’ll first add citizens to the board and (optionally) take one of the six character cards in play. You place as many citizens as there are rat tokens…

What are these things? For a relatively small industry concerned with the creation of something that is solely for recreational purposes there is a lot of debate swirling around. Sure, some of it is mired in the culture war morass, accusations of immorality and unseemliness but, I’m incredibly happy to say, most of it is about the substance of these things. Games. So, with no regard for being repetitive I ask again, what are these things? Do games exist solely in the mind? Are the bits and the board just ways of tracking the abstract and intangible thought impulses of the designers? A reminder of our station in the journey we’re being taken on? Are games engineering without a machine? The only identifiable motion that the mechanisms create, the electrical…

Why do you keep doing this to me, anime tie-in games? Why do you continue to raise my expectations and feed into my memories of these shows only to leave me swearing and disheartened? I swore again whilst writing this review after learning how much this game costs. Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood –The Promised Day (what a mouthful) is a co-operative game for 1-4 players set during the epic finale of the show, so if you haven’t watched it but ever want to (it is genuinely one of the best animes ever made) there’s no quicker way to spoil major plot twists than playing this game. Each of the game’s seven rounds start with a new event or boss being revealed, causing an outpour of enemies to spill out from the…

Ken Follett has an interesting relationship with board games. Where most authors are looking for that celluloid version of their penned events with actors and special effects and hopefully a run of sequels. Mr. Follet seems to have a small cottage industry running alongside his efforts, adapting his stories from very thin pressed and printed trees, to slightly thicker pressed and printed trees. I personally enjoyed playing the worker placement game Pillars of the Earth and so when I heard about Kingsbridge becoming available from Kosmos Games, then I was very interested to see what they were offering. Where Pillars of the Earth was a striking but straightforward worker placement game where you built the main cathedral structure in the game, Kingsbridge is much more scaled back in terms of…

2019’s Parks hit me right in the feels, after I picked a copy solely on the back of the beautiful artwork. To my joy, inside was a light-but-robust celebration of rambling and natural beauty. It remains one of my favourite games, the full package of play and presentation. So when Fil from All Rolled Up excitedly showed me Space Park, the third entry in Keymaster Games’ Parks series? Well I think my exact words were “I must have that, please take my money”. Was it worth it? It’s fair to say Space Park does two things very well; retrofuturist space art – think the Jetsons, but way more psychedelic – and unnecessarily chunky spaceships to move around and hold in your hands and make childish “Whoosh” noises as you move…

Games are magical objects by their nature. A pile of tokens, plastic bits and glorified wood chippings are going to transform your evening from one practicing bad posture around a dining table into one of adventure, commerce or war. Roleplaying games can send you places with little more than a dice and a few sentences from a poorly printed book you picked up at a convention. There’s something completely transporting about all of these acts as you give up the world around you and commit, through the use of the objects in front of you, to being somewhere else as well as someone else. Whether other games are planned out as magically teleporting as they are, or that’s just something transferred from the medium we’re working in, it’s very hard…

I bet there is a very cool adventure somewhere within the ideas of Holy Mountain Shaker, and I wish Luka had actually written it. The first ten or so pages are quite strong, setting up a conflict between native villagers, newly arrived industrial workers and a secret society devoted to the worship of a giant fish at the centre of the titular Holy Mountain. The exploration part of the adventure also has an interesting gimmick; traditional encounters rolls are replaced by Challenges, of which 4/10 are location specific and are usually just encounters or earthquakes. As you backtrack out of the adventure locations, they start to collapse from the earthquakes, making it almost feel like a living, changing world. Unfortunately, as soon as we actually get into the descriptions of…

Dungeons & Dragons fans have been clamouring for some first-rate heisting ever since it became clear that the otherwise rather wonderful Waterdeep: Dragon Heist campaign didn’t quite deliver on its grandiose title. Their long wait has finally been rewarded with a collection of over a dozen adventures dedicated to the noble art of the heist, each of which can either be run as a stand-alone quest or integrated into a sprawling campaign that sends the heroes rocketing across the multiverse. The book is the latest product of one of Wizards of the Coast’s regular releases of themed adventure anthologies and is quite possibly the strongest entry in the series since the nautical-minded Ghosts of Saltmarsh. As with its predecessors, the anthology has a fairly simple premise that can be used…

Modern life can feel like a bit of a rut; a dirty path flooded with the daily repetition of some decidedly non-glamourous tasks. A mundane reality of electricity bills, doing the washing up and getting the groceries in. Board games provide an easy and impermanent route to that escapism. Even at a basic level, games like Power Grid, Who Is Going To Do The Dishes? and Pop to the Shops can abstract the tediousness and responsibility of those grown-up challenges. More than that though, deep down? Everyone wants to go on an adventure. The reason Netflix binging is so entrancing is that ability to submerge yourself in another world – for hours on end, if you desire. However TV, and even books, will always fail to be truly immersive as…

When a game is great, you want to take it with you everywhere. So, it helps if it comes in a portable, compact size, and has components that can be used in situations where large flat table surfaces may not be readily available. Azul is a great game. There is just something so incredibly compelling about its tile drafting puzzle that forms a colourful pattern of chunky Moorish decorative tiles at the end of the game. However, it is not easily played on the go with its large box and components that require a stable surface. Azul Mini edition rectifies those issues. It is, as the name suggests, the same game in miniature, which can be packed in one clothed lockable bag and easily carried everywhere. The components not only…

Alcatraz prison has undergone a refurbishment: it is now fully automated, with AI sentinels patrolling the grounds of the island night and day and swarms of drones seeking out any prisoners who are not where they are supposed to be. The new, escape-proof security systems is about to go online, so a bunch of experts come to test it only get locked up on the prison island themselves. Oops! Naturally, they will need attempt to get out. To do this, they will need to navigate the corridors of the prison block to make it out, and then get inside other buildings on the island to find the necessary tools to escape, all while avoiding the roaming never-sleeping sentinels. Maybe they will get lucky and find ignition keys to the boat…

In the event of a breakout at the zoo, the last creature I‘d suspect would be the panda: an animal often too lazy to even procreate and ensure its species‘ longevity. Anyhow, in Pilfering Pandas, players will embody these monochrome musteloids, pilfering various snacks from the zoo‘s residents to appease the meerkat masterminds, whilst avoiding the unwitting zookeeper. Mechanically, this takes the form of rummy – expanded and generously made playable solo, cooperatively, or competitively. There‘s even an app iteration. Players will be creating sets (suits or numerical) with cards either drawn blind or taken from the communal ‘hideout’. Taking one card is generally risk-free, but there’s also the option to take any number of consecutive cards. Doing so opens up the possibilities for more sets (there’s no limit to…

Even if you somehow manage to put aside the absolutely cursed state of the Harry Potter franchise and its creator, Stupefy! is a confounding choice for a new version of Cash’n’Guns. This party game, first released in 2005, saw players imagine themselves as members of a gangster band who are attempting to split the loot among themselves but are finding that it’s far easier to shoot everyone and then take the treasure. So, everyone armed themselves with foam guns and prepared to bluff and shoot their way to riches. In Stupefy!, the same actions take place. Only now players are students of Hogwarts. They are practicing spells, namely Stupefy, and instead of competing for loot, they are trying to get the most house points. Most heartbreakingly, the foam guns are…

I‘m debating with myself whether it‘s a good thing for a game to have a theme that works well whilst being so amorphous as to be adaptable to literally any other theme. The answer‘s subjective I guess, but let‘s take a look at an example. Land of Clans is a two to four player game of building and/or stealing castles in the Scottish Highlands. Players will be taking turns playing cards to place counters out on the board and hopefully arranging them into particular patterns. Once a pattern is achieved, counters are replaced with the corresponding castle tile. Points from constructed castles will be awarded as soon as a player builds their fourth castle, with the player amassing the most points being the winner. Essentially, what we have is a…

The sun was beginning to set when Kannan’s sharp eyes spotted the beach, just a small patch of sand bordering jungle. “I think this could be the spot” he said, referring to a tattered map fragment obtained from the trader a few days ago. Captain Sofi Odessa took the glasses and nodded agreement. “Aye, you can see the entrance to the underground cave as well…but who are those folk gathered around the fire?” Rafa came bounding up on deck “lets get the boat launched and set off right away”. “Not so fast young man” grizzled sea dog Laurent joined in from his fishing station, “we need more fish, Mac and Kasumi are still in sick bay following that giant sand squid fight, Audrie’s asleep in the engine room and I’m…

In Garden Nation, the four magical fairy and gnome folk are vying for control of the garden. They don’t do this by waging war with one another but instead by using everyday objects such as coffee pots and bird feeds to build beautiful towers. Players, who for this game get to imagine themselves as a chief architect of their selected tribe, have seven randomly arranged garden terrains to build on and a starting population of their fellow fairy folk who are eager to inhabit their new homes. The players’ primary goal throughout the game would be to construct buildings in certain arrangements or on the terrains that are specified on the common project cards, on their private secret missions that are only revealed at the end of the game. Each…

Hidden role games are experiencing a little extra limelight recently, with the popularity of Blood on the Clocktower driving much of the hype. Unfortunately, just hiding one’s role from other players – or even yourself – doesn’t necessarily guarantee a good game. Let’s Call The Exorcist takes its theme from the Satanic Panic era of the 80s and 90s, with lo-fi cartoon imagery that nods to the era’s early dungeon RPG illustration. The point tokens are tiny little communion wafers, a cute touch. Cryptozoic have released two volumes of games in partnership with illustrator Stephen Rhodes, all sharing a similar retro paintjob. The basic concept underlying the game is this: Daddy has returned from some sort of archaeological excavation, and accidentally brought home cursed artifacts that have possessed the children.…

It’s 16th Century Ming Dynasty China and vases are kicking off. Boy, do folks love their decorative receptacles. But it’s not just porcelain and ceramics that are having a cultural moment. Chinese literature is exploding, with sprawling adventurous epics like Journey to the West and The Water Margin reaching a wide audience, there’s a surge of plays, scholars are writing about their travels round the country and artists are painting bold new works. If you can ride the tides of fickle public opinion, there’s clout and cash aplenty, waiting to be trousered. Players take the role of members of the creative gentry, toiling over great works in their studios while staving off the ever-present threat of ennui. Each turn you’ll place one of your three scholar pawns on one of…

Women a novel concept, but one that has been taken too far? This is one of the positions that you are (sort of) asked to take as one of the factions in this battle for the right to vote for the fairer sex. Votes For Women is a cube-shuffling war game that swaps the usual ‘kill the cubes, control the area’ for a metaphor of influencing each US state house to ratify the 19th amendment. This is a historical game, but not one that demands reading ahead, and one that is pitched for a more mass-market audience. The history pamphlet is slim, but there’s a bushel of historical props – facsimiles of real documents of the time – in the box that make engaging with the history easy and the…

Living Well Is The Best Revenge is a dice-rolling card-flipping game that’s part tableau builder, part dice placement game, and mostly an unfulfilled vibe. Just look at that name. Just look at that cover. You know why I picked this up for review – it looks really cool with the ‘French GCSE textbook meets Dungeons & Dragons’ art style of Steve Rhodes. It’s got one of those funny long names that should be the title of your favourite post-rock band’s third album. It promises dumb dice rolling and a bit of fun. The cards even kind of ‘transform’ from one side to the other when they’re unlocked – we all like a levelling up montage after all. But Living Well Is The Best Revenge is more of an unsatisfying compromise,…

Following Storm Weavers, this is another ‘book with bits’, a deluxe re-issue of a work published in 2013. This time the setting is a post-apocalyptic future with cyberpunk trimmings. Climate control has long been entrusted to a giant AI network named GAIA; a massive mistake (didn’t they watch the films?) with catastrophic consequences for the planet. It is now 2300, Earth is blanketed with snow and ice and GAIA is omnipotent and possibly ‘insane’. You are sitting in your local inn in Northern Italy in the company of Kyle Boche when an old news feed tells of a fallen meteorite known as the Heart of Volent, venerated by a cult since it purportedly holds massive psychic potential for someone in direct physical contact. You decide to travel to Du-en in…

Some solo game are hell. But few as much as this one where you’re scribbling your own personal underworld down like a free-flowing paper version of the seminal 90s dungeon making game, Dungeon Keeper. Here you grab a pencil, paper, and a character sheet, and start planning out your dungeon. Each turn you’ll roll some of the three dice to generate not only the next room you’re going to add to your drawing, but also the events that happen within. The goal of the game is to collect together souls of the damned that you have found exploring the underworld and then deposit them within machines of torture as you expand your realm. It’s surprisingly appealing to draw little devices of pain, like a teenager scribbling in the corners of…

It’s kind of astonishing that it’s taken nearly 50 years for Hollywood to finally get Dungeons & Dragons right. Especially when you consider that, to a large degree, the ’80s boom in fantasy cinema (from Conan the Barbarian to Krull to Willow) was sparked by the game’s phenomenal success. Yet, despite Gary Gygax’s own best efforts, all we got was a mildly embarrassing cartoon TV series about a gang of kids sucked into a D&D world via a magical fairground ride… Followed years later by a thankfully largely forgotten movie starring Jeremy Irons and Marlon Wayans, which landed with a splat at the turn of the century and pretty much got everything wrong. And now, at long, long last, we have Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves riding to the…

Time does not tend to be kind to board games. The emphasis on the newness — new games, new gimmicks, new gewgaws — makes efforts from the recent past look old before their time. Peer Sylvester’s 2007 game König von Siam harkens back to an era when a game’s sense of adornment originated from its design considerations, not its fancy clothing. Yes, the game cuts a drab image: a map of Siam bathing in muted colours with no apparent concern for clashing with the bright primary colours of the cubes that fill it. But its lack of pretension is in keeping with an elegantly minimal game that is both entrancing and edifying. Spanning eight rounds, König von Siam (or King of Siam) sees three historic factions battling for supremacy of…

Monsters are tearing apart Tokyo! But not to worry, because you’re one of them! You and a few friends will be battling it out to become the last monster standing in a big ol’ wrestling match. Pick your favourite monster based entirely on their good looks and set yourself up for a bash at one another. There’s two zones on the board – one is Tokyo city itself, the other simply ‘everywhere else’. This game is a ‘king of the hill’ competition, where you want to be in the city to gain extra points at the start of your turn. Winning is a matter of hitting 20 points total without getting wiped out (having your health reduced to zero from ten). Playing the game is a simple matter of rolling…

Rotten Tomatoes, the original crowd-sourced movie review site (probably now eaten by Letterboxd) offers up a plethora of opinions on everyone’s favourite and least favourite films. In the game you’ll be dished out a bunch of film cards which you’ll arrange in order of their tomato score. On your turn the player next to you will draw a card, read out the title, and you’ll have to guess where the score fits in your rogues gallery of films and their ratings. Get it right, get the card. Get ten, win the game. That’s it. It becomes a bit more fun when the wild cards come out and everyone has to guess the year or similar, but ultimately it’s a bit of a half-cooked game with little spark within it. In…

Much has been written arguing that the average player is interested not in tight design but in an experience. They don’t want to waste time learning lots of rules, they don’t want to spend much money, they don’t want to devote much space to storage, they just want a diverting pastime they can share with friends and family. This is bitter medicine indeed for those of us who appreciate slickly constructed puzzles, interesting choices, and, you know, at least the pretence that the game you’re playing wasn’t cobbled together in five minutes entirely from objects at arms’ length after the designer forgotten they were supposed to be pitching over Zoom. Indeed, as someone burdened with onerous duty of playing lots of games every week, Knot Game is a refreshing change…

Everdell is a brilliant game, with a luscious theme, but it does require a fair amount of concentration. For players with analysis paralysis, there can be a lot of thought required in making the optimum move, especially when trying to predict for future cards and the actions of other players. As a result, it’s not necessarily the best introduction for new players or children – which is why My Lil’ Everdell exists. Taking the over-an-hour concept of Everdell and condensing it into a half hour game has been done with care and attention. The world building of the bigger title is still here; but now you all play woodland animal kids, trying to put together a play city. My Lil’ Everdell is a worker placement game where you use your…

While Cards Against Humanity has many detractors, it is impossible to deny its success. Copycat games were sure to follow, with WatchMojo: A Super Fan Top 10 Party Game falling unapologetically into this category. For the uninitiated, WatchMojo is a popular website and app that has collated hundreds of Top 10 lists as videos in categories such as TV, music, video games, and comics. What a way to make a living. At this point, I expect many of you have already put two and two together to get generic party game. For the rest, in the box you’ll find 400 cards, game board, and dry erase marker. A player (‘the Ranker’) flips one of the 100 Lists cards, reads it out, and the other players choose one from their hand…

This month we’re off to Southeast Asia to visit the island country of Singapore. Being a densely populated and vastly multicultural country, Singapore would seem to be prime territory for a rich tabletop scene, and judging by the number of games cafes and stores, this seems to be a fair summation. Within the Singapore capital alone, hobbyists can freely flit between large stores such as Games@Pi, and cafes including King and the Pawn, The Mind Cafe, and Settlers Cafe. Whilst the aforementioned stores can be easily found amidst the streets and malls of Singapore City, it’s likely that anyone heading south of Chinatown may (or may not!) come across the unassuming Experience Point games club. Behind its plain door, visitors will initially find themselves in what appears to be just…

Gambling is a thorny subject in gaming, especially when it comes to the kind of designer or hobby board games, we spend a lot of our time covering at the magazine. It both feels a bit dirty if you end up playing with real money, and somewhat pointless when you don’t. As a mechanic within other games we’re happy to put our resources on the line, but that’s usually paired with a choice we’ve made – rather than throwing us into a classic gambling game instead. Antematter is a game of sci-fi poker. You know when the space-faring heroes wander in to a dive bar, and after everyone’s turned around to glare, they go back to some sort of high stakes card game? This is it. Sort of. Players set…

Some board games have a strong table presence, Forests of Pangaia makes a table statement. It’s not necessarily a moralising one but having played this game composed of beautiful sustainably sourced stackable wooden trees, it is hard not to leave the table in awe of the beauty of the forests and thinking of just how much human intervention disrupts the natural dance of growth and decay. The gameplay strongly links into that tree growth cycle and adds a little bit of magic to it. As players, you control the forest spirits, fantastical creatures that travel around the gridded terrain of four biomes, represented by snow, wind, sun and rain, to plant seeds. Through the subsequent rounds of the game, these seeds would come to grow into trees, which can also…

Next time you pay a visit to The Range, try to tear yourself away from the prospect of a new lightbulb, toilet brush, or competitively priced sofa, and instead divert your attention to the games section: You might be surprised. Sure, there’s no shortage of typical family fare here, but the home, leisure, and garden superstore has also started distributing titles from Finnish publisher Tactic Games. Elsewhere in this issue you’ll find Tactic’s light and strategic Land of Clans, but right now we’ll be taking a look at London 1892; one of several games from their Crime Scene series. Designed by Richard Heayes with writing by Arttu Tuominen, London 1892 is a narrative, mystery/puzzle game: Think Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective crossed with the EXIT games. Together, players assume the role…

I expect many will be drawn toward Nicodemus thanks to the steam punk art style which harks directly back to previous Cathala/Sirieix game, Imaginarium. That received pretty average reviews on release back in 2018 but must’ve done well enough for publisher Bombyx to squeeze a few more shekels out of the franchise with a two-player version. Which brings us back to Nicodemus. I’ll waste no further time on the theme, as beyond the unusual steampunk art style it is non existent in gameplay terms. You’re either going to love or hate the style and it is worth noting the game is very nicely produced. But then it needs to be with a £35 price tag for a small box game, which seems faintly ridiculous when you look at what you…

Hello! Would you mind introducing yourself to our readers? Who are you and what are you known for? I am Tory Brown, the designer of Votes for Women. I am a first time game designer and in my day job I’m a political communications strategist for America’s largest labour union. I believe deeply in the power of social movements to create a more just world and I’m inspired by stories of people who, with all their flaws and mistakes, still managed to make the world a better place. What was the inspiration for making the game? What was that initial spark? The first inkling for the game came when I read an article in 2019 about plans to celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment’s passage. I knew the basics…

Imagine, some four or five millennia ago, not far from the banks of the Tigris, a merchant and some local bureaucrat sitting down in the shade of a storehouse to play a game. Maybe the board is carved out of wood, maybe it’s etched into the dirt or rock. The playing pieces might be individually-sculpted dogs or pigs, or just pebbles. Their act of play, this familiar ritual which anyone today – despite colossal changes across almost every other domain of human life – would instantly recognise and comprehend, might just look like an age-old exercise in destressing and goofing off. With the important work of trade out of the way, the pottery or grain or cattle properly accounted for, the tithe paid or the deal agreed upon, these two…

If Old School Essentials is the ‘Classic-D&D but for cool kids’ game, then this might as well be bundled up as a starter set. With art by Nate Treme and the promise of both a dungeon to explore and a dragon to die to, this is a great place to start with old-school roleplaying. The writing is terse, but flavourful – and most importantly, there’s loads of jokes. You might be mucking about with teleporters, getting some weird environmental red herrings from the encounter table, or just having to deal with swimming monkeys. As most dungeon delves require navigational choices, each passage comes with a bit of whiff of what’s ahead. Ideal for leading players by the nose. Nate’s artwork is the classic slightly goofy and absolutely charming work we’re…

It’s a witch hunt, literally. Whether your players actually find a witch* (spoiler) and put them to trial is another matter, there’s a lot of weird stuff happening in the town, and you’ve only got a few weeks to work out who you’re putting on the pyre. This is another cutting-edge narrative game from Luka Rejec. The game claims to be ‘novella-length’, which suggests something about its literary goals (after all, a lot of RPGs are that length without making the comparison). Your players have four weeks to work out who is the witch by talking to the huge cast of NPCs (30 or so, each with a page of their attitudes, secrets and life). Each of these is entangle and connected with one another in a way that suggests…

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