Innehållsförteckning för Issue 80 från Tabletop Gaming

NOW PLAYING… Alchemists: The King’s Golem Expansion It might be trite to describe this job as a dream come true, but it is. Not just the dream of a contributor for three years, wishing they could do this full-time, or the dream of a fresh graduate, employed in the Sisyphean job of writing marketing copy. This is the dream of a kid clutching a copy of Battleship on the bus home, wishing he could always spend his time being excited about new games. In my first month I’ve been privy to exclusive information about new and upcoming card games, attended the UK’s biggest tabletop gaming convention where I was inundated with countless lovely people wanting to chat, all the while spending my evenings and weekends experiencing a multitude of games,…

Choosing a favourite game should be hard work, but for me, it’s not. So many of the games I have played and loved have been through my brief time at TTG. Readers might have a few ideas as to what my favourite game might be: I’ve banged on about liking Carcassonne because it was my entrance into the hobby, or MÖRK BORG because it’s the game that made roleplaying games click for me, or The King Is Dead because it’s perfect. But I’ve chosen an imperfect game instead. One knotted with history, chance and occasionally, a completely unfair twist. That’s right, it’s Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. The very concept of the game, one dredged from Cole Werhle’s experience of playing…

Sometimes you don’t have anyone to play games with. It’s not that you don’t have friends - I can already tell that you are a lovely person who is fun to be around - it’s just that you don’t have someone available at this particular moment in time. We’ve all been there. You send a few messages out but no one is free tonight. “I can do Tuesday!” comes back, but that’s no good; today is Wednesday. Sure, you could find something else to keep you entertained, but that won’t quite scratch the itch. Covering a tabletop with colourful cardboard is its own reward, but no-one is free to share that joy with you. Now, solo games exist, but maybe you don’t own any? It’s hard to justify sometimes when…

Designer: Florian Fay | Publisher: Sorry We Are French Making horror fun is a particularly difficult challenge for tabletop games. Roleplaying has the benefit of a GM slowly revealing every terrifying moment, who likely volunteered to be the one conjuring the tale of woe. When instead you demand everyone to give their best Goosebumps pitch all at once, it’s a sure-fire way to misery of a much less enjoyable kind. Greenville 1989 tries its best to fuse association/deduction games like Dixit with more horrifying theming, but ends up being an over demanding game of improv. Each player is lost in their own VHS-era story, trying to guide each other home (collect four cards) before anyone is lost (makes too many wrong guesses.) Each turn one player is the Guide, whilst…

Designer: Jennifer Everett | Publisher: Skybound Tabletop With such an uninspiring name, Whine Night had an uphill battle ahead of it. Firstly, puns are terrible. Secondly, does anyone really use the term “Wine Night?” If not, then it’s an unnecessary pun, especially for a concept people don’t even use? Thirdly, whining is irritating. I’m constantly asking my children to stop whining, so a game invoking it as a central game mechanic is a dangerous choice. Unfortunately Whine Night absolute fulfils the low expectations it casts. The entire game is literally read a card, whine about the question on it, vote who had the “best” whine. Now, there are some great prompt chat games. Billionaire Banshee and Champions of the Wild have caused impassioned arguments and waves of uncontrollable laughter in…

Designer: Tim Pinder | Publisher: IT I, like many people, enjoyed the original Sub Terra. It’s a cooperative game about navigating a claustrophobic, hazardous cave complex, while being stalked by some terrifying underground predator. The map is generated by drawing tiles as you move from section to section until you eventually find a way to escape. Not everyone will survive, but one of the game’s appeals is its variety of levels of victory, leading to some nail-biting finishes, where most of the party made it out, aside from one left to perish in the darkness. Sub Terra II transposes the action from dank caverns to ancient ruins, changing the antagonist from a beast to an erupting volcano. You’re hunting for a precious artifact while the volcano gets ready to…

Designer: Dave Beck | Publisher: Paverson Games Look, whisky is horrible. We all know it. People who pretend to like it are just trying to win cool points with some bloke with a huge beard. And yet, the art of fermenting sugars, carefully aging them in a barrel and decanting into tastefully designed bottles? I’ll admit I see the attraction. In Distilled, you compete with your friends to make whiskies, gins and other high-end spirits, with the winner being whoever earns the most spirit points. The brain cruncher here is that you start with nowhere near enough resources to do what you want. As the seven years of the game progress, you slowly become richer, building your distillery until finally, you’ll have enough to enact all those plans you have……

Designer: Scott Almes | Publisher: Gamelyn Games Tiny Epic Vikings is Gamelyn Games latest in the long-running series, but considering its popular theme you’d be forgiven for thinking it already existed. Indeed, this feeling of familiarity may linger even after opening the box, as Tiny Epic Vikings certainly shares some DNA with Eric Lang’s classic Blood Rage. Thankfully this isn’t a shrunken imitation, as there’s much more crammed into this tiny box than you’d expect. In this card drafting and area majority game, players will be leading a whole host of Vikings through three eras, as they attempt to exert their influence across an icy archipelago. Through harvesting, exploration, building and battle, each players’ clan will gain (or lose) runes associated with particular gods, said runes being worth points depending…

Designer: Friedemann Friese | Publisher: 2F-Spiele Friendmann Friese continues his long-standing tradition of starting his board games names with “F,” with his newest creation, Findorff. Through it, players are teleported to a district of Findorff in Bremen, Germany (Friese’s hometown). Once a humble bog until Jürgen Christian Findorff (after whom the district takes its name) drained it, extracting the peat. This lead to an economic and population boom, with massive construction projects throughout the district, boosted by railroads and canal routes. Players oversee the building of now historic structures, turning the board from pastel muted colours into a vibrant cityscape, filled with such wonders as a train station, peat skipper shelter, chair pipes factory and more. To do that, players will use a wide range of gaming mechanisms like engine…

Designer: 317 Games | Publisher: Trick or Treat Studios Hats off to the designers, adapting a point-and-click adventure game to tabletop couldn’t be easy. Most video games that receive a tabletop adaptation often fall into the adventure or strategy categories, like Dark Souls or Civilization, games where the theme is easy to replicate in cardboard. Trying to capture the sensation of plunging through a dungeon, rusty key and torch in hand, whilst also making it a multiplayer experience, is a difficult challenge that 317 Games have (mostly) pulled off well. If you never played the NES original or the 2014 remake passed you by, Shadowgate is a grimdark fantasy series where you play as a destined hero, struggling against numerous monsters, death traps and puzzles. In Shadowgate: The Living Castle,…

POKÉMON GETS ANOTHER CHARIZARD This month the Pokémon Company international announced the latest set for the Pokémon TCG: Obsidian Flames. This is the third expansion in the Scarlet & Violet block and, following the tradition from the previous two blocks, will feature Charizard as the star Pokémon. The big change in Obsidian Flames is to be the introduction of type-shifted Tera Pokémon EX. These will be like most EX cards, except the Pokémon will have a different type than normal. Already announced are the Fire-type Charizard appearing as Darkness and the typically Fighting-type Tyranitar appearing as Lightning. The set has been announced with an August 11th release date, coincidentally the same day that the Pokémon TCG World Championships begins in Yokohama, Japan (no, the set will not be legal for…

ASTEROID DICE This game was already on our radar when we were sent a preview copy of the game to make a promotional video with, but it was my first time playing it and it is everything I love about silly dexterity games. In Asteroid Dice players are competing to gather the most cards by grabbing foam dice and aiming to roll the biggest numbers you can. Everyone starts with the same deck of seven cards, five representing the different dice of doom, with two special cards for extra spice. Everyone starts a round by choosing one of their cards and playing it face down. On a countdown everyone reveals their card, grabbing the die that matches it from the table. If two or more people picked the same die…

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to gather your friends and family for a fantastic word association game that pits two teams against each other as rival spy organizations. There’s been a security breach and the special codenames for your team’s secret agents have been muddled in with a bunch of your opponent’s ones, as well as some random false flags and a terrifying assassin. Only one person on each team (known as ‘The Spymaster’) knows exactly who’s who from the twenty-five possible options, but they’re not allowed to say any of the actual words face-up on the table. It’s their job to get the rest of their teammates to successfully deduce which of the codenames out relate to their colour, all the while avoiding any opposing…

Designer: Adam E. Daulton Publisher: Kids Table Board Games I’m not particularly green fingered, if I’m honest. My last attempt to grow anything involved chilli plants and, well, let’s just say that after spending £50 on the project and most of a year’s hard work, there were less than fifty grams of chillies to show for my effort. And they weren’t even very spicy! I’m much more excited about fictitious plant life, especially when it comes bedded in such a beautiful package. The core of the game involves laying brightly coloured patch tiles onto the table. These tiles could easily just have been hexagons, but instead these are just slightly curved and pointed, creating a very appealing visual flourish, one that still tessellates beautifully whilst gaining an organic overtone. There…

Designer: Fantasy Flight Games & Hourglass Escapes | Publisher: Tyler Stuart Back in the late 90s-early 2000s, there was a slew of point and click games like Myst, that challenged players with clever puzzles requiring a keen intellect and an eye for detail. In the years since he genre has petered out of mainstream interest, replaced by the high action thrills of Call of Duty, or Peggle. The genre has never completely died, with a dedicated fanbase keeping the genre alive, with countless independent designers doing their best to resurrect interest. Here enters The Road To Innsmouth, a point and click adventure game with heavy digital elements that also uses physical components like a Cthulhu statue, a nice map of Innsmouth and a hole-punched bus ticket. The plot is fairly…

Designer: Exploding Kittens | Publisher: Exploding Kittens Like most of Exploding Kitten’s titles, I’m A Little Crabby is easy to explain and even easier to play. Perfect for young children, drunk people, or your boardgame-resistant grandparents who attest that they’re all far too complicated for them. In this game, you’re trying to collect four of the same crabs in your hand, then give your teammate the agreed upon secret signal so that they will shout the name of the game, winning you both a crab token. The difficulty is supposed to be that your opponents are watching you carefully, so they can accuse you of being “A Little Crabby” to steal points, forcing you and your teammate to try and use fake signals to lure your opponents into false accusations.…

Designer: Tanner Simmons | Publisher: Kosmos The table is hushed. Two agents are stacked with intel. I look between Agent C and Agent J, unsure which is the insider. Agent C kept a steely silence as the mission is declared. Agent J stared me dead in the eyes. Four words: “I like Peanut Butter.” My mind unravels. This is the espionage trick-taking delight, known as Inside Job. Two to five players are dealt out a hidden role. Most are agents, whose mission is to successfully meet a specific requirement each turn (better known as a ‘trick’) such as “the second and third cards must have matching suits.” Regardless if the mission is successful or not, whoever wins the trick takes an intel token. One player is the Insider, secretly looking…

Designer: Didier Dincher and Frank Garibaldi | Publisher: Capsicum Games Fighters of the Pacific is that rare design which captures the feel of its setting with broad simulative strokes, yet never strays from a very streamlined and simple ruleset. It’s a beautifully realised product despite being rather modest in components and physical structure, with a lot going on here beyond its clean facade. The game sets two players in a head-to-head battle for control over the Pacific Ocean in World War II. One player controls the Japanese forces, including the iconic Zero planes and aircraft carrier Akagi, whilst the other manages the U.S. fleet, consisting of F2A Buffaloes and ships such as the USS Yorktown. Each army is varied with three types of aircraft on either side, as well as…

Designer: Inka and Markus Brand | Publisher: Plan B Games Where were you in 2011? Binge-watching Game of Thrones series one? Bidding Harry Potter farewell at the cinema? Throwing shoes at the radio whenever Moves Like Jagger came on? More importantly, what were you playing? Although not a vintage year, 2011 did manage some memorable releases: Castles of Burgundy, King of Tokyo and War of the Ring Second Edition to name a few. Then there was Village: a worker placement title with strands of area control and resource management. Applauded at the time, it went onto collect both the Deutscher Spiele Preis and Spiel des Jahres. Inevitably, a regular output of expansion packs followed until the tumbleweeds rolled in and the village fell silent. Now, almost ten years on from…

My dad grew up with the tales of riddles, heroics and magical jewellery, passing that love onto me through audiobook cassettes played on long car journeys, both there and back again. Coming of age at the time when the films first hit cinemas, I won’t ever forget spending New Year’s Eve 2003 enraptured by The Return of the King. The tales of Middle-Earth have constantly been retold and adapted through every conceivable medium, with each team of artists and designers putting their own take on this seminal work of 20th century fantasy literature. With the formal announcement of Universes Beyond in 2021, Lord of the Rings was one of the first properties confirmed to be getting the Magic: The Gathering treatment, but it was only later on that this was…

Designer: Will Shick (Lead Game Designer) | Publisher: Atomic Mass Games General Anakin Skywalker leaps from the ground and onto the rusty gantry, feeling it tremble beneath his feet. He sweeps his lightsaber through the air, the hum cutting out the noise of battle below. The blow severs the head from a nearby Battle Droid, which falls to the gantry with a loud clank. Anakin quickly summons the Force and pushes the remaining Battle Droids off the gantry. “I hate this jooooooobbbbb…” whines one droid as it falls to the ground below. Finally, Anakin uses the Force once more to leap to a higher platform where the true threat lurks: Lord Maul. This is Anakin’s final chance to steal the secret plans and return victorious to the Galactic Republic, but first,…

You said… Attending seminars about varied topics like “The Social Good of Gaming” and “Accessibility and Gaming.” It’s so huge to see how many in the gaming scene are wanting to do better. Adam Best Being surrounded by fellow gamers in the Open Gaming space, everyone completely immersed in the hobby. Nothing beats it. Dave Griffiths Playing in Dungeon Crawl Classics games with all the fantastically energetic dungeon masters. Over the weekend I was a Jammer (Hypeman), an occultist, a thief and a wizard. I can’t decide which was my favourite! Staceface Sanderson So great to see Wizards of the Coast provide walk-up D&D Games, including (to our surprise) a kids zone. Our daughter played three sessions with super simplified rules and amazing kid-friendly DMs. She LOVED it! Will Doyle…

DIE RPG We met with comic book writer and game designer Kieron Gillen to discuss adapting their award-winning graphic novel into a hotly anticipated roleplaying system PLUS! Reviews of The Great Wall, Sagrada: Artisans, Big Boss and so much more BUY SINGLE ISSUE COPIES FROM www.ttgami.ng/single-issue SO YOU DON’T MISS OUT!…

Here’s a quick trivia question: True or false, there are more possible combinations of moves in a chess game than there are atoms in the universe?* Now, you may well have an answer and if I were asking you in person, I’m sure you’d plump for one or the other. But what if I asked how confident you are with your answer? Would you say very confident? Pretty confident? You think it’s definitely possible? Maye not very confident at all? How would you estimate and weigh your confidence level? Let’s take it one stage further: What if I asked you to now imagine you could stake an amount of money on your answer. If you’re correct, you double your money, but you lose it all if you’re wrong. How much…

Brought to you by Release date: 1978 Publisher: MB Games Still Available New?: Yes! Second hand: Car Boot Classic Price: £10 Hello! Can you introduce yourself to our readers? Hi! I’m Nicola, I’m the Production Manager for all things gaming at Warner’s Group with TTG and MWG. What game have you found in your attic? I found the original copy of Yahtzee from my childhood days. This version was published by MB Games back in 1978, although a quick Google tells me it was originally published in 1956! The box even had our original marked scorecards from when my parents, brother and I played it 30 odd years ago! Whose was it? Who bought it for you? My parents bought this in a toy shop in Lincoln in 1983. We originally gave…

Designer: Jonathon Chaffer | Publisher: Grand Gamers Guild The eighteen-card game format has been around for about a decade now, typically associated with independent designers and the print-and-play scene. With Jonathon Chaffer’s Holiday Hijinks series, Grand Gamers Guild have given the format a touch of polish, presenting audiences with seven ultra-compact escape room style games, with The Cupid Crisis being number four in the series. After being locked in a romantic restaurant, players will embark on their escape with a handful of initial puzzles and a web-based app for entering answers. The game progresses simply: figure out the puzzle, enter an answer, then flip over the next card as indicated by the app. Sometimes you’ll have multiple puzzles on the go, making this palm sized game feel more expansive than…

Designer: Haakon Hoel Gaarder | Publisher: Sinister Fish Games This game feels like it was designed to ensnare me. On my very first day in the office at TTG HQ, I sat down at my work station to this my predecessor’s last unopened present from a publisher. Inside was Moon, a sci-fi drafting and card tableau game for 1-5 players (yes, a solo mode for a drafting game that’s also fun!) where across three eras of play they will build their lunar settlement, adding production sites which fuel future purchases and structure cards which earn points. Points can be earned by building structures worth a fixed number of hearts, gathering or investing specific resources to feed into special structures or by obtaining flag rewards. Structures can have flags from five…

Designer: Brandt Brinkerhoff | Publisher: Lucky Duck Games Oros is a 1-4 player game of sliding tiles and raising islands out of the ocean. You play as demigods who each seek to expand their portfolio of followers, becoming more powerful and ultimately ascending to dominance. The action takes place both on your very inviting player board and the central grid where islands shift, collide and rise ever higher. Your player board has a bunch of actions to pick from, which are upgraded significantly as the game progresses. Using these actions you can construct monoliths, shrines and temples on the central grid, as well as acquiring new followers. Oros combines a light engine-builder with a light spatial puzzle. Whenever sections of island collide, they’ll rise a little farther out of the…

Designer: Matúš Kotry | Publisher: Czech Games Edition I don’t think I’ve ever played anything quite like Deal with the Devil. It’s certainly the only game I’ve seen with a player count of “4 Exactly” on the box. In this game player runs a kingdom in the Dark Ages. Two of you are puny mortals, one player is a cultist and the other The Devil. Everyone has the same goal: to build the biggest and best kingdom. However, the Devil also has a secondary aim to steal as many pieces of soul as possible. The game takes place over five rounds, each including opportunities to gain resources, construct buildings and make deals. This mostly involves the kind of engine-building, victory-point hunting seen in many Euro games. The deals are where…

Designer: Francisco Nepitello | Publisher: Free League The relationship between The Lord of the Rings and Dungeons & Dragons has always been messier than a hobbit’s breakfast, with legal tussles and ‘homages’ that stretch back to the 1970s. Swedish publisher Free League aims to smooth over the cracks, blending its highly-rated One Ring system with the widespread popularity of the D&D 5e ruleset. This supplement book revolves around a set of bolt-on rules, converting a traditional 5e game to something a bit more Tolkien-like, though notably still requiring the core rulebooks to make the most of it. Many of these are stripped directly from the pages of One Ring, such as the Fellowship system which provides bonuses based on how well the party is meshing. There are also detailed instructions…

Designer: Fabio Cury, Michael Shinall | Publisher: CMON Global Limited Say Zombicide and your mind immediately paints a picture: on the tabletop is the map composed of large square tiles, heroes standing back-to-back with weapons raised high, exploring the ruined locale whilst surrounded by swarms of zombies. As you get rid of one horde, sweeping the miniatures off the board, more monsters join the fray and all you can think of is: ‘Please don’t eat my brains!’ Marvel Zombies flips the script. You’re still standing in the centre of the map back-to-back with your comrades in arms, but now you are thinking: ‘Please, may I eat your brains?’ You are a zombie now. And not just any zombie mind; you are the famous superheroes turned super-zombies. Tony Stark may still…