Innehållsförteckning för Issue 81 från Tabletop Gaming

NOW PLAYING… Archeos Society I was curious how long it would take before gave my first “Must Play” recommendation as editor. I definitely didn’t think I’d be awarding two in the same magazine. I find it very hard to justify any game as a “Must Play,” possibly because gaming is already a hobby with an abundance of classics in constant print, that telling people to add another game to their ever-expanding list of titles can feel like a burden. But it’s also that struggle to keep up with the constant release cycle which makes the “Must Play” award so important. To shine a light on those truly incredible games, the ones that don’t just excite you at the table but stay with you, playing out in your mind and making…

Q. Dear Ben, Readers, I married him! My Dr Jekyll! You would never meet a man as mild mannered as my Billy. Now, without wanting to fall into the territory of TMI, I must admit that I get rather hot under the collar when a man exhibits timidity. This is the first time I have admitted this and the liberation is exhilarating! So, you can imagine how concerned I was when my little Billy, my Dr. Jekyll, swilled a magic potion and transformed into Mr. Hyde! The potion in question? Board Games! He had never asked to play in my weekly group before, but when he evinced a curiosity, I told him he could come along. What a frightful transformation! Every time he was outbid in Keyflower his face would…

The classics keep on coming as the world around us went through its own major changes, both good and bad. The Panmunjom Declaration was signed between North and South Korea, finally seeing an official end to the Korean War, ‘The Camp Fire’ incident in California, USA was the state’s deadliest wildfire in history, with over 80 deaths and $16.65 billion in damages and costs, whilst on the silver screen Black Panther became the most successful film by an African-American director, causing a wave of celebrating black culture worldwide and becoming the first superhero film to be nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award. The year also saw some real gamechangers for tabletop gaming, found out what as we look at 2018! BRASS BIRMINGHAM When we started this little project of…

Designer: Evgeny Petrov | Publisher: Alley Cat Games I hate to be the one to break this to you, but the Roman Empire has fallen. Hooray! Too many people focus on the loss of a long-standing culture and collapse of a civilised society into barbarism, when instead they could be divvying up those tasty vineyards and deciding who swiped the coolest stuff. Rome in a Day proves that, whilst it may have taken longer than 24 hours to build, it’ll take you less than 30 minutes to dice and disseminate. Over four rounds, players will create a new land by grafting together Roman remnants into the optimal, point-producing position. Everyone starts with the same stack of 20 lands, which are shuffled and revealed over the game, with five new tiles…

Designer: Frédéric Henry and Corey Konieczka | Publisher: Zygomatic If you haven’t played Timeline, why not? We now have over a decade of chronological culture collating, with pretty much every possible genre of trivia category available. If you have played Timeline, possibly to death, do you want a fresh challenge to pleasantly infuriate your friends? Timeline Twist takes the core concept of arranging events and inventions in order of appearance and turns it into a co-operative challenge. Each player has four cards and will constantly draw back up to four from a deck of 64 cards (36 cards are always randomly removed to ensure you can’t perfectly memorize a deck.) On your turn, you choose any one of your cards and, rather than trying to place it correctly, you immediately…

Designer: Tim Sharville, Paul Sharville and Russ Law | Publisher: Gunpowder Studios A little giggle burbles like a stream across the table from me, as slowly, purposefully, I watch carrot after carrot clatter to the table, as my rabbit approaches the dark oblivion that just swallowed them whole. A much louder clatter follows, accompanied with even louder giggling. I can’t help but crack a smile as I lose the game. Rabbito, ‘a game for pushy rabbits,’ pits up to four players in the pursuit of orange root vegetables, which can only be collected by gently shoving them down various rabbit holes on the raised game board. Players start the turn by rolling the red and white dice, which will provide the co-ordinates to place a randomly drawn tile. Most of…

Designer: Aron Midhall, Elon Midhall, Assar Pettersson | Publisher: Studio Midhall It is a story as old as time: the hunter prowling the forest seeking their prey, closely following its tracks, ready to strike that final blow. Beast, a hidden movement ‘one versus all’ game, capitalises on this simple premise and adds plenty of whimsy. One player is The Beast, choosing a fabled creature like Fangrir the great wolf or the dragon-like Raaga. They are sneaking through the forests and villages, munching on sheep or boar to gain enough strength to eventually attack the villages, or even the hunters themselves. This won’t be easy, as said hunters are controlled by all other players, each with their unique abilities, all working together to take The Beast down. Beast incorporates many staples…

Designer: Jack Caesar, Alessio Cavatore, William Burgos | Publisher: Draco Studios Dragonbond - The Lords of Vaala is a visual spectacle in a box. It starts with the box cover, which has some of the most sumptuous art that I’ve seen in some time. This continues as you open the box, a set of lovely sculpted miniatures as well as an array of imaginative card art and comfortingly sized tokens. Dragonbond is an area control game at heart, which plays with four characters (two generals and two dragons) regardless of the player count (even allowing for solo play), using ‘faceless players’ with basic AI rules, so the board is always busy every time you play. Play revolves around a programmable action deck, where players decide what they are doing by…

Designer: Daryl Andrews & Adrian Adamescu | Publisher: Floodgate Games It’s always tricky to review anything where spoilers are an issue and Sagrada Artisans is no exception. You’ll have to forgive me for being vague as I attempt to keep the mystery, but rest assured that I’ve played the whole campaign and thoroughly enjoyed it. I wasn’t overly enamoured with the original Sagrada dice game when it released. It arrived at an unfortunate time, as Azul was blowing the abstract gaming world away and had totally won me over. Plus, I took an irrational dislike to the tiny dice. It was a solid puzzler that didn’t have quite enough going on to make it onto my shelves. Anyone familiar with the original Sagrada will be on familia ground here. Players…

Designer: Tristan Hall | Publisher: Hall or Nothing Productions If you’ve avoided historical wargames for fear of punching out a thousand cardboard squares or trying to wrap your head around titanic rulebooks, it’s worth knowing that they’re not all hex-and-counter affairs.1815: Scum of the Earth is living proof. If the game’s combination of “Year + Odd Title” seems familiar, that’s because designer Tristan Hall previously unleashed the Must-Play hits 1066: Tears to Many Mothers and 1565: St Elmo’s Pay on the world. 250 years have passed since the last game (in historical terms at least), with 1815 picking up the baton and keeping the high pace. The basic premise remains unchanged: Build a hand of cards from your personal deck (this is the Battle of Waterloo, so you’ll be playing…

Designer: Shreesh Bhat | Publisher: Pandasaurus Maybe I’m finely attuned to the zeitgeist, or perhaps I’m just a sucker for trends, but it feels like trick-takers are having a moment right now. After years of sitting way down the pecking order beneath flashier, big-box euros and miniature-heavy thematic titles, gamers seem to have collectively decided ‘oh yeah, these are a thing’ and returned to them with, if not rabid enthusiasm, then certainly affection. In Aurum, you and up to three other alchemists are working to transmute base metals – represented by five card suits – into gold. There are slightly varied rules depending on whether you are playing a threeor four-player game, with both versions having feeling quite different without either feeling like a lesser or compromised version of the…

Designer: Ignacy Trzewiczek | Publisher: Portal Games 51st State is a game from the past, set in the future, within a somewhat contemporarily relevant world ravaged by sentient AI-induced civil war. In this crowdfunded Ultimate Edition, thirteen years of expansions have been compiled within a tidy insert, giving fans and newcomers an exhaustive toy-box of content. But does Ignacy Trzewiczek’s expansive card game still feel as fresh as it once did? Set in Portal Games’ Neuroshima universe, 51st State is a strategic hand-management game pitting up to four rival factions vying for power amidst the ruins of a fallen United States. With multi-use cards facilitating drafting, resource management and worker placement, players will build the country anew; constructing locations, establishing trade deals and scavenging areas for valuable resources. The game…

Designer: Keiron Gillen & Stephanie Hans | Publisher: Rowan, Rook & Decard A quick caveat: DIE RPG is based off the eponymous comic series. In fact, the game is more than simply “based on” the comics: at points it’s hard to see where one ends and the other begins. As a result, there’s a few things you need to know about the series in order to get the most out of the RPG, so be warned that “spoilers” lie ahead. If you are planning on reading DIE one day, I would advise you stop here and read the comics first. You won’t regret it - they are worth the investment in time. The basic concept of DIE RPG is you roleplay a group of teenagers (and later adults) disappearing into…

Designer: Craig Duffy | Publisher: LunarShadow Designs Signal To Noise is a two player RPG that tracks the unstoppable degradation of an intergalactic relationship. It models the impacts of time, distance and the inevitable corruption of the messages sent to each other which interstellar communication would cause. The game’s setting is based on a common sci-fi concept: humanity is travelling to the stars, using generation ships technology to travel the long distances. This transit to Tau Ceti will take hundreds of years, with ships on a one-way journey - one that will encompass many lifetimes. Signal To Noise explores the fragile links between those explorers and the people they leave behind. Set in LunarShadow’s Dyson Eclipse space opera setting, it is one of many planned standalone games set in a…

Designer: Alex Davy, Travis Severance, Nicholas Yu | Publisher: Wizkids This is a confusing product. Designed as a “party vs party” miniatures skirmish game where adventures battle it out right in the middle of an active dungeon, Onslaught is intended to compete with genre standouts such as Warhammer Underworlds, Aristeia and Marvel: Crisis Protocol, but rarely does it offer anything to make itself stand out. Whilst Wizkids has ensured a launch line-up of additional factions with plans to offer organised play support, those factions (and even this ‘starter set’) are all so ruddy expensive, much more so than its main competitors. Most peculiarly, it’s launched only a couple months prior to another similar competing D&D skirmish design, Trials of Tempus, which is being produced by the very same publisher. All…

As it’s my first time writing The Soloist, I figured looking back on my very first solo gaming experience would be a good way to establish my experiences. Funnily enough, this didn’t come about due to the COVID. Way back before my magazine writing days, I was a semi-employed Games Master for escape rooms (the title makes the role sound significantly more glamourous than it was) which meant I was busy evenings and weekends, but often home alone during the day. Having exhausted digital streaming libraries and needing to give my eyes a sorely earned screen break, I looked over my upper shelves that held my board game collection. It had changed very little since it was last heavily used at university, with many games designed for larger groups like…

Designer: Torben Ratzlaff | Publisher: Pandasaurus Cosy, but deadly. Such are the numerous inlets of the Nordic coast and such is Beacon Patrol, a co-operative game for 1-4 players that at first glance looks so gentle and undemanding, that you might be tempted to drift into a tea-addled stupor, half-concentrating as you enjoy the blue skies and softly lapping waves. If you do that, you are going to get murdered. Beacon Patrol has your table working together to map the Nordic coastline, noting the positions of unstaffed lighthouses, buoys, offshore wind turbines and more. You do this by drawing and laying tiles, then moving the little wooden token representing your boat into the new area. At the end of the game, you score points for each tile that is surrounded…

Designer: Ryan Boucher | Publisher: Seabrook Studios 18 Holes is a hand-management game which sees up to five players drafting a hand of golf clubs, then using them to navigate their way around each hole of a course. Along the way, players will have to deal with various hazards (namely trees, bunkers, and lakes) by choosing their clubs wisely. Whoever has amassed the most points after the eighteenth hole is officially the best at golf. But is this golf? No, not really. To be fair, the rulebook does include some flavour text justifying some of the game’s more questionable mechanics, which essentially boils down to a convoluted condemnation of corporate golf club manufacturers, rendering the game too easy through homing technology and ‘super-drivers’. This may be groan-inducing to purists, but…

Designer: Jessica Metheringham & Mill Goble | Publisher: Dissent Games I’m pretty sure there is a generation of children who, like me, saw the film Ghostbusters when it appeared at the cinema and were wonderfully traumatised within the first fifteen minutes thanks to the library ghost. Fast forward to today and I can say that being surrounded by shelves of books still has me checking for floating old ladies. Library Labyrinth swaps ghosts for famous literature-based terrors, as you team up in order to send each terror back to where it belongs and halt the menacing Bookwyrm in its tracks. You start Library Labyrinth in the centre of a five-by-five grid of octagonal tiles. Each turn you’ll flip tiles on your turn in an attempt to map out your surroundings,…

Designer: Kamil Ciesla, Robert Plesowicz, Lucasz Wlodarczyk | Publisher: Awaken Realms When The Great Wall Kickstarted back in 2019, publisher Awaken Realms promised a “fresh take on Euro/worker-placement board games”. Now that it’s finally on our table – filling up most of the available surface with its prodigious board, serried ranks of finely detailed miniatures and impressive cardboard 3D wall sections – we’re happy to confirm they’ve made good on that promise, bringing something new to a well-worn genre. Each player takes the role of a general in pseudo-medieval China, randomly chosen from a deck, with each character benefitting from its own unique power. The aim is to earn the most honour (a.k.a. Victory Points) by contributing to the repulsion of the ever-attacking Mongol hordes. Mostly, this requires assigning clerks…

Designer: Pascal Ribraut | Publisher: Super Meeple It’s the end of the 15th Century (not literally, don’t panic) and Italy is stumbling, sneaking and painting its way out of the Middle Ages into modernity. Exciting times! Especially if you are a member of one of the noble families vying for influence and control across the country. Victory comes through surrounding yourself with the best people, placing spies in places of influence and conquering cities through flattery or fire. Once laid out, Virtu can look intimidating. There are multiple tableaux of tiles and cards, offering everything from potential courtiers you can recruit to help you achieve your aims of dominating Italy, to cathedrals you can build in certain cities. There’s a wide range of powerful, unique allies or developments that grant…

Designer: Barbara Burfoot | Publisher: V8 Games In Damask, you play rival Venetian weavers competing to produce fine patterned silks that best speak to shifting fashions. Why? Well, for good old-fashioned profit, though a little recognition from the powerful guilds wouldn’t go amiss either. Each turn, you take cubes representing different colours of silk, or grab design cards which let you combine two colours of cubes in particular amounts in order to weave. You get bonus points for completing cards that match some of the colours and the pattern of the last design you wove. You also get special ‘guild favour’ tokens for creating designs in tune with current trends, which you can spend to enhance your later actions. Damask an immediate sensory treat. The cards are festooned with a…

Designer: Ben Heyes (Lead Designer) | Publisher: Wizards of the Coast Ever heard of Weiß Schwartz? This Japanese TCG is lauded for its elastic game design, allowing it to feature characters from a wide range of different IPs, with numerous sets for different films, shows and other geeky properties. I can’t stand it. Mechanically, the system is fine, a variation of Bushiroad’s other popular TCG Cardfight! Vanguard that’s a little too busy for my personal tastes. But I hate its lack of identity. You can have Goku from Dragonball Kamekameha blast Hatsune Miku whilst Obi-Wan Kenobi watches from the sidelines, just as confused as the rest of us. Maybe I’m just a curmudgeon who can’t enjoy the schoolyard “who would win in a fight?” antics that the game is clearly…

Designer: Friedemann Friese | Publisher: Rio Grande Games Fancy Feathers is a set collection game tasking two players (or more with multiple copies) with capturing a flock of pheasants for a baroness’ aviary. The game offers very little other context here and perhaps that’s the point, as considering the popularity of bird themed-games in the wake of Elizabeth Hargrave’s Wingspan, I think Friedemann Friese is actually just trolling us. Allow me to explain. With its rather pretty art (aside from the uncanny ‘servant’ cards) and catalogue of obscure pheasant species, Fancy Feathers seems designed to draw in avid twitchers, but then out of nowhere, players find themselves amidst an incongruous cloud of avian farts. Thematically, players are ambling down a path, snatching up particular birds for their collections. Clearly, this…

Designer: Realm Runner Studios | Publisher: Realm Runner Studios Collectable card games might be the hardest genre of our hobby to break into. It’s an industry 30 years young that is guarded by titans. Companies with major intellectual properties have had their card games crash and burn, as they attempt the gauntlet of creating a game that’s visually pleasing, immediately engaging and, most importantly of all, consistently releasing compelling new cards, with enough supply to fire up and fuel a demand. Enter Achroma. A small team of less than ten artists, designers and developers, based out of a small studio in the UK, using its own IP. It faces every challenge a CCG can and yet, they have created something I’ve seen countless others fail to do with infinitely more…

Designer: Various | Publisher: Modiphius Even in its most serious moments - the court cases, the interstellar wars, the philosophising - Star Trek has only been a hair’s breadth away from silliness. This new supplement for Star Trek Adventures is for those tables that want to straddle that line and take a more earthy look at the far-flung future, imagining what happens to the people who keep the starship ticking over when the bridge crew are off saving the galaxy. The book is, naturally, based on the animated Lower Decks series. As such, it’s easy to make an assumption when looking at the title, artwork and relaxed tone that this is only going to appeal to die-hard Lower Decks fans. In reality, however, the book offers three distinct benefits to…

1 CATAN: TRAVELLER – COMPACT EDITION Catan should be a nightmare to shrink with all its tiny components, but this Traveller version has managed it so effortlessly. It comes with slinky compartment drawers that contain every card, road and town, each fitted with pegs to slot into the customizable board (with six different grouped hex tiles to add variety), as well as a tiny dice tray. This is an ergonomic dream that provides a novel way to enjoy this tabletop classic. It even comes with 2-player variant rules for added flexibility. 2 HIVE: POCKET Hive is one of the better 2-player abstract games around, a classic area control game with iconic chunky plastic pieces representing the various insects at your disposal. Your task is to encircle your opponent’s queen bee…

Following on from last month’s trip to Oman, we’re remaining in the Middle East, cruising northwest around the Gulf of Oman onto Kuwait’s shores in the Persian Gulf. This relatively small country once formed part of ancient Mesopotamia, a region rich in ludic history. The oldest civilisations can be traced back ten-thousand years to Mesopotamia, where following a generous settling-in period (about five-thousand years), the first games also began to appear in the region. Backgammon has long been regarded as the oldest game in the world, following archaeological discoveries in the early 20th century which unearthed playing pieces and dice carved from human bone. From here, the game spread in one form or another to Egypt, then Persia, until it eventually appeared across the world. Later, the Royal Game of…

Brought to you by Many games have tried to overthrow the property building prefect of board games Monopoly over the years and whilst almost all of them didn’t survive the gaming gauntlet, there are a few pretenders to the throne that still found a way to shine and secure their own tabletop legacy. One such game made by Milton Bradley in the eighties was the beautiful looking, plastic laden Hotel. Visually striking (if mechanically simple going by rules listed online) the game itself feels like a little time capsule of the high living lifestyles that the eighties celebrated. We catch up with Tasha as they tell us all about one of their favourite childhood games and how it plays differently as an adult. Hello! Can you introduce yourself to our…

I smirked. It was all too easy to fool them. Facing me across the table were my sparring partners: Mirka, shaven headed, with barcoded net-tats on her cheeks; Rret, tousle haired with cold, calculating eyes and Evryt, tall and crooked with age. They stared at me. Might I actually have the personal connections that I claim? They had no way to know for certain. Coup is set in a future ruled by a royal class of multinational CEOs. Players are given two cards, from a deck containing three copies of the same character card: Duke, Assassin, Captain, Ambassador and Contessa cards. These represent who the players can influence at court, the hook in the game being that players can claim to have influence on any of the roles, regardless of what’s…

Designer: Big Potato Games | Publisher: Big Potato Games You know that feeling where everyone around you is talking about how disgusting something is, asking each other incredulously how anyone could like that? All the while you’re just trying to shrink into yourself because, secretly, you like that? That’s the worst-case scenario for Get The Ick, but thankfully the best case is just boredom. Get The Ick is a party game in which three cards are drawn and the active player has to secretly put down tokens to show which one they hate the most. Everyone else then gets to guess which one it is, gaining points if they’re right. It is, by design, a very negative game that seems a bit scattershot with its targets. Some cards are about…

Designer: Guido Hoffmann, Jens-Peter Schliemann | Publisher: Zoch Verlag There’s a delightful magic in dexterity games. The most unique are full of surprise and wonder, causing us to question what a tabletop game can be. Piazza Rabazza is a novel, bizarre experience, centered on delivering little metallic pizzas to magnetic walls. That task alone would be a semiserious endeavour with its own challenge, but the process is upended when you wind up the big chef sitting atop the centre of the 3D-board. As soon as you let that devilish cook go, he starts to spin, causing the whole structure to shake violently. This is the type of game that draws a crowd. Players take turns manoeuvring the plastic pizza delivery boy atop his scooter. He’s attached to a rod which…

Everyone likes that feeling of accomplishment in a game, when you can look over everything you’ve done in your playthrough and admire your myriad of brightly illustrated achievements. Drafting games excel at creating this feeling, as you slowly see your choices laid out in front of you, one card at a time. It’s a mechanic still relatively young in tabletop gaming, transitioning from sports teams deciding who to add to their rosters, through trading card games like Magic, until they took the wonderful, self-contained form that we get to enjoy today. Of the many drafting games now available, it’s hard to find a better introduction than the one which put the system into the mainstream: 7 Wonders. So many strategy games that are about raising a race of people take…

Designer: Wolfgang kramer | Publisher: Funko Games Why are many of our games are about becoming rich? Not just well off, but to be exorbitantly wealthy, a monopolistic tycoon that any worldly want or power has a price tag they can purchase. So many popular games celebrate this rush for monetary gain: Brass, Modern Art, Monopo- well, yes that is sadly still a popular game, but when games as bold and beautiful as Big Boss exist, I don’t know how Mr Pennybags is still in business. In Big Boss, you are already a multimillionaire, but you want more. The board begins empty, surrounded with spaces numbered 1-72 and a clattering cascade of plastic components sitting off to the side, just waiting to be unleashed. Amongst them are eight gorgeously designed…

Designer: Scott Almes | Publisher: Kolossal Games Nerds love a ring binder. It’s the satisfying clunk as we archive countless small papers or plastic pockets. We curse the fact that we live in this modern age, as the smart phone rises to the preferred portable data storage, as society abandons the formidable Filofax. Anything that fills that void in our life is desperately welcome, so when I opened Almanac’s ring bound collection of playboards, I was spellbound. Almanac: Crystal Peaks is a standalone expansion for the Almanac series of games by Scott Almes, the designer most well known for their Tiny Epic series. Set in the cute fictional world of Baeloria, the game is thematically and mechanically similar to the first entry, Almanac: The Dragon Road, whilst not requiring it…

POKÉMON GOES BACK TO ITS ROOTS This month saw the eagerly-awaited reveal of the ‘Scarlet & Violet 151’ expansion for the Pokémon TCG. The Japanese version of the set (‘Pokémon Card 151’) released to huge hype and sell-outs. ‘Scarlet & Violet 151’ features all 151 Generation 1 Pokémon, including the first Kadabra card in over 20 years and fan-favourite Ex cards like Charizard and Mew. Being a special set (outside of the 4 main sets released each year) there aren’t any single/display box booster products, instead being released in special Ex boxes and the stunning ‘Mew Ultra-Premium Collection.’ The products will release in 2 waves in September 22nd and October 6th. Pokémon is also gearing up for the holiday season, with a suggested UK release of the Halloween-themed BOOster packs…

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Designer: Andrew Haught | Publisher: Gale Force Nine With another Doctor Who series due later this year – and with a new Doctor in the guise of Sex Education’s excellent Ncuti Gatwa – here comes the preshow game of Doctor Who Nemesis. Ncuti is sadly missing from the game, yet all the previous Time Lords do feature, including the very first, William Hartnell. Whilst the Doctors play a part (more on that soon), they are not the star of the show. Instead, four nemeses take the spotlight: the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Weeping Angels and The Master. Each baddie comes with a tailored playing board, personalised deck of cards and unique way to win, offering similar asymmetric play to Disney Villainous and Root. Players must also randomly choose two Doctors…

Designer: Tim Sharville and Paul Sharville | Publisher: Gunpowder Studios Kastles feels like just the right sort of kard game throwback from the early days of Fluxx and Munchkin. It’s a battle of wits and luck, as each player must defend their kastle from being destroyed, whilst doing their best to topple their opponent’s towers. Kards have a variety of different ways of doing damage, from katapults that propel mighty boulders (which require you to discard a number of kards that total to an exact figure) to barrels of gunpowder that kan be set up to kreate a kaskade of explosions triggered by a single flaming arrow. Each attack kan be kountered if you’re lucky enough to have the relevant kard, from krucibles that hurtle rocks back at their aggressor’s…

Designer: Nao Shimamura and Nobutake Dogen | Publisher: Pandasaurus Thematically, District Noir is a game about rival American gang bosses consolidating power, gaining control of the city’s underworld and becoming a wealthy kingpin. In practical terms, it’s a quick two-player card game with a hybrid mechanic that is sometimes reverse bidding, sometimes a bit push-your-luck and sometimes set collection. The rules are simple to the point of minimalism: At the start of each round, you draw six cards. Each turn, you either play a card to the end of the central tableau, or claim the last five cards in the row. You can claim cards once per round and each round is six turns. The game lasts four rounds, then you tot up your scores. So, what’s on the cards?…

Why do so many of us spend hours of our lives in each other’s company imagining we were somewhere else? What is it about roleplaying, both as a hobby and creative art, that engages us on a level that you cannot reach with a book or film, that makes us reflect and question not just the world around us, but to question ourselves? It’s topics like this (with a fine dusting of ass-kicking fun) that forms the core of DIE RPG. The original comic ‘DIE’ won the British Fantasy Award for “Best Comic/Graphic Novel” two years in a row, whilst the Kickstarter for DIE RPG outshone all expectations raising over £520,000 last year. With the physical edition now having its public release, we got to chat to co-designer and writer…

Designer: Stoo Goff | Publisher: Stoo Goff When thinking of solo-developed indie RPGs, we usually picture slim little books with a light ruleset that prioritises storytelling over mechanics. Aegean manages to defy every one of these expectations, being big, bold and bursting with confidence. Aegean’s hefty rulebook is packed with options for characters and monsters alike, revelling in crunchy gameplay. When the party’s long-term planning plays out just so, Aegean can tickle the “I’m so clever” portion of the brain that normally only fires during strategy-heavy board games. The game’s simple premise combines two distinctly Grecian principles - mythic heroism and city-building. Rather than the roaming adventurers found in so many other RPGs, Aegean’s players take the role of the champions somewhere in the Mediterranean. This means that one session…

Designer: David F. Chapman | Publisher: Stoo Goff WILD is a fantastic example of how to pair up a premise with a mechanic; specifically, exploring dreamscapes and a Tarot deck. We’ll get to how all this works later, but for now, let’s start with the basics. Rather than tackling dragon slaying or space battles, WILD focuses on a party of teched-up brain-hackers tasked with leaping into unconscious minds, either attempting to guide the dreamer back to the waking world or riffling through their psyche in search of secrets. You won’t be surprised to hear that the premise owes a fair bit to Inception, however WILD is very much its own beast. Rather than focusing on business shenanigans, the core game concentrates on a specific scenario. Namely, diving into the dreams…

Designer: Dave Chalker, Brett Myers | Publisher: Restoration Games Don’t let fun become a dirty word. I did once, po-facedly declaring that games weren’t about anything as facile as fun. My mistake was asserting that fun was one singular thing, beneath the consideration of a great mind™ like mine. Sometimes fun can be silent flow, the fun of a brain pushed to work at its best, or it can be the kind of rambunctious abandon you get when playing Thunder Road: Vendetta: Raucous, chaotic, cacophonous and full of adrenaline. The healthy dose of the fun that dare not speak its name: Schadenfreude. Thunder Road harkens back to those wonderful George Miller and Paul Bartel movies: A blighted landscape living on the fumes, both from an environmental and automotive perspective. Each…

Designer: Noah Cohen, Sam Crane et al | Publisher: Restoration Games Restoration Games’ Unmatched was originally well known for steering away from well-trodden paths, using popular (and notably public domain) characters from folklore and fiction, many of whom had somehow avoided the spotlight of the cardboard arena. More recently there has been a slew of licensed property additions, such as their Jurassic Park and Marvel superhero sets (although the latter is often the lower profile characters, less Iron Man, more Squirrel Girl.) In this package, somewhat impressively, they manage to combine both approaches. Unmatched: Houdini vs The Genie features Harry “Handcuff” Houdini, notable Edwardian escapologist and magic man, against the lamp-lingering Genie from Arabian anthology One Thousand and One Nights. Cleverly, Restoration have managed to ride the coat tails of…

We’ve all got our collection of games that we’re proud of, from the wardrobe toppers and shelf stackers of burgeoning collections to the full-wall displays and sometimes dedicated rooms for storing your treasury of tabletop titles. Here I shall show mine and my partner’s collection of games some fifteen years strong, as well as go into a bit of detail about how it came to be. How many games are in your collection? Current count comes to 94 games in total, not including expansion boxes which possibly pushes us much closer to a round 100. When did you first start properly collecting tabletop games? Whilst I’ve been playing tabletop games for decades, I don’t think I first started to pursue hobbyist gaming until 2011, when I finally had enough disposable…