Innehållsförteckning för Issue 96 från Tabletop Gaming

The UK's no.1 magazine dedicated to board gaming, RPGs, trading cards and card games • Subscriber-only artwork covers• The latest board game news previews & reviews• Deep dives & interviews with world famous creators and designers JUST €6.99 A MONTH* The most convenient and cheapest way to receive your monthly magazine. To see our latest subscription offers go to: www.ttgami.ng/TTGAutumn2024 or call 01778 392034 and quote TTGM/Subs24 * T&Cs apply - Price applies when subscribing to Tabletop Gaming magazine via monthly direct debit.…

Vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein’s monsters, and mythical creatures from the folklore of olde, have all become a key part of the autumn to winter festivities. They might be icons in their own right, but almost all of them have gone on to influence the tabletop gaming realm in some capacity. What are the origins of many of these monsters, and how have they shaped the gaming space today? Those are the sinister questions we’re about to dive into. THE ORIGINS OF THE CLASSIC MONSTERS A huge portion of the monsters that we now see in these modern tabletop games originally stemmed from classic horror literature. That may be obvious to suggest, with the likes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula doing so much of the heavy lifting. But there…

Eurogame A category of modern board game usually characterised by including various ways to score, focusing on individual play, and highlighting strategy over luck. Often considered in opposition to wargames and party games. After the turbulence of the first half of the 20th century, there wasn’t so much desire for wargames in 1960s Germany. The alternative tabletop game at the time was Monopoly. I like to think what happened was someone in Germany took a look at Monopoly and said, “Okay, this is almost fun. We love gathering around the table, we love playing, and we love spending time with friends and family. But what if…what if we didn’t have to hate the game?” Most of the defining factors of eurogames are in direct opposition to what happens in Monopoly.…

THE BETWEEN Brindlewood Bay was a game of Murder, She Wrote meets Cthulhu. This is the new game from the same designer, Jason Cordova and their imprint The Gauntlet, with the Brindlewood Bay system at the core. The Between sees Victorian Monster Hunters wrestle with things that go bump in the night and the nefarious Mastermind behind it all. The game has been available as a preview edition for a while. It is complete, and pay what you want, but a recent crowdfunding campaign promises to bring this title to a wider audience. FIVE EVIL Spooky season is upon us, and Scottish publisher Handiwork Games is rolling out the blood-red carpet for their new game Five Evil. From designer Morgan Davie, this game takes the ruleset behind Dungeons & Dragons…

A WHOLE NEW WORLD Disney Lorcana fans rejoice, we finally have the dates and locations for the big events we’ve been looking forward to. These will start with the European Championship happening at Disneyland Paris Resort from December 7th to 9th. With Disneyland well into its holiday celebrations by then this sounds like an exciting venue to be sure. Not to be outdone the North American Championship will be held a month later from January 10th to 12th at the Disneyland Hotel at Disneyland Resort, California. Exact dates aren’t known yet but we do know that the World Championships will be held at Walt Disney World, Florida in March 2025 with a phenomenal Whole New World promo for all participants. What else could it have been? A WHOLE NEW HERO…

NorthStar Game Studio has been messing around with evolution for a decade now—no, they don’t have some kind of Frankensteinian laboratory somewhere, full of lightning and body parts—I’m referring to their award-winning Evolution series of games. The entire series is based on a similar concept; players must adapt species to outcompete others for food. By adding various characteristics such as “Fast” or “Sharp claws”, a species might gain an advantage over others, gaining in population, eating more food, or, if they become carnivorous, eating other species. It’s an enticing hook that has served them through four versions; Evolution in 2014, standalone Evolution: Climate in 2016, Oceans in 2020 and now Nature, currently on Kickstarter for a 2025 release. Each game takes a different approach, with Evolution having the feel of…

Designer: Peggy Chassenet, Thomas Dupont | Publisher: Hachette Games Cartaventura is a series of narrative card games. Their unique selling point is that the cards, as they lay out choices and story, also build a map on the table. Cartaventura is available in many expressions—there is a Viking variant; Vinland; you can experience World War Two in D-Day, and in this version, Versailles, you play as a young Mademoiselle stuck in an arranged marriage to a French count in 1687. There’s no rulebook here, just some short written prompts that fill you in on your character and their situation in a few sentences. As further cards are revealed, some are laid down to create a map, whilst others reveal choices for you to make. You begin as Julie d’Aubigny, a…

Designer: Brigette Indelicato, Mike Callahan & Tom Rochelle | Publisher: Bright Eye Games Upon first picking up The Plot Thickens, players would be forgiven for being mesmerised by the gorgeous cover art. The series created by Bright Eye Games is varied based upon genre, and it’s the Science Fiction edition that has landed on our review pages today. The box itself is a stunning recreation of a retro novel, complete with pulpy aesthetic and authentic pages along the spine of the piece. You can even open the box just like a book, in a truly immersive manner. This early attention to detail is stellar and sets the scene for what’s to come. The basic premise of The Plot Thickens, which can also be found with Mystery (reviewed in a previous…

Designer: Grégory Grard, Mathieu Roussel | Publisher: Catch Up Games I can’t stop playing this game. I’ll put it down for just long enough to tell you about it, but then I’m getting right back to it. Delightfully, it has appeared on Board Game Arena and started floating around in the BGG hotness list too. It’s frequently hard to put your finger on what makes a game special, but usually, you can feel the X-factor. Castle Combo feels like it has an X-factor. Let me introduce you to the colourful world of Castle Combo, where you’re not going to want to leave. It’s a big game in a small box. There’s a whole medieval town of characters split into two main types: the village and the castle. The village is…

Designer: Mirko Marchesi | Publisher: Gigamic If you went to UK Games Expo this year, you may have spotted Quoridor Pac-Man. It might have been the huge XL version that donned the tables that caught your attention, or the frankly fabulous Pac-Man suit that Hachette Board Games UK’s Flavien Loisier was wearing, but either way, it made a bit of a splash. The game offers the board of Quoridor as its foundation, letting you play a game of this with all the same pieces, but adds in gorgeous wooden versions of much loved Pac-Man, the ghosts, and the power pellets too. In reviewing the game, I want to raise that the foundation of it – Quoridor – is perfectly playable within it. Quoridor is a popular abstract strategy game that…

Designer: Peter Scholtz | Publisher: Wise Wizard Games Right now, the industry is in a boom period, and innovation is an absolute necessity in such a competitive space. In the realm of card games, there are two ways to really grab the market’s attention. The first is with a unique set of mechanics, and a premise that has rarely been seen before. The second is to bring in a well-known intellectual property, in the hopes that a familiar name will ultimately result in sales. Unfortunately, Sherlock Solitaire falls in the latter category, and on the face of it, there isn’t really a gameplay reason for the 22B Baker Street overlay at all. The box and indeed every synopsis for the title, tease a gameplay experience that will see players solve…

Designer: Justin and Anne-Marie De Witt | Publisher: Fireside Games I know what’s going to put you off trying out this game: it looks like another new version of Uno. There are cards, there are colours, there are numbers, blah blah, seen it before - but wait! Inside this not far from fluorescent cardboard packaging is something closer to a sudoku than anything else. It’s bright, bold and cooperative. It’s a card game that fits in your pocket, giving you something different to play at a bar or restaurant table. It asks only the skills of basic mathematics, teamwork and colour mixing. Yes, it’s a little nerve-wracking to think you may have forgotten something you know every primary school child will remember. But don’t worry, they’ve included reminders on the…

My Mutants had Franton (insect wings), Hugust (massive chainsaw) and Danko (infected-with-spores) whilst Joen’s Tribe had chosen Dux (crossbow), Moose (even more massive club) and Farrow (stealthy like a fox. Because he is a fox). ENTER THE FIELD We began by gingerly edging onto the battlefield, arriving on opposite sites. The aim of the game was to hunt to the blue artefact tokens; one of which was the elusive GPS module. Most of them had landed in the middle of the table, but one was nearer. If we could find it and run away without the Tribe even seeing us? All the better. On the other side of the field, none of the artefact tokens were close enough for the Tribe to touch this turn. So they sprinted forward: they…

This time of year always feels like the best time for board games. The weather turns a bit rubbish, sending us inside to debate whether it’s too early to put the heating on or not, and days out become evenings in, making everyone game (pun intended) for a board game night. But with Halloween this time of year, plus dark, gloomy nights, getting some spooky games to the table is ideal, and so this issue is celebrating it all –_the gothic, the psychological, the outright monstrous and beyond. We’ve of course got the story behind the new characters in Marvel: Crisis Protocol, as you’ll have figured out from our cover, but we’ve also got the lowdown on Horror on the Orient Express, SHIVER by Parable Games, and Sublime Dark, the…

Over the last few years, Parable Games have become well-known in the UK Tabletop Roleplaying Game community. Operated by the brotherly duo Charlie and Barney Menzies, they specialise in all types of horror. We asked them why are RPGs so well suited to spooky stories… “The horror genre is all about exploring anxieties and fears in a safe space”, explains Charlie. “You do it with movies when you’re sitting down with a group of friends in the dark, screaming, throwing popcorn up in the air—you have a good time because you know there is a distinct separation. The interesting thing with roleplaying is that it gives you even more depth to explore these problems. When done well, it’s in a very safe space with friends, a place that’s also much…

CATAN The first popularised eurogame, often considered the first modern board game, many people’s first gateway game and still a huge global phenomenon. As with many of the first eurogames, it’s economic-based, working on acquiring resources and using them wisely. Dice are used only to tell you what resources are available, the rest is up to your strategy. CASTLES OF BURGUNDY This is another example of how dice are used in eurogames. There’s an element of luck, but turns include so many different ways of using and manipulating those dice that strategy wins out over luck. Always running up high in the BGG ratings, the game includes half a dozen different ways to score and really gets your brain engaged._ CARCASSONNE It’s always a wonder to me that a game…

Designer: Kane Klenko | Publisher: KOSMOS A nunatak is the pinnacle of a mountain protruding from a glacier, and fittingly Nunatak: Temple of Ice is a pinnacle of set-collection games. In Nunatak, up to four players have to juggle set collection with a spatial puzzle. The gameplay is simple, on your turn you choose a card from the trade row and then place one of your ice blocks onto a matching space on the board. There are a range of different card types to choose from each of which has unique scoring. Maybe you’ll focus on assembling architects, rewarding you for completing rows of ice blocks in the temple, or perhaps you’ll find yourself battling for builders, trying to ensure you have more than anyone else. There are also points…

Designer: Mike Gnade | Publisher: Rock Manor Games The apocalypse is here and all you have to your name is a totally sweet campervan and a team of unreasonably skilled mercenaries. Sounds like the perfect set up for an adventure. Maximum Apocalypse: Wasted Wilds is a 1-4 player roguelike survival game set after the world has taken a turn for the worst. You play through the story of a group of survivalists making their way into finding some safety in the wasteland. Everyone takes the role of a character with unique skills, represented by their deck, and each mission is presented in the form of location tiles which are shuffled up and laid out face-down according to the briefing. Mission objectives are set up and players take actions on their…

There’s something really impressive about seeing characters we know and love in miniatures form. Putting our heart and soul into building and painting the little creations, and then seeing the character from book or screen come to life in 3D form. What truly makes it a triple threat though, is when it’s part of a game that is equally as brilliant – something which Marvel: Crisis Protocol has proven itself to be again and again over the years. Marvel: Crisis Protocol began life in 2019, under Atomic Mass Games. The core set immediately gave us some of the most popular characters, at arguably the peak of the Marvel Cinematic Universe hype, around when Avengers: Endgame released in cinemas. But of course, it didn’t stop there. Atomic Mass Games proceeded over…

NOT ALONE Not Alone is a weird, paranoid many-against-one survival horror game where most of you are space explorers who have crash-landed on a strange new planet, Artemia, while one plays the Creature, hunting the players in an attempt to wear down their resistance until they willingly merge with the planetary hivemind forever. The card-based, simultaneous action system is simple and brilliant, powers and equipment add variety without feeling stupid or unfair, and the dramatic tension of trying to anticipate the Creature’s next move as the rescue ship edges ever-closer is superbly poised. It’s quick and scales well, though it works best at the upper end of its 2-7 player count. LEGENDARY ENCOUNTERS: AN ALIEN DECK BUILDING GAME If you’ve played Dominion, Ascension or Star Realms you know the drill…

HORRIFIED This cooperative game gets you working together to rid the town of old-school movie villains. With four different themed versions of the game to choose from, you’re sure to find a favourite monster in one of the boxes you’d like to go up against – though the original Universal Monsters version remains my favourite. You’ll be up against one of seven creatures, Frankenstein and The Bride, The Wolf Man, Dracula, The Mummy, The Invisible Man and Creature from the Black Lagoon, and each requires different ways to beat them in order to save the townsfolk. Each monster is hugely thematic, so for example, to beat Frankenstein and his bride, you need to teach them both what it means to be human. You’ll need to spend items of the right…

1 TEN CANDLES Not only is Ten Candles a cult classic, but it will make you feel like you’re in a cult. Between the candles being blown out in the centre as time ticks down, the ritual chant “And we are alive”, and the smouldering character trait cards, Ten Candles is a game all about atmosphere. You play as characters fighting against Them, your mysterious adversaries who are only weak to light in a dark world. Candles are blown out to show the passing of time as your characters grow closer to their inevitable deaths in the dark, leaving you plunged into the darkness right alongside them. 2 DREAD Welcome to the terrifying, gut-wrenching, heartstopping mechanic of… JENGA? Dread is a TTRPG without dice rolls. Instead, this psychological thriller has…

This month our playful jaunt across the globe takes a slightly different turn. Firstly, we are visiting a country I had previously never heard of. In fact, I only accidentally stumbled across the Republic of Kiribati whilst randomly flicking around Google Maps - a pastime I engage with more often than what would be considered normal. Probably. Secondly, our focus is less on the evidence of the clear globalisation of the modern tabletop hobby as we know it, and more on how a nation engages with a select few games whilst residing largely outside of globalisation’s transfer of mass-marketed goods and culture. Consequently, we’ll be taking a look at fewer games than usual, and shying away from highlighting the various designers, publishers, and establishments we would usually strive to cover…

It is the year of Dungeons & Dragons as the RPG behemoth celebrates its 50th anniversary. Does that mean it is the only show in town if you want your RPG fix? Absolutely not. Let us guide you towards the weird and the wonderful. SIGNAL TO NOISE Two people separated by great distance write letters to each other. Not an unusual situation you might think. Yet, when one person is on Earth, and the other is on a generation ship accelerating away, things get trickier. This is Signal to Noise, an epistolary-based game from designer Craig Duffy and their imprint Lunar Shadow Designs. As you write letters back and forth, a deck of cards gives you prompts for events in the lives of the writers. Communicating over vast distances also…

Spiel Essen is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think that UK Games Expo’s 65,000 visitors is a lot, but that’s just peanuts to Spiel Essen. Listen, Spiel Essen’s four-day tickets sold out this year. That’s never happened before. And then the one-day tickets for each of the four days, October 3rd-6th, sold out too, and that’s never happened either. Over 200,000 attendees came from eighty countries to play and buy more than 1,500 new games and expansions from 923 different traders across six massive exhibition halls. The scale of it can feel overwhelming. When I went in 2016, my first Essen Spiel after a long break, after three hours in the halls I had to go back…

Designer: Shanon Lynch | Publisher: Ravensburger I’m going to go out on a wing here, and tell you immediately that I really love this game. It’s no secret that I’ve got a soft spot for a game that I can explain in a few sentences, often because I love playing them with people who tell me they don’t and won’t play games. I'll often tempt them into just one light game… which often becomes another, and another. All of a sudden they’ve got a BGG account and are subscribing to Tabletop Gaming – and I have someone new to play games with. Winner! No wonder I love it. But before I go much further, I'll get the negatives out the way. Oh My Pigeons! is nothing revolutionary. It’s not smashing…

Designer: Felicitas Pommerening | Publisher: Lookout Games What would you do if confronted with a lemon scented smear of sentient ectoplasm? Immediately engage in inane chat? How about if your nan fainted? Would your immediate thought be to slap her? Probably not. Nevertheless, these are all experiences one encounters in the early stages of the tonally odd Eppi. This is a cooperative narrative adventure from Lookout Games, designed to be played with younger players. If you haven’t played the publisher’s previous ‘Paper Point ‘N Click’ games such as Cantaloop, think of it as a reimagining of classic point-n-click computer games like Monkey Island, but in book form. I played through this over a few nights with my son, and it made a nice, if at times slightly fiddly, alternative to…

Designer: Taiki Shinzawa | Publisher: Allplay I feel like there’s been an explosion of cute-animal trick-taking games in the last few years, 9 Lives is somehow the second cat-themed trick-taker in my collection (third if you count Nyet!). In this game, 3-4 players bid on the number of tricks they think they’re going to win and score points based on how close they were. So far, so standard, the two big twists on the format are the backs of the cards and what happens after you win a trick. The backs of each card match the colour of its suit, making it very clear how many of each everyone has in their hands, this includes the purple trump suit, so it’s always clear how strong everyone’s hand is. The other…

Designer: Jeffrey Chin, Andrew Nerger | Publisher: Road To Infamy Games (R2i Games) This game looks off-the-scale stunning. The box is a suitcase complete with a real handle and mock hinges, stickers and straps. I can see why it was backed so well on Kickstarter. On first appearances, it’s daunting and it doesn’t fit on the kallax, but you can almost forgive that when you open the box and find you’re going to be playing the game on individual three-dimensional globes! It wasn’t cheap to make or buy, and it looks exceptional for it. Each player takes an individual passport and globe. You’ll be planning three trips around the world: spring, summer and fall. Everyone starts in the same locations and then chooses one of three new locations to fly…

Designer: Paul Scott & Gary Scott | Publisher: Midlam Miniatures Dungeon diving is a familiar genre, and you generally need a good selling point to stand out from the crowd. Stalagbite! does this by casting an anthropomorphic lifeforce onto stalagmites—those pointy outgrowths you find in limestone caves. They also have a few gameplay innovations that give this fun little game extra reason for your attention. First things first; this is a game of dwarves heading into caves, hunting for gold and glory by hacking their way through crowds of nasty creatures. The aim is to hopefully escape before a crowd of hunting goblins arrive to take care of you. Much like cave-crawler-in-space Level 7: Escape, the game is semi-cooperative, with the players working to clear the cave together, but each…

Designer: Andy Chambers | Publisher: Free League Lots of people find miniatures gaming a little daunting. There’s the idea that you’ll need to learn how to put together armies of complicated miniatures and—even worse—professionally paint them. There’s often a heavily militarised feel to them, with complex books filled with detailed rulings to argue over. And finally, they often seem to last for days. Free League have the answer to this in Zone Wars. Pre-assembled models? Check. No need to paint? Check. A stylish pre-shading is applied to these models, much like the figures in Unmatched, making further paintwork optional rather than expected. The rules are fast, intuitive and fun, and scenarios are built to run quickly and end dramatically. Zone Wars is the models-on-a-table version of the Mutant: Year Zero…