Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 83 i Tabletop Gaming

NOW PLAYING… Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West What was your first spooky tabletop experience? Mine was a suprisingly sobering moment with Atmosfear: The Harbingers. It’s a very silly VHS board game of rolling dice against the clock, hoping that the Gatekeeper won’t rear his terrible head and scream ‘STOP’ at you from the screen. The game starts with a little ritual: everyone writes their biggest fear on a slip of paper, which you later have to successfully draw back from the pile and finally ‘face your fear.’ As I reached in, I drew the paper ‘Forgetting the faces of my loved ones.’ It wasn’t my slip. The room, which had been cackling at the cheesy effects and dopey mechanics, went still. There’s a power to tabletop gaming…

Brought to you by Ewbank’s Hello! Can you introduce yourself to our readers? My name is Richard Giddings and I teach data skills to apprentices. What game have you found in your attic? This is Escape from Colditz, A game I loved back when I was younger and was very happy to retrieve from storage. Whose was it? Who bought it for you? This particular copy was originally my father’s game from his childhood: fittingly, he found it in his parent’s attic and played the game with them, making it quite the family heirloom! He brought it down for me and my sister to play when we were younger. When he later moved house, I procured it for my own collection, though ironically it was also packaged up and put…

If you’re playing with the recommended six players, here are the best nine roles to include in your One Night Ultimate Werewolf gameplay. My First Hunt: 2x Werewolves, Troublemaker, Sentinel, Seer, Hunter, Robber, Mystic Wolf and Witch. If you’re a group of new players, either to board games or just this series, this combination of roles will allow for some knowledge on both sides of the table, with some chaos to allow you to get a feel for the manipulative side of the game. It also includes some protection in the forms of the Sentinel and Hunter, a lifeline if you’re not quite sure who the villains are. Silly Spooktacular: Werewolf, Troublemaker, Village Idiot, Doppelganger, Revealer, Paranormal Investigator, Tanner, Alpha Wolf and Mystic Wolf. Ideal for groups used to the gameplay and…

Bake It Happen managed to pass the ultimate test for a younger family board game: my niece loves it after originally refusing to play. She was obstinate that nothing was better than her tablet, sternly frowning at videos of toy unboxings, whilst I sat next to her looking at the deck of recipe cards. Her head peeked over the screen at the sight of beautifully illustrated pink donuts. Then she asked if she could look through the deck. Then when I asked her if she wanted to play and brought out the chef’s hat the game came with, the tablet was immediately left on the sofa as she beamed under the brow of her new white floppy headwear. Bake it Happen is not a hardcore set collection game. If the…

Some games thrive on chaos-players shouting at each other, objects flying across the room and a leader board that changes more often than a baby’s nappy. Others love tension - the creeping pressure of a shared objective, or the threat of a rival taking that special item or space you NEED. Dorfromantik, on the other hand, is a game so chill that it makes a sloth look positively energetic. It’s the board game equivalent of a warm bath with candles and relaxing music, followed by a lovely cuddle. Based on the videogame of the same name, Dorfromantik is a co-operative tile-laying game, in which you try to beat your high score by careful placement of tile groups. The different hexagonal tiles include things like forests, grain, villages, streams and railway…

Thereare some names so intrinsically linked to their medium that it becomes a mark of prestige: a Steven Spielberg movie, a Beyonce album and, for our interests, a Reiner Knizia game. To say the man has been prolific in his over 30 years of game design would be an understatement. At time of writing, he has 699 game credits on BGG. By the time we’ve gone to print, I wouldn’t be surprised if that had gone to 700. With that many games, it’s unsurprising how so many are now considered classics: Tigris and Euphrates, Modern Art and today’s topic, Amun-Re. In Amun-Re, you are a vizir looking to ensure your family name is not forgotten. And you know what’s a great way to make yourselves memorable? That’s right, we’re putting…

Crisis & Control feels less like an expansion than a balancing patch, intended to address weaknesses in the base game. The hidden agendas function like any hidden information scoring system in a game, adding ambiguity around who has won until the final reveal, hopefully making the last round a bit more exciting. They force a bit more diversity of strategy, as you’re incentivised to hit particular targets to maximise your points. These tweaks go a long way to repairing the original’s anticlimactic final turns and replays attenuating the game’s freshness. The crisis response and alternative events cards help revamp the State – the least exciting faction to play in the base game and the default autopilot in the three-player game. The crisis response cards won’t be used in every game…

The rulebook for Sea of Thieves: Voyage of Legends is deceptive. A word-heavy, 32-pages long, it gives the appearance of a comprehensive guide complete with iconography and step-by-step breakdowns. Upon closer inspection, it contains vague explanations, disjointed information and even absences concerning key points. Anyone deciding to busk it alone using their own interpretation of rules will be forgiven. If you can venture beyond these murky waters, however, you will discover a multi-layered, lively jaunt. Sea of Thieves is based on the 2018 video game which is still being enjoyed by a community of millions of scallywags. The translation from digital to analogue maintains the same open-world nature, where players roam the seas looking for loot, while racing to become a pirate legend. The best buccaneer is whoever can earn…

Acommon approach with successful games is to bring out a smaller card version. Some of these are as good or better than the original. Others - looking at you Castles of Burgundy: the Card Game – are worse. Unfortunately, Camel Up doesn’t quite make it into the former category. Camel Up: The Card Game is a light-hearted experience of betting and racing extremely unpredictable camels. These dromedaries are stackable, sometimes letting them piggy back their way to victory, or result in four camels burying first place, dropping them disastrously to last place. Even better, one crazy camel runs in the wrong direction, who can also be landed on, dragging contestants in the wrong direction. Functionally it’s fairly similar to Camel Up. The board is replaced with a row of race…

Like stepping through the screen into a 16-bit wonderland, Fabula Ultima brings the essence of classic JRPGs to the tabletop. While Final Fantasy is the most obvious inspiration, virtually every SNESera RPG has inspired an aspect of Fabula Ultima, with the resulting ruleset provoking dangerous levels of nostalgia in anybody who spent their childhood collecting magic crystals and counting down the minutes until they unlocked the airship. The game is delightfully blunt in its intentions. It isn’t trying to be a more traditional, D&D-esque TTRPG in a world that’s merely inspired by classic RPGs, nor is it an ironic deconstruction of the genre’s tropes. Instead, it’s a game about trying to recreate as much of an old-school JRPG as possible at the tabletop. This means you’re virtually guaranteed to be…

This latest addition to the Dungeons and Dragons library of tomes enables us to dive headfirst into the many worlds of giants across the multiverse, presenting Dungeon Masters with almost 200 pages of seemingly everything you could want or need to know about these larger-than-life entities. There isn’t a lot of new stuff for players in this book (no new playable races or spells unfortunately) but the things we do have are very fun. There is one new subclass, Barbarian: Path of the Giant, which satisfyingly enhances the benefits gained from the barbarian’s rage ability, as well as two new backgrounds which unlock bonus features (Skilled and Tough, PHB) for other players in your campaign to keep things nicely balanced. The 3rd and 14th level Path of the Giant feature…

There’s so much potential with darkness in roleplaying. No other fear is more primally charged in our minds, or has more potential for creating thrilling experiences. Below are a few ways you can incorporate the many forms of darkness into your RPG nights. DARKNESS AS PROP The most immediate way to play with darkness is to literally play your game in the dark. Whilst most RPGs require you to be able to read your character sheets, there have been some games that feature actual light as a key component to the game. Ten Candles is a horror one-shot system that uses light to create the best atmosphere possible. This is not a system for recreating your favourite horror movies, where many will fall victim but at least one hero survives;…

“Ask what’s a horror story we could only tell through the format of a board game.” Henry Lewis, interviewed for our ‘Game Fright’ Feature, pg 37 “What if?’ is a question players will frequently ask themselves as they explore and experience the world.” Davide Garofalo, on Vampire: The Masquerade – Milan Uprising, pg 57 “I see my role as taking fans on a journey of product experiences; sometimes grim, sometimes uplifting, but always exciting.” James White, on designing Flesh and Blood, pg 75…

Our gaming interests develop on a difficulty curve. The very first games we play in our lives are as simple as things can possibly be: roll a die, move the counter, brace for misfortunate serpents. We progress from roll and move, to matching card games, to combinations of the two, slowly adding more and more components until suddenly you’re resupplying the action board whilst considering how the position of the first player marker and your hand of improvements may help you best optimise your personal player board in time for the next harvest. Bigger, supposedly ‘better’ board games, are sometimes seen as the natural evolution for hobbyist gaming, the games we should strive to dedicate our free-time to because it rewards those hours of investments whilst scratching that itch to…

Q. Dear Ben, How much can you deadlift? I recently started CrossFit and just smashed the 100-kilo barrier! Now you may say that this is quite a personal question and totally irrelevant to your ludological expertise, but I would roundly pooh-pooh both assertions. Firstly, as a public figure, you should be more than willing to Instagram your most intimate moments to be picked over by the public and secondly, it’s incredibly relevant because I’ve started CrossFit in the vain hope that I’ll be able to lug my games over to game night. When I first entered the world of games, they were simpler things: Plain cardboard boxes with simple components that shone with the brilliance of their mechanisms, not the several hundredweight of fake diamonds in the unique, mass produced,…

One of my all-time favourite games is Clank! In Space, a deck building game where you explore a spaceship and claim loot in an attempt to be the most successful thief in the galaxy. It was first brought to my attention by a close friend of mine called Simon, who me and my wife meet up with once a month to play games. What intrigued me initially was my love of science fiction, with one of my favourite film franchises being Star Wars. I played a lot of card games such as Magic and Pokémon (which I still make time for several times a week), so I was excited to give Clank a try. I also enjoy games which take you on an adventure, allowing you to create your own…

From the off, Disney Animated starts with the charm offensive. I defy anyone who plays this not spend time looking at the care and attention that has gone into the quality of components on offer. Everything, from the cel character cards to the power tokens, are designed to push all of those nostalgia buttons and make you want to get the game to the table as fast as possible. You’re all animators trying to finish the film you are working on before deadline. Unfortunately, the main villains of these films are trying to stop you completing their film and therefore prevent their untimely demise. You must work with others to finish the various parts of your film, from the background to the characters, then finally collect enough ink to meet…

Why is that most Word Association games feel like they were designed by an English teacher? Not that this is bad thing, we all probably remember the fun teacher from our time at school, but so many word games feel like they were designed for the last day of term, when no-one can focus on anything but the rapidly approaching holidays. It might be that a lot of these games also revolve around a single clue guesser, letting one person keep the unruly children (i.e., your friends who’ve come over for games night) under control. What’s so refreshing about Sides is how it flips this expectation, offering a small but substantial twist that breathes new life into an otherwise well-worn genre. In Sides, players work together to try and guess…

Some games are just beautiful to behold. When I first laid eyes on Tuned, I was spellbound by how visually masterful it was. The tome-shaped box lifted open with a magnetic tautness to reveal a trove of charming, characterful creatures: The large smile and rounded features of the donkey, balancing a drum on its head; the comforting dog cuddling its tuba, paws tucked around it as far as possible; the elegant yet equally rounded cat, stroking at a viola with its paws; and the maestro of the mix, a squat yet commanding rooster, wings outstretched and peak proudly lifted to the heavens. It was enough to sell me on this a thousand times over, an example of what truly imaginative and considered wonders could be made for board games. Then…

I am a solo gamer who, when not dungeon crawling, really likes campaign, legacy and storybook games, even those not designed for solo play. Legacy of Yu did not disappoint. In this game you (or Yu) are digging canals at the behest of Emperor Shun of the Xia Dynasty. There is a local town which supplies workers, provisions and building materials for this enterprise, but it also attracts the attention of barbarians. You win the game if you can build six sections of canal and reduce barbarians to two or fewer at the time of building the final section, but lose if you run out of townsfolk, if the barbarians completely overrun you or if the flood wave overcomes your site. Win or lose, you march onto the next town…

You have just landed, shipwrecked and disoriented, on a remote, dinosaur-infested island. You must explore and ultimately escape the island, overcoming obstacles, completing challenges, and defeating the ever-spawning enemy raptors along the way. Ulaya Chronicles: Raptor Claw Island is set in the deep, tropical world of The Drowned Earth. This is a campaign-based game with a set of 14 unique scenarios, each game continuing the story from the last. A large double-sided play-map acts as a gameboard and is set up differently for each scenario, depending on which part of the island you’re approaching, what has taken place in the story and the particular predicament your characters find themselves in. In essence, your clan of characters spend action points to progress through the game – moving, battling enemies and making…

Historical Events is a much smaller offering than the other expansion, Crisis & Control, yet promises to be more flavourful. It offers event cards based on historical moments like World War II or the introduction of the internet. One is revealed at the beginning of each round and if the requirements for its being triggered are met – say the Working Class having low happiness for the Chinese Communist Revolution – then some immediate consequences may happen, potentially introducing special actions that round for specific factions. This expansion feels like it’s getting at Hegemony’s agenda – and I use that term in an approbative sense – in that it invites players to view major historical moments through four specific lenses, envisioning how these groups would have viewed these crossroads, what…

There’s two types of ‘classic’ board games: modern classics like Carcassonne and Catan that have become cultural touchstones for the hobby, and the Other classics, decades-old titles that still outsell our favourites by thousands. I’m reluctantly referring to the likes of Monopoly and Cluedo, but of these, Risk is one of the least painful for me to accept on a bookshelf. It has enough interesting choices and a tactical simplicity that allows players to focus on area control and permanently ruining friendships in equal measure. I was therefore interested - and apprehensive - when I heard of the card game version, Risk Strike, which aims to condense the multi-hour, world-conquering experience down to 20 minutes. An ambitious task and one that it sort of achieves, mechanically anyway. Firstly, this is…

ACorp ship has gone down in the ruins of a city to the west of our Crawler. Normally the corps, like anyone else, would transport their goodies by mech, which means whatever it was carrying was expensive. Our goal? Find the crash site, recover any useful scrap and return to the Crawler before Corp security arrives. This was the intro to our first session of Salvage Union, a mech-centric RPG set on a distant planet that has gone through a series of brutal wars and ecological collapse, forcing the majority of the population to carve out difficult lives among the ruins and deserts while the corporate elite live in high-tech arcologies. In Salvage Union, you play as members of a Union who are the lucky few who live and work…

Pirate Borg is the latest attempt to port indie darling Mörk Borg’s lo-fi ruleset and brutal attitude into a fresh new genre - in this case, the swashbuckling world of pirates. The slick, slim rulebook propels its players into the depths of the Dark Caribbean, delivering easy-to-grasp rules, phenomenal artwork and blistering high-seas adventures, that offer a shade more swashbuckling than its gloomy ancestor. If you’ve explored any of the Borg games, you’ll already know what to expect from Pirate Borg. The entire thing is built on a stripped-down d20 system that emphasises grim and gritty violence over comic book heroics. Combat is quick and brutal, skill checks take seconds to resolve and character creation is a breeze, which is vital when even the most powerful character is only ever…

Editor’s Note: The price and contents of this game include the optional standee add on, required if enjoying the game as a standalone experience, however a cheaper version excluding this is available. In the League of Dungeoneers, your party of adventures explores a potentially never-ending world of adventure, run entirely without a dedicated GM through using multiple dice and many tables to create a high degree of randomness throughout. Characters are created by choosing a race (human, dwarf, elf or halfling) and a profession, such as ranger or warrior priest, rolling their basic stats and determining their starting skills and talents. Smaller groups may hire mercenaries since this system is designed for a party of four. Player characters level up pretty quickly at first (which is always good to keep…

A GOOD MONTH FOR GAMES PREVIEWED IN TTG There’s nothing like seeing the success of companies we get to feature in TTG. Mantic Games have managed to raise over £350,000 with Worms, exploding past their £25k target (which was reached in an astonishing 13 minutes after the Kickstarter launched) In a statement celebrating their success, Mantic Games posted how happy they were to see this project come to life. “It’s an absolute delight to be able to bring that classic blend of humour, strategy, silly weapons and outrageous luck to life on the tabletop alongside our partners at Team17!” Similar success has been achieved by Mycelia, previewed last month and reaching their Kickstarter goal in less than a day, with at time of printing a fundraising value of £160,000, nearly…

IN THE NEXT ISSUE TICKET TO RIDE LEGACY: LEGENDS OF THE OLD WEST Find out if there’s gold in them thar component boxes in our feature review of the latest legacy release! PLUS LORCANA: SECOND CHAPTER What’s next for the biggest CCG of the year after a massive launch reception and what goes into making the iconic art of these beloved characters? Discover the answers to both! BRICK WARS We go to battle with building blocks in this latest wargaming rules system SEE ALL SINGLE ISSUE AND SUBSCRIPTION OFFERS AT www.ttgami.ng/single-issue SO YOU DON’T MISS OUT!…

Augmented reality: Create a house of horrors by enhancing the real world through digital stimuli, provide the graphics are up to scratch. XD Productions’ escape room Amelia’s Secret is one such example. Bring the darkness: Deploy gameplay that can only truly be played in the dark to build the atmosphere, such as Kraul’s candlelit one-versus all Shadows in the Forest. Silence: If too much chat is ruining the mood, get everyone to be quiet, as seen (but not heard) in the real time, text-messaging RPG Alice is Missing. Hidden movement: Where is everyone? Build that unease just like how Last Friday keep things tense. Mood music: Add some uneasy ambient vibes or door creaks with a companion app, a la Mansions of Madness. An actor in full makeup on a TV screen barking out orders:…

Glory Islands is a two to four player game of good natured piracy set against the sunny backdrop of 17th century Tortuga. Players must sail around the Caribbean islands, collecting loot and claiming territory to attain enough glory to be crowned “King of the Pirates.” Much like the similarly themed Jamaica, Glory Islands is a race game, with elements of area-control, hand management and set collection, all mixed in to elevate the game above the dated roll-and-move trappings of the genre. With that said, the level of complexity here shouldn’t deter those under the game’s 14+ suggestion. Each round begins with players choosing one card from a hand of six. The number at the top of the card serves two functions: indicating the maximum number of spaces a ship can…

When I first picked up Gunter Burkhardt’s Tipperary, my mind, jumped to the famous First World War marching song “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” I had always pictured this yearned-for land, so far from the realities of war, as an imagined one, with the name chosen for its musicality perhaps. It was quite the discovery to learn that Tipperary is actually Ireland’s Ireland’s than its wartime hit. In this largely cheerful tile-laying game, Tipperary evokes a similar sense of wistful longing, as players construct their square-edged simulacrums of bucolic perfection and lingering mysticism. This is a game set in a specific place at an unspecified time and, within the loose confines of abstract rules, allows players to fashion an immaculate vision of rural Ireland. Here, the worked landscapes of…

The thing about railways, is that they tend to be quite big, with railway games often trying to emulate this with big boards. Look at something like Ticket to Ride, where you’re creating transcontinental lines across varied continents. Recently we’ve seen two train games that use a handful of cards instead, namely Village Rails and Isle of Trains, with now there’s a third, even smaller train game arriving at the station: Railways. Railways is part of a series of small games called Nano9games, that consist of nine cubes, nine cards and nine dice. Even within those limitations, designer Alban Viard has created a game with a surprising amount of variety packed in. Eight of the nine cards are double-sided, acting as either map cards with rail lines and buildings or…

Hegemony is a high-concept political game where players take the role of one of four parts of a nation: the Capitalists, the Middle Class, the Working Class and the State. Each has different goals and scoring conditions. By manipulating labour markets, infrastructure and influencing the political conversation, they compete – and occasionally collude – to serve their own interests. The early feedback I heard from folks who got to Hegemony before me was qualified enthusiasm, with the ominous caveat that it was possibly ‘more interesting than fun.’ It’s certainly an ambitious idea and once set up the board is a telecom switchboard of tracks and resources. But does it stick the landing? Hegemony is not as intimidating as it first appears. Sure, it’s not a light title and complete newcomers…

We’re reaching an interesting point in the tabletop space, where there is a definite branch off of narrative games. These games are weaving together their own worlds, with stories underpinning the game that often come in a manual the same size as the rulebook. These titanic quests require a time and group commitment to play through the campaign, a feat which brings its own challenges. In Legends of Andor: Eternal Frost, you are offered an adventure that is more of a hearty meal than a banquet and is all the more satisfying because of it. Your group are attempting to save the land in a series of narrative legends that require to complete various tasks carried out in order. It plays like a mixture of a tower defence and resource…

First Kickstarted back in 2019 and now expanded with twelve factions and multiple game modes, Untamed is a two to three player game of anthropomorphised combat. For whatever reason, Foxes, Rhinos and Tigers can face off against Rats, Raccoons and Rabbits, destroying each other’s strongholds in the process. Indeed, destroying one another’s strongholds is the primary objective. At the start of the game, players will take turns choosing one animal faction until they have three separate decks. Each deck is made up of the appropriate animals, various items they possess and the faction’s stronghold. After placing the three stronghold cards in their play area (stacked in any order desired), players will shuffle their cards to form a deck comprising an unlikely union of creatures. You may have noticed an emission…

In the words of Admiral Ackbar, this game was a trap. A honeypot of mechanics and theme designed specifically to lure me in, like a space siren singing sweetly from their jagged asteroid. I like drafting games, clever card play and understand the vast majority of Sci-fi references this game is stuffed with. It was only through seeing other people’s less than enthralled faces that I learned this wasn’t quite the game I was dreaming of. In Black Hole Buccaneers, you are one of several space-faring treasure hunters attempting to pilfer the contents of various wrecks slowly orbiting around a black hole. Each turn, players select from a hand of lovingly rendered pop culture pastiches, ranging from the overt Millennium Flamingo to the more obscure ‘Kevin’ (hats off to the…

Troika! is loved intensely by those who already know it. A science-fantasy roleplaying game that wears its weirdness on its sleeve, its whimsy-drenched setting, bizarre characters and “Is that a joke?” vibes prepare players for boundless adventures across the humpbacked sky. It has a huge community of designers making weird adventures for it, many officially published by Melsonian Arts Council. For those unfamiliar, I like to imagine this as the best way into playing roleplaying games. It has all of the promised expansiveness of Dungeons & Dragons without the 600-page books. It prioritises you, the players, as well as your creative potential, in a world that’s been created for you to expand. It’s a world that’s funny, but not in a way that’s pastiche. It has none of the ironic…

Whilst many seeing a guide to dragons for Dungeons and Dragons may expect stats and figures, this book deftly sidesteps the standard expected format. Presented in a style of an apprentice wizard (Sindri Suncatcher) writing to their family, it has more in common with the classic Dragonology book many of us fantasy-mad folks salivated over as children than it does with the Player’s Handbook. That doesn’t mean the book is lacking - we get to experience dragon alphabet and language, including a handy-dandy list of common words to get translated right back into the dragons’ speech - to aid with your communication skills on adventures. This still may be a disappointment to players who are looking for more beasts to put into their worlds, but that doesn’t mean the book…

The problem with adaptations of well-known books & films is that they are often not as well-known as you’d hope. I reviewed Hellboy: The Dice Game a few issues back, with many players having absolutely no idea who Hellboy was. Some franchises, like Star Wars and Spiderman are culturally ubiquitous, whilst others fall a little foul of fame. I would say Blade Runner lands in this space; you’ve probably heard of it, possibly even seen it, but you might not remember much about it. To recap, Blade Runner is a moody neo-noir story featuring detectives/hunters - the eponymous Blade Runners - running down renegade android Replicants in a neon-dark future Los Angeles. It’s a great setting for RPG. It has a solid style and aesthetic, as who doesn’t want to…

As is the case for many, Jenny’s collection is a joint venture – shared alongside her husband and peppered with occasional suggestions from their 11-year-old son. She walks us through the highlights, lowlights and controversial categorisation. How many games are in your collection? Around 75. I am quite shocked at that figure, mostly because I have been culling lately. The dream is a carefully curated selection of bangers. We’re edging closer to that vision by the day, but there are still some games hanging about that the three of us can’t agree on. When did you first start properly collecting tabletop games? I’ve flirted with it since my teens, but it wasn’t until I discovered my local indie shop that it became a regular expenditure. I was magpie-like at first,…