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CRITICAL ROLE T H E R P G P H E N O M E N O N ’ S S TA R S TA L K S E A S O N 2 tabletopgaming.co.uk
April 2018
GODTEAR | CRITICAL ROLE | HELLBOY
THE GREATEST DESIGNER OF ALL TIME? How Wolfgang Kramer changed everything
HELLBOY
Get fired up for a comic book game like no other
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REVIEWS
S TA R WA R S : L E G I O N | R I S I N G S U N PAL ACE OF MAD KING LUDWIG S T U F F E D FA B L E S | G K R : H E AV Y H I T T E R S | C I V I L I Z AT I O N + M O R E
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Legacy! Miniatures! Whips! The creators of GUILD BALL and DARK SOULS on their most ambitious game yet
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PLAYERS
20-40
MINUTES PLAY TIME
Every year the Emperor walks through the Imperial Gardens to greet the spring, every year he stops beneath the sakura trees, and every year you try to paint his picture. This will be your year!
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Jostle to the front of the crowd ready for your opportunity to shine, or keep yourself in the background only to leap forward at the right moment. But beware! The emperor has a mind of his own.
Sakura is a light tactical game of pushing your luck and pushing your friends. Each player will simultaneously decide how far to move both their character and the Emperor. The player closest to the Emperor when the cherry blossoms are reached will gain a huge amount of prestige, but if you push too far you risk bumping into the Emperor and walking away in disgrace.
TIPS FROM CREATOR REINER KNIZIA
It’s the turn of the century, and it’s time to live large!
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Life offers many temptations and aspiring to reach the echelons of high society comes at a price. Spend your money wisely, but keep some reserves for the challenging days ahead!
TIPS FROM CREATOR REINER KNIZIA
Reiner Knizia’s classic auction game returns in a new edition from Osprey Games! Players must out-bid one another in an effort to acquire the social status to surpass their peers, whilst avoiding scandals which will ruin their reputation. The player who achieves the highest status without going broke will be crowned the winner!
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EDITORIAL EDITOR Matt Jarvis 01778 392 400 [emailprotected] CONTRIBUTORS Sam Desatoff, John Dodd, Owen Duffy, Holly Gramazio, Robert Florence, Sam Illingworth, Richard JansenParkes, Dan Jolin, Joshua King, Andy Leighton, Phil Robinson, Alex Sonechkina, Charlie Theel, Paul Wake, James Wallis, Eric Watson HEAD OF DESIGN & PRODUCTION Lynn Wright
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DESIGNER Richard Hallam COVER IMAGE FROM GODTEAR | CRITICAL ROLE COSPLAY IMAGE BY PAMELA JOY ADVERTISING TO ADVERTISE PLEASE CALL GROUP ADVERTISING MANAGER Claire Ingram 01778 391 179 [emailprotected] GROUP TELESALES EXECUTIVE Ben Jackson 01778 391 129 [emailprotected]
Now Playing... Star Wars: Legion
ADVERTISING DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Nicola Lock 01778 392 420 [emailprotected]
Get in touch
MARKETING MARKETING BRAND MANAGER Nicola Lumb
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MARKETING ASSISTANT Katherine Brown 01778 395 092 [emailprotected]
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PUBLISHED BY ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Claire Ingram Warners Group Publications PLC The Maltings, West Street, Bourne, Lincolnshire, PE10 9PH 01778 391 000 www.warnersgroup.co.uk NEWSTRADE DISTRIBUTION Warners Group Publications PLC 01778 391 150 PRINTING
This publication is printed by Warners 01778 395111 The views expressed by contributors are not necessarily those of the publishers. Every care is taken to ensure that the content of this magazine is accurate, but we assume no responsibility for any effect from errors or omissions. While every care is taken with unsolicited material submitted for publication, we cannot be responsible for loss or damage. While every care is taken when accepting advertisements, we are not responsible for the quality and/or the performance of goods and/or services advertised in this magazine. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) exists to regulate the content of advertisements. Tel: 020 7429 2222 © Warners Group Publications Plc, 2018
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e’re only a handful of months into 2018, but it already feels like we’re seeing some strong contenders for the biggest games of the year. In this issue alone we’ve got reviews of Star Wars: Legion, Rising Sun, Stuffed Fables, GKR: Heavy Hitters and The Palace of Mad King Ludwig just for starters – head to the Played section on page 65 to read our thoughts. Looking ahead at promising big games, Godtear sounds like it’s shaping up to be something very special, with its blend of legacy elements and miniature wargaming offering something completely fresh. The creators of Guild Ball and Dark Souls reveal what to expect on page 18. If you haven’t already heard of Critical Role, you’re in the minority – the roleplaying campaign has millions tuning in. Its stars tell us how the series got its unlikely start and what’s planned (or not) for the second season on page 26. Speaking of fantastic games, we’re looking for your votes to decide the Greatest Games of All Time. Point your web browser at ttgami.ng/greatestgamesvote and let us know your top ten games by April 13th latest to help your picks make the list. While you’re at it, why not enter our competition on page 6 to win a pair of tickets to Tabletop Gaming Live this September? After all, there’s no better place to find your next favourite...
Matt Matt Jarvis Editor
[emailprotected] | @liquidmatt
Q U I C K S TA R T
The game Ultimately still feels we have a very intimate, game that is because it is still quite sort of character-heavy. just the eight of us around a table. Godtear is a miniatures game like no other, says Alex Hall, p18
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Factoring in sleep, work and life, there’s not enough time to play them all even if we wanted to.
Avid board game collectors take us through their libraries, p44
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In this issue 06 AT A GLANCE
Your 30-second guide to the latest in gaming
08 FIRST TURN
For Corey Konieczka, before Star Wars: Rebellion came StarCraft: The Board Game
10 10 OF THE BEST
Start your collection with our pick of trading, collectible and expandable card games
13 ROLE CALL
Catch up with this month’s must-see RPGs
14 ALL THE JAHRES
Get on your bikes and ride! It’s Um Reifenbreite
17 MY FAVOURITE GAME
Former Magic pro and deckbuilder designer Justin Gary on his Fluxx infatuation
ON THE COVER
18 GODTEAR
Stepping into the arena with the ambitious legacy miniatures game from the makers of Guild Ball
26 CRITICAL ROLE
Matthew Mercer and Liam O’Brien talk about taking their D&D campaign to millions
34 HAVE YOU PLAYED?
Heating up the Cold War in Twilight Struggle
37 KICKSTARTING FROM SCRATCH
Art Deck learns from Kickstarter success stories
38 HOW WE MADE
62 TANIA WALKER
44 HOARD GAMERS
65 PLAYED
47 THE INDEPENDENT SHELF
83 PAINTING GUIDE
48 HELLBOY
88 DUNGEON MASTER’S GUIDE TO ROLEPLAYING
The animator-turned-artist on bringing a touch of Disney magic to ladies, tigers and Dracula
From improv comedy to learning to lie: the origins of Don Eskridge’s The Resistance
Our thoughts on what should – and shouldn’t – find its way to your tabletop this month
Meet the tabletop fans in pursuit of the ultimate board game collection IT’S ALL TERROR, ALL ACTION, ALL CAPS IN INDIE HORROR SIM FREAKFACE!!! The comic-book superhero prepares for a hell of a good time in his co-op adventure
Making over the monsters of Mansions of Madness
Learn how your characters can embrace the cliché
91 EVENT REPORT
53 THROUGH THE AGES
Relaxing at the North’s easy-going show, ChillCon
The global domination of area control games
92 CLUB DIRECTORY 95 SHOP SPOTLIGHT 98 TABLETOP TIME MACHINE
54 WORLD OF INDINES Meet the tabletop’s answer to the shared universes of Marvel and DC
57 PLAY IT SMART
Back in the fight with ‘70s wargame Campaign
Settling the debate of analogue versus digital
58 WOLFGANG KRAMER
A true legend of gaming looks back – and forward
61 UNEARTHED ARTEFACTS
We head to the far-flung future to Escape from 100 Million B.C. Wait, what?
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THE GAMES
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6 nimmt! 58 Ancestree 71 Art Deck 37 BattleCON 54 Campaign 98 Civilization 72 Cosmogenesis 73 Cowboy Bebop CCG 81 Dracula’s Feast 62 DreadBall 76 Dungeons & Dragons 26 El Grande 53, 58 Empyreal: Spells 54 and Steam Escape from 100 61 Million B.C. Farlight 80 Fluxx 17, 57 FREAKFACE!!! 47 GKR: Heavy Hitters 69 Godtear 18 A Handful of Stars 78 Heimlich & Co. 58 Hellboy 48 The Lady and 62 the Tiger Magic: The Gathering 44 Mansions of Madness 83 Meeple Circus 76 Millennium Blades 54 Monopoly 44 Mysterium 57 The One Ring RPG 75 The Palace of Mad 70 King Ludwig Paper Tales 77 The Resistance 38 Rising Sun 67 Risk 53 Seventh Cross 54 Star Wars: Legion 66 StarCraft 08 Small World 53 Stuffed Fables 68 Tails of Equestria 79 Terraforming Mars 57 Tikal 53, 58 Torres 58 Trail of Cthulhu 88 Twilight Struggle 53, 34 Welcome to Centerville 74 The White Box 80
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AT A GLANCE
WIN TICKETS TO TABLETOP GAMING LIVE Six pairs of day tickets to the UK’s hottest gaming convention up for grabs Tabletop Gaming Live 2018, our massive celebration of all things gaming taking place in London’s Alexandra Palace this September 29th and 30th, is fast approaching – there are now less than six months until doors open! If you haven’t grabbed your tickets yet, there’s no need to panic – you can still make sure you don’t miss out on seeing the latest releases from Gen Con and coming up at Essen, as well as the biggest games of the year, by heading over to Ticket Factory and searching for “Tabletop Gaming Live”. Tickets start from just £10 (kids get in free), with family bundles and weekend passes available, so you’ll have plenty of cash left to pick up your gaming wishlist at the show. The Tabletop Gaming Live line-up is a gamer’s dream, featuring designers, artists and studios behind huge games such as X-Wing, Warhammer, Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, Arkham Horror, Adventures in Middle-earth, The Walking Dead: All Out War, Ticket to Ride, Hearthstone, Android: Netrunner, Frostgrave, Wild West Exodus, Dystopian Wars, Bushido, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Warhammer: Age of Sigmar Roleplaying Game, The Lost Expedition, Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space, Catan, Legend of the Five Rings, Kings of War and many more. Phew! Whether you’re a fan of board games, miniatures or roleplaying, you won’t be short
of exciting new games to play and talented creators to chat with. As well as getting to meet the creators of your favourite games, there will be plenty of traders stocking thousands of games to pick up through the Saturday and Sunday, plus much more to see and do, all surrounded by the beautiful scenery of Alexandra Palace. To celebrate the countdown to the first Tabletop Gaming Live, we’ve got six pairs of day tickets to the show up for grabs – the perfect chance to bring along a partner, friend, club member or whoever you’d like!
Even if you’ve already booked your tickets, why not enter anyway and invite even more people to what’s sure to be a weekend packed with fun, laughs, plenty to see and – of course – lots and lots of games? If you want the chance to win two tickets to the show, head over to tabletopgaming. co.uk/competitions and simply answer the question: where will Tabletop Gaming Live 2018 be held? If you’ve read this story, there’s no excuse not to know! Find full terms and conditions on the website. Closing date June 30th 2018.
ADVANCE TICKE
NOW ON SALTES
Book and save today: theticketfactory .com
25
Magic: The Gathering’s latest set Masters 25 includes iconic cards from the entire quarter-century history of the card game
LV-426
KNOW YOUR NUMBERS Sons of Anarchy, Star Trek: Ascendancy and Firefly: The Game studio Gale Force Nine has announced a co-op game based on Aliens
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Duelosaur Island is a two-player follow-up to Dinosaur Island due out later in 2018
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Zombicide: Invader, the first sci-fi entry in the co-op series, hits Kickstarter this month
The first proper sequel to Uno in 47 years updates the ubiquitous simple card game with two separate stacks for players to discard onto
Blitz Bowl is a compact version of Blood Bowl out later this year that takes just 40 minutes to play
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We asked…
In honour of April Fools’ Day, what’s the game that makes you laugh the most?
You said…
KICK-AS
Golden Ace awards name their Games of the Year
Cards Against Humanity, in a despicable way. Matthew Stevens
arguably the best home advantage, cycling smash hit Flamme Rouge. The expert As d’Or award – the equivalent to the Kennerspiel des Jahres – was collected by Jacob Fryxelius’ excellent simulation of survival on the Red Planet, Terraforming Mars. On the shortlist was a pair of similarly lauded runners-up: cow-herding Euro masterpiece Great Western Trail and Lovecraftian living card game spin-off Arkham Horror: The Card Game. Lastly, the children’s category was topped by the delightful Outfoxed!, a clue-gathering game where players try to work out who took Mrs. Plumpert’s delicious pot pie by ruling out suspects using an evidence scanner. It pipped Kullerhexe (also Recommended by the Kinderspiel des Jahres) and Boom, Bang, Gold, a frantic timed dexterity game about lobbing dynamite and grabbing gold. If you’re wondering what picked up the As d’Or awards last year, allow us to jog your memory: Unlock! took the grand prize, joined by the ‘expert’ Scythe and kid-friendly Go Cuckoo!
Cyanide & Happiness’ Joking Hazard is worth a mention. Many awkward laughs, especially when your mother-in-law sits down and asks what all the fun is about... @cptnmingo I haven’t even had to play Telestrations for it to have me in tears. Sometimes I laugh just because of how much people nearby are laughing. Michael Heron Cards Against Humanity can be a giggle, but the one that’s made us burst out laughing is Scrawl. Andrew Barber An average game can be made awesome and make me laugh hysterically if played with the right people. Carl King Cards Against Humanity. Become a Christmas tradition to play with the in-laws, and they find it as hilarious as us ‘youngsters’. Andy Leighton
A NEW PATH
Second edition of fantasy RPG Pathfinder kicks off this summer reworked, with a single proficiency ranking based on each character’s attributes and level replacing the need for multiple different numbers. What won’t change is the world and story, with first-edition scenarios supported even after they stop being created next July. The playtest rules will be available as a free PDF download this summer, but are also coming out as a limited-edition 400-page book bundled with some maps and the seven-scenario playtest adventure Doomsday Dawn.
Kittens in a Blender. Garett Seebruch For me, a terrible Donkey Kong game from the past. This was the ‘Mario’. Chris Beadsmoore
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Ceramite White Dark Reaper Dawnstone Doombull Brown Dorn Yellow Drakenhof Nightshade Khorne Red Kislev Flesh Krieg Khaki Leadbelcher
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STAGES
Since there is a large amount of variety in the crew of the Enterprise, combined with matching uniforms, this guide is split into general sections covering the uniforms and tech, but splitting the skin, hair and other details into different sections. This will allow us to cover every element of each crew member, giving you a guide for the full boxset contents.
STAGE 2 Apply a highlight of Dawnstone, focusing on the hard edges and folds.
COMMAND AND HELM
STAGE 1 Apply a basecoat of Altdorf Guard Blue.
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STAGE 3 Add a line highlight of Wild Rider Red, focusing on the hard edges.
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SCIENCE AND MEDICAL
STAGE 2 Add a dot highlight of Slaanesh Grey, focusing on the corners and the top of the raised folds.
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STAGE 1 Apply a basecoat of Sotek Green.
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STAGE 3 Apply a fine highlight of Blue Horror to the edges and raised folds.
DARK SKIN
SKIN
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10 RPGs YOU MUST PLAY IN 2018!
LIGHT SKIN
ENGINEERING, SECURITY AND OPERATIONS
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MEDICAL JACKET
UNIFORMS BODYSUIT
UNDERSHIRT
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Rhinox Hide. PLUS OUR REVIEW OF D UNGEONS & DRAGONS’ NE W E XPANSION STAGE 1 Apply a basecoat of
January 2018
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STAGE 3 Apply a highlight of Kislev Flesh, focusing down the centre and top of the head.
STAGE 3 Apply a line highlight of Blue Horror, focusing on the corners and raised folds.
February 2018
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tabletopgaming.co.uk
STAGE 4 Apply a final fine highlight of Pallid Wych Flesh, only adding small lines and dots over the previous coat.
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ANDROID SKIN
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BOGUS BOARD GAMES Do you own a fake?
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LEARNING EVOLVED
Games aren’t just help you boost fun – they can also your brainpower. Professors and students tell us the cranium-cram about Darwinian delight ming benefits of Evolution
GAMES
FALLOUT Words by Anna
Blackwell
Wasteland warfare Nuclear
JANUARY 2018
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Abaddon Black Agrax Earthshade Alaitoc Blue Altdorf Guard Blue Averland Sunset Baneblade Brown Blue Horror Bugman’s Glow Cadian Fleshtone Celestra Grey
STUFFED FABLES | FAKE BOARD
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FALLOUT: WASTELAND WARFARE |
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PAINTS & TECHNIQUES
PHWOAR! We go behind the the action-packed post-apocalyptic scenes of minis game
STUFFED FABLES | CIVILIZATION: A NEW DAWN | VENGEANCE | THE MAKING OF DOMINION | AZUL STAR SAGA PAINTING TIPS | PHOTOSYNTHESIS | MASSIVE DARKNESS HNEFATAFL: THE VIKING BOARD HUNT FOR THE RING | TABLETOP LIVESTEAMERS | RAXXON | AND GAME MORE
£5.25
A decade after it first shook up the roleplaying landscape, Pathfinder is getting a second edition. The upcoming revision of the D&D 3.5-based RPG, which launches into a playtest this August 2nd followed by a full release in 2019, will include several major updates to gameplay. Among the biggest is a newly streamlined action system that gives every character three actions and one reaction every round. The way bonuses and stats are calculated has also been
Display until 29/1/18
The As d’Or awards are France’s answer to the fabled Spiel des Jahres, so their winners are always worth paying attention to. This year’s biggest prize – the ‘Golden Ace’ Game of the Year – went to Azul, the tile-laying stunner from Michael Kiesling. Kiesling, of course, is no stranger to critical acclaim, having claimed the Spiel des Jahres twice for Tikal and Torres alongside Wolfgang Kramer. Following closely behind were nominees Dice Forge, Twin It! and the game with
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FIRST TURN
COREY KONIECZKA The Fantasy Flight brain behind Star Wars: Rebellion reflects on his first lead designer credit: 2007’s epic adaptation of Blizzard PC game StarCraft Interview by Dan Jolin
BACKGROUND “As far back as I can remember, I made silly little board games with my brothers, based on whatever we were playing at the time. But the first serious amateur game I worked on was shortly after Magic came out, when some friends and I worked together to make our own quote-unquote ‘CCG’, drawing on index cards. Once I’d turned my hobby into a job at Fantasy Flight Games in 2005, my first few years were a learning process. The most useful experience was working on the new edition of Warrior Knights. My boss Christian T. Petersen was so impressed he said, ‘Hey would you like to take a crack at designing a StarCraft game?’ I said, ‘Sure. Really!?’ I loved StarCraft, so I was very excited.”
of feeling like a single match of StarCraft it felt like the entire campaign. Of course, we knew it would appeal to fans of StarCraft, but we also wanted it to appeal to a broader audience as well – the kind of players who like other games like Twilight Imperium and whatnot.”
SETUP “Blizzard was involved early on. We talked to the design team that was actually working on StarCraft II at the time. Then once we had a game design we flew out there and played it with them and they didn’t really have too much feedback. They said, ‘It feels like StarCraft. Good job.’”
HOW TO PLAY
“The biggest influence on StarCraft was the Game of Thrones board game that Chris had designed. It has a very similar order system, though he suggested we take that and have the players stack orders on top of each other, so you can block what other people are doing. Also, the idea that each player has a special objective that can win them the game was inspired very much by the old Dune game, by the creators of Cosmic Encounter.”
“Two to six players each take on the role of one of the races in StarCraft: the Zerg, the Terrans or the Protoss. You start on your home planet with a couple of troops and a base, and the board is made up of a bunch of different interlocking planets, which players try to conquer to give them access to new resources so they can build bigger stuff via technology. By capturing certain strategically important areas on planets you can get conquest points, which you accumulate until the player to reach a certain amount of conquest points wins.”
OBJECT
END OF THE GAME
“In our early discussions we asked: ‘Who is this aimed at? What are we trying to accomplish here?’ We decided we didn’t just want to replicate the video game. We didn’t want a single map on which everybody was just building bases and attacking in a Risk-like way. So the pitch was to zoom out, so instead
“It sold great. It was a very well-received game. In terms of my personal relationship with it as a designer, I feel I’ve grown and changed a lot. If I were to go back and do it again, I’d probably find a way to make a game that didn’t require a 40-page rulebook. It’s a beast to read! There’s a lot of rules, a lot of exceptions and little things going on. Over the last few years I’ve tried to move away from the simulationist type of game design approach and now prefer to abstract things a bit more.”
COMPONENTS
If I were to go back and do it again, I’d probably make a game that didn’t require a 40-page rulebook.
STRATEGY TIPS
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“I would suggest that anyone designing their first game try to keep it simple. [Laughs] It’s better to start small and learn the ropes that way. I was at FFG for a couple of years just doing smaller projects before I moved on to this. Everything you create doesn’t have to be huge and epic.”
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STEAMFORGED GAMES ®
Guild Ball is a bloody mob football game of intense action and high stakes! Complete with everything an aspiring coach needs to play, Kick Off! is the perfect entry point for the amazing world of Guild Ball, a bloody mob football game of intense action and high stakes! This competitive two player board game takes between 60 and 90 minutes to play and is for players ages 14+
Take control of iconic characters from the video game and fight your way through hordes of enemies before facing monstrously powerful bosses! Dark Souls™: The Card Game is a deck evolution card game; simple to learn, but with a huge amount of depth. Bring your friends, and Prepare to Die!
Godtear is an exciting scenario-driven legacy miniatures game for two players taking less than an hour to play. You’ll assemble a warband, chosen from the greatest champions of this Age. Defeat your rivals in the search for ultimate power in the form of precious Godtears. Do you have what it takes to claim the power of the Fallen Gods or will you merely be a sorry footnote in your opponent’s odyssey? Find out in Godtear!
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ARKHAM HORROR: THE CARD GAME
There’s no need to be a horror fan or Lovecraft lover to appreciate the polished co-op gameplay in this spin-off of the globetrotting board game, although it will help get you into the tense atmosphere. With tight mechanics and mysteries to uncover, Arkham Horror: The Card Game isn’t just one of the greatest recent card games – it’s one of the finest games in years, full stop!
Start your collection: The core set includes the complete Night of the Zealot campaign, which is best followed by the Dunwich Legacy expansion (and then its connected Mythos packs, which continue the story).
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MAGIC: THE GATHERING
It’s a classic for a reason. The first collectible card game is still one of the absolute best around, thanks to simple but deep mechanics and a highly active community that is all too happy to introduce newcomers. It looks great, plays fast and there’s 25 years (and counting) of rich lore and meta to dig into if you find yourself under its spell. Start your collection: Duel decks are a great way of jumping right in with minimal effort, thanks to their ready-to-play balanced pairs of decks – another option is two separate planeswalker decks. Once you’re ready to try building your own custom deck, the latest Deckbuilder’s Toolkit is a great instant collection to play around with. Or ask at your local hobby store for a free learn to play deck, which are designed as simple intros to the game.
OF THE BEST
TRADING, COLLECTIBLE AND EXPANDABLE CARD GAMES Looking for your next gaming obsession? You won’t find much better than these card games, with hundreds or even thousands of cards to fine-tune your custom deck. Prepare to surrender your free time – and your wallet! Chosen by Matt Jarvis
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A GAME OF THRONES: THE CARD GAME
It doesn’t matter if you can tell your Lannister from your Tyrell – this atmospheric head-to-head battle for the Iron Throne is a thrilling card game that perfectly captures the scheming feel of the books and TV series, juggling military might and the power of influence. It can be played with just one other person or with multiple opponents, making it a great choice for groups of friends who can’t get enough of the fantasy universe.
Start your collection: Grab the secondedition core set – you’ll need two copies if you want to really get into the competitive side of things (or play with more people), but one will serve beginners just fine. Once you’re ready to take things further, the deluxe expansions and a couple of chapter packs from the latest cycle will give you plenty to explore.
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POKÉMON TRADING CARD GAME
I choose you! Like its video game counterparts, Pokémon remains agelessly entertaining, bringing pocket monster battles to life with an approachable twist on the Magic formula mixed with the games’ signature rock-paper-scissors elemental combat. It’s got some of the most recognisable characters around (Pikachu! Squirtle!) and is generally a bit cheaper to keep up with than some of its competitors – it’s not just for kids!
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LEGEND OF THE FIVE RINGS: THE CARD GAME
The ‘90s collectible card game-turned-living card game has been given a breath of fresh air by its recent return, opening up its feudal Japan-inspired world and tense, brutal combat for a new wave of players to enjoy. Action centres around the interplay between each player’s dynasty and conflict decks, with an engaging mechanic that requires players to invest ‘fate’ in cards to keep them on the battlefield – one extra turn can decide the outcome of an entire match. It’s complex, deep and riveting stuff. Start your collection: The main box, which includes enough cards to play with any one of the seven clans. From there, move onto the Imperial cycle of dynasty packs.
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THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE CARD GAME
Another co-op entry in a generally competitive crowd, The Lord of the Rings: TCG is a fantastic way to explore the world of Middleearth outside of Tolkien’s stories with a challenging and atmospheric adventure. Players use their heroes to play against the story deck, dealing with encounters as they defeat enemies and uncover new locations. Although the going can get rough, the immersive theme and wealth of quests available means that it’s the ideal choice for Tolkien obsessives. Start your collection: There’s plenty to get through in the core set (no need to doubleup this time), but once you’ve exhausted its scenarios the Shadows of Mirkwood cycle is the next best thing. After that, following the packs in the order of their release isn’t a bad way to go – and it’ll keep you occupied for a while to come.
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ANDROID: NETRUNNER
The living card game reboot of Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield’s tense hacker-versuscorporation is a game like no other, conjuring a thrilling race to either breach heavily protected servers (as the runner) or complete secret agendas without having your data stolen (as the corp). The asymmetric setup means there’s plenty of individual strategy to perfect on either side of the conflict, with a huge level of advanced play for those that invest in crafting their custom deck. A brilliant blend of bluffing, luck and head-to-head tactics, it’s a marvel. Start your collection: The new Revised Core Set has the latest batch of tournament-legal cards with revamped artwork. It also means you won’t need to pick up the Genesis and Spin cycle packs, and can move straight onto the more recent cycles. If you’re after a more story-driven mode, the Terminal Directive expansion has some interesting ideas worth checking out.
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ASHES: RISE OF THE PHOENIXBORN
Ashes is one of the best-looking games around thanks to some truly incredible artwork, but it’s also one of the more inventive CCGs out there. Dice are used as resources, with players taking main and side actions each round before refreshing their hand and pool of resources. The individual format gives Ashes a unique feel – and it’s also a little easier to get into, with less of a reliance on deckbuilding and a gentler release schedule. Start your collection: The main box packs in two pre-built decks and dice, with plenty of customisation options. After that, expansion decks offer up new characters (but you’ll need the dice from the base set), while the Song of Soaksend and Laws of Lions deluxe expansions go one step further with new dice, deck boxes, tokens and further gameplay elements.
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FINAL FANTASY TRADING CARD GAME Designer by a former Magic pro, FFTCG is more than a simple clone reskinned with the popular Japanese RPG series. It adds an interesting option to pay for cards by discarding other cards, meaning there’s no need to wait around to summon powerful spells and monsters, as well as the EX Burst mechanic that offers the chance to benefit from taking damage. It’s an exciting and unique idea that works wonders, especially as matches tend to wrap up quickly. Start your collection: If you’re already a Final Fantasy fan, you’ll no doubt want to grab the starter set based on the game you like most. That’s fine. Otherwise, look into the play style of each deck and go with the one that best fits your interests. You’ll need to pick up two to play with a friend, as there are no bundles available.
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HEARTHSTONE
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Start your collection: The free-to-play Hearthstone app on iOS, Android or PC will let you play indefinitely without paying a penny, although those who find themselves hooked will undoubtedly find themselves buying one of the randomised in-app packs of digital cards.
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Yes, yes, we know it’s a digital card game, but that doesn’t stop Hearthstone from being a fantastic entry in the genre with both familiar concepts and fresh ideas. It’s ties to the world of Warcraft are unimportant, as they’re quickly hidden behind Hearthstone’s fast and furious card-battling – matches play out in a matter of minutes, and managing your virtual collection takes mere seconds. It’s also technically the cheapest game on this list to try out, as the app costs nothing to download.
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Role Call
This month sees a remastered return for an old favourite, a trip to the French Revolution and a stay in a haunted hotel Words by John Dodd
SAVAGE WORLDS: HIGH-SPACE
The newest edition of the popular High-Space rules for Savage Worlds, with a particular focus on cinematic playing over more grounded games like Traveller. The universe is a bright and shiny place, filled with all the delights that high technology could bring, but the characters know better, and it’s down to them to investigate the truth. Storyweaver | $20
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CALL OF CTHULHU: REIGN OF TERROR
Containing full details of Paris at the time of the French Revolution, this book has a two-part scenario and a number of adventure seeds for playing in the historical time period. The material within can be played solo or integrated into the existing campaign for Horror on the Orient Express. Chaosium | £25
FROM BEYOND: DISTRESS CALL Part one in the Starfinder-compatible From Beyond adventure path. The characters are sent to investigate a distress signal from a mining vessel orbiting a brown dwarf in a desolate star system. The signal was sent only to the nearest colony, then went dark. When the characters arrive, all is in darkness. Angry Golem | $8
THE STRANGE: THE HUM
A new scenario for The Strange, detailing the Grand Bavarian Hotel, known to many as the most haunted hotel in America and now a popular tourist attraction for the ‘Amazing Tesla Science Engine’. But the engine has been stolen, and the hauntings are becoming more frequent, as well as other phenomena, such as a low frequency hum that can cause madness, and worse… Monte Cook | £5
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One of the most celebrated roleplaying game setting books of all time, re-released for RuneQuest Classic after years of being unavailable. Covering several thousand square miles of land and with one of the most dangerous wilderness campaigns ever created, this is not for beginners of any kind. Chaosium | £15
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All the
Jahres Replaying the winners of the Spiel des Jahres so you don’t have to Words and photographs by James Wallis
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UM REIFENBREITE
et’s recap for a second. The year is 1992, the Spiel des Jahres has been running for fourteen years and is, along with the Origins Awards, the most prestigious gong for games in the world. It’s seen two winners by British designers, four with a British theme, two that are not actually games with a board and four that are roll-dice-and-movepiece games. Make that five. Um Reifenbreite is the first Dutch winner of the Spiel des Jahres, and – unless you count camel racing – it’s still the only one based on a real sport. In it you control a team of cyclists; if the board reminds you of 2017’s delightful Flamme Rouge,, you’re not a million miles off track. Cycling games tend to cover the same ground in more or less the same way: hills, road surfaces, crashes, getting puffed out and the all-important drafting rules. Drafting, or riding in another rider’s slipstream, is at the heart of road racing, and it’s at the heart of Um Reifenbreite too – that’s a good thing because otherwise the most striking thing about the game would be the cover and board. Pause for a moment and look at those. The box is an aberration; it’s the long format that was big in the ‘70s and ‘80s, but by the ‘90s was looking decidedly oldfashioned. Long boxes are fragile and they’re difficult to store, but the size means
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Year of win: 1992 Designer: Rob Bontenbal Number of players: 2-4 Playing time: 30-90 minutes Worthy winner? Yes Worth playing now? Not a must-play, but definitely worth a try Availability: Rare in the UK Price: €15 on ebay.de
there’s more space for the cover, and this is a great cover. Inside, the board is just as good – it too is decorated with humorous art by Jan van Haasteren, the legendary Dutch cartoonist who still designs many of Jumbo’s range of jigsaws and also drew the art for the game pieces. It gives the game a wonderful coherency of style and tone – if you get bored you can stare at the illustrations until it’s your turn. Once you’ve got your pieces onto the track – four per team, one team per player – the race is on. The piece at the front moves first, so the pieces at the back won’t immediately crash into the pack. On each piece’s turn you can roll two dice and move up to that many spaces, or spend an energy card worth five or six and add a die to it. But you have to deduct the number on the space your piece is on, and that makes corners tricky and hills properly punishing, because if a rider rolls a negative number they have to dismount for the turn. It’s the drafting that makes the difference. If your piece is directly behind another cyclist and they make a good move, you can immediately declare that you’re drafting them, moving the same number of spaces without rolling to stay right behind them Chains of riders form up, often all the same team, just as in actual road
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While a short race can be over in 15 minutes, you could spend several evenings running a whole season.
racing. This is not only elegant game design, it works really well in play because a lot of the game’s strategy lies in blocking other riders’ paths, particularly around corners. There’s a peloton, riders make breaks; it all feels like proper racing. It’s a tight, exciting game experience. Except... except that it’s fundamentally, unapologetically, a roll-and-move game. On most turns you roll two dice and move up to that many spaces, and that randomness makes a mockery of any clever tactics or plans you may have. What’s more, if you roll a seven then you have to draw an event card, which may be good or bad. The cards do add variety and unexpected happenings to the game (saddle
sores, anyone?) but a tighter design wouldn’t need this enforced jollity. On the other hand, without the bike spanners that a wild roll or unexpected card throws into the mix, the game would be much drier. The cards bring another problem. There has never been an English-language edition of Um Reifenbreite, and Google Translate chokes badly on a mix of cycling jargon and game mechanics. Auf Achse (the 1987 Spiel des Jahres winner) presents the same problem to non-German speakers, but the difference between that and Um Reifenbreite is that Auf Achse is not worth bothering to play. The game doesn’t end when one rider finishes; every one of your team will
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Next month: Did the Spiel des Jahres jury really give the 1993 award to a variant of Liar’s Dice? Or is it all a… Bluff?
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score for their position, so you mustn’t leave stragglers behind, and a player who maintains a tight team grouping will beat someone who abandoned a team member or two on a punishing hill climb. The board has multiple possible courses and, while a short race can be over in 15 minutes, you could cheerfully spend several evenings running a whole season of races. Roll-and-move mechanics were fine in the ‘90s; not simply an accepted part of game design but something that the audience of the time expected and enjoyed. Tastes have changed and, while Um Reifenbreite is still fun and engrossing, it’s unquestionably showing its age. Any modern designer could improve it with a few minutes of thought, but it has its charms and some of its ideas are really smart. If you want a less luck-based cycling game then Flamme Rouge or even 1991’s Breaking Away will suit your needs but, even with its failings, Um Reifenbreite is a tour de force.
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DreadBall is the fast-paced futuristic sports game set in the galaxy’s most hi-tech arenas. Choose from the agile Ninth Moon Tree Sharks or the unstoppable Draconis All-Stars robot team before taking to the pitch and going for glory. Outwit your rival coach with tactical set pieces, push your luck with daring plays, or just smash your opponent to the ground with brutal tackles. When the game begins, anything goes…
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05/03/2018 09:42 08/03/2018 16:30
my favourite game
JUSTIN GARY
The Magic: The Gathering pro turned deckbuilder designer explains why he finds the simplicity of Fluxx inspiring
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’m going to avoid the easy answer here and exclude Magic: The Gathering from my list of favourite games. I started my career in gaming when I became US national champion in 1997 and world team champion in 2003 so it will always have a special place in my heart. Putting aside the easy answer, I am going to choose a game that boils down the essence of a trading card game into a single, elegant package. That game is Fluxx. Elegance is that which is pleasingly simple. Elegant games get a lot of depth and variety of experience from very few rules and components. Go is a classic example of a game with very simple rules and enormous depth. In my original deckbuilding game, Ascension, I tried to boil down the essence of deckbuilding into a single centre deck with only a few extra piles of cards and tokens required to play. Building deep, strategic gameplay with very few components and rules has always been a passion of mine as a designer. I work hard to ensure that the game remains simple to learn with a lot of strategic depth. I’ve since taken what I learned from nine years of working on Ascension to build a new deckbuilding game, Shards of Infinity, that even further reduces the number of components required to play by removing
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all side decks and tokens. Judging by how hooked everyone at the office is on playing, I think we’ve done a good job maintaining fun and strategic depth with even fewer components than Ascension. While Magic is a brilliant game because of its ability to completely transform with each new card played, it is very complex to learn and teach, with many rules and corner-case timing considerations. Fluxx boils down the collectible card game to its essence. The starting rules fit on one card that sits in the centre of the table. Each player starts with a three-card hand, then draws and plays one card per turn. Players can change the rules by simply playing new cards, including goal cards that dictate how you win. This is elegance at its finest. There are countless Fluxx variations – Zombie Fluxx, Star Fluxx, Stoner Fluxx, etc. – that keep the elegance of the original game, but add a themed twist, referencing humorous tropes and allowing cards to change the rules accordingly. Stoner Fluxx even includes a handy ‘Whose Turn Is It?’ card to remind you in case you space out. Speaking of Stoner Fluxx, here is a pro tip for aspiring game designers: always test new game designs with a group of stoner friends if you can. They are a great barometer to see if your game is too complicated. If you can keep their focus and attention, you’ve probably got something pretty fun on your hands. And if things get too confusing? It never hurts to give a friendly reminder that “It’s your turn.”
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Fluxx boils down the collectible card game to its essence.
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13/03/2018 13:40
TEARING IT UP After Guild Ball and Dark Souls, Steamforged’s most ambitious project yet sees the worlds of miniatures and board games collide. Lead developer Alex Hall reveals why Godtear is the biggest leap for the studio to date – and what we can expect
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Words by Matt Jarvis ow do you follow a smash-hit spiritual successor to one of the most influential sports miniatures games of all time? In the case of Steamforged, the British studio behind Blood Bowl rival Guild Ball, it’s with a record-breaking multimillion crowdfunding campaign for a board game based on video game series Dark Souls. With a card game spin-off of Dark Souls and another high-profile video game adaptation, Resident Evil 2, since tucked under its belt, the team is now no stranger to tackling grand projects, but its next undertaking might just be its most ambitious yet. It even comes with a grand-sounding title. Godtear. Lofty enough to be in the tier of gods. Or to make a deity weep. Or rip them apart, if you ignore the official pronunciation and stick with the visual wordplay. Puns don’t come more ostentatious than this. True to its name, the game is aiming high. The heart of its action is scenario-based arena skirmishes between two teams of mighty champions and their submissive followers, who gang together as a single warband. The teams battle to wipe out their rivals and claim objectives on a hex-based grid, scoring points over up to five rounds for ultimate victory. Where Godtear breaks away from so many objective-driven skirmish games, though, is in its introduction of one of the hottest words currently in board games: legacy.
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GODTEAR
ABOVE Rangosh is one of the champions available to play as. He’s... sizeable OPPOSITE The game’s early access kit is being used to help refine its rules before a full release
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That’s right: this isn’t just a miniatures game. It’s a legacy miniatures game, joining the ranks of much-discussed board games Gloomhaven, Charterstone, SeaFall, Pandemic Legacy and more in its use of permanent changes to its rules, characters and board across multiple plays. Each Godtear match begins with the selection of a specific scenario, each with unique rules and gameplay conditions. As an example, the game’s pre-release early access kit includes a mode called ‘growth’, where a central objective area expands at the end of each turn, providing more hexes that can be captured by a player’s champion planting a banner and subsequently moving the game’s score tracker closer to their side. But enemy champions can crush banners by moving onto their space, moving the tracker back and creating the dynamic tug-of-war tension at the heart of the game. “Something I’ve highlighted as a big issue with a lot of this-style game: if we have a scenario where there are objectives directly outside of your deployment zone and we have just a core rule that followers cannot move on objective hexes, that means you then have to park a champion who isn’t allowed to get involved in the action because you need them parked on there to try and grab you battle points,”
says lead Godtear developer Alex Hall. “That just seemed weird to me, whereas having this thing where at the start of the game they just move forward, throw their banner down on that objective and banners are very easy to get rid of – all you need to do is move a champion onto the hex that a banner is on and it’s removed. As soon as you move onto the hex that it’s on, it’s gone. So the obvious counterplay to that is set up someone that’s slightly quicker on that side of the board when you’re deploying and you just indeed on nipping them up and crunching that banner. So then your opponent has a choice of: do I guard this objective a bit under the assumption they’re coming up, or do I throw my banner on there, take what I get and keep going?” Ending a round with the token on your side of the board grabs a set amount of points – starting with a single point for the first round and increasing by one until the fourth round, when it begins to decrease in value again. Five points wins the game completely, so matches are guaranteed to conclude within three to five rounds, and the varying point values mean that players can use different tactics to try and pull an early victory or last-minute turnaround out of the bag. “If you want to go with a super early champion build to try and win the game by turn three every time, that’s
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Quite often a lot of miniatures games don’t tend to be that characterheavy. We have a game that is quite sort of characterheavy.
Each champion comes with their own group of followers, themed around the character’s distinct look and play style. While each champion has to be accompanied by their specific followers for the moment, unlike Guild Ball’s teams, Godtear’s characters aren’t aligned with a particular faction – players can draft a unique team from any combination of heroes and have them work together. It’s an ambitious design that Hall admits is tough to balance. “That’s something that we’re super proud of with Guild Ball and something that, when we do erratas and revisions and season updates, we’re trying to make sure that every character [feels different],” he explains. “It’s not easier in Guild Ball, but guilds have their identity and you always need to try and paint within the lines of that identity. You don’t want to make a fisherman that does a load of damage, because that doesn’t fit what fishermen do. It’s almost harder once you’ve got those kind of faction-based restrictions, because when anyone can do anything – Godtear’s an entirely faction-less system, you can put anyone with anyone, so trying to make all of these champions so that they feel different and interesting, the more upgrade options you put on there, the more you’re potentially cutting off options for just cool new champions that have different things. “Something that I know Mat [Hart, Steamforged cofounder and creative director] mentioned at times and sometimes we agree on, sometimes we disagree on, is it’d be cool if at some point down the line we have a dwarf champion who has some keywords on his card that means he can benefit any other dwarves. So rather than necessarily focusing on the animosity side, focusing on the kind of ‘this race can benefit its own race’. The worry that you come into then is: does just running the same race become optimal? And trying to get that fine balance of being able to have
something you can try and do,” says Hall. “If you want to go for a late-game one where it’s a bunch of slow tanky guys that slog their way up, then you almost accept you’re giving up turn one and two. But once it hits turns three you’re in a really strong position to be able to win turn three and four. It just adds a really interesting dynamic into the selection or your warband and the strategy you want to try and go for to win.”
WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS
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Champions can be mixed and matched between four classes, whether powerful slayers, tough guardians, area-ofeffect-casting maelstroms or manipulative shapers, opening up the chance to form a diverse force or specialised unit. “Currently we’re looking at a maximum of four-versusfour in terms of champions, but the main one we’re going to be testing is three-versus-three, which is my preference in terms of the size because you have the kind of juggling act of we don’t want to make it so this game takes up too much space to play, but we don’t want to make it feel really confined and small in scale,” Hall reveals. “So I feel with the size of the hex grid we have to play with, threeversus-three is where it’s at its strongest.”
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GODTEAR
ABOVE Godtear’s legacy aspects might let players permanently upgrade their characters’ abilities over multiple matches
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it so that we can have the dwarf champion have like an aura that he can place that benefits other models that are dwarves without making it so that every time you see dwarves, the whole force is dwarves. That balancing act is the one that I’ve found hard; making sure that we can have these interesting interactions without making players feel like they need to because they’re suboptimal if you don’t do it.” It’s these characters that are at the centre of Godtear, serving as a focal point of the game’s legacy elements. When we speak, Hall reveals that the legacy aspects are still in the early stages of being blended with the core hex-based combat, but suggests that players may be able to upgrade their champions’ abilities over the course of multiple matches. “Rangosh is a big minotaur with a massive whip – that whip is used primarily to drag people in, and then his level one upgrade might be you increase damage to the whip [or] you add a way of inflicting some sort of condition – we’ve got things called blights and boons which are your buffs and debuffs,” he says. “Or maybe it completely flips it on its head and, rather than you dragging them in, you move over to them. That could be three examples of the level one talent you get when you upgrade Rangosh, and you choose which of those three you want. But the other two you can never have in that campaign. It may end up being deeper
than that, but we’re still playing around with it a lot and the complications come in in terms of looking at the amount of design space you have to work in. Because the moment we give Rangosh an option to flip that on its head, so rather than him dragging people in he goes towards them, then if we give a character where their thing is that they can hook someone and drag themselves in, either Rangosh is treading on their design space or they’re treading on his.” With gamers spending hours assembling, customising, painting and playing with models, there is a sense of attachment to any miniatures game. Godtear plans to take this personal investment even further, developing its champions’ place in the universe alongside their progression as elements in the gameplay. “Ultimately we have a game that is quite sort of characterheavy,” Hall explains. “Quite often a lot of miniatures games don’t tend to be that character-heavy. So you look at a game of Warhammer 40,000, for example. You have your army and you may have your force commanders and whatnot, who are named, but they’re still just part of the army. Whereas once you break it down into a more skirmish-level miniatures game, as we did with Guild Ball, you can add a lot more character into those models. Once you’ve got characters and people invested in models, it becomes very interesting once you start looking at ways in which you put across a campaign that can permanently change what that character can do.
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“I really like the idea of doing an organised play pack that’s like the origin stories of three champions and it comes with alternate sculpts for those three champions. Say Rangosh is currently functioning as like a controller/support character where he focuses a lot on repositioning, perhaps in the organised play pack where you just come and play the game for a day, that has some of the more legacy components to match a really fighty Rangosh that represents what he was like when he was younger and how he got to where he is now. So rather than necessarily focusing on the more tournament side of things, focus on that narrative campaign.” It won’t only be the characters that forge their own unique stories. Godtear’s hex map will also be impacted by the outcome of battles. “It becomes even more interesting when you start to look at, like, a campaign map that has different locations on it that can permanently change based on what’s happened in a game that someone else has had in that campaign,” Hall says. As an example, he suggests a growth match could end with each player selecting a hex that remains as permanent terrain for future games. Another option ties the traits of champions and their connection to the landscape together, with specific environments gaining abilities activated by certain races or classes, such as woods able to be traversed more quickly by elves.
Hopefully you can get an emotional attachment to the places you’re fighting in.
“Hopefully you can almost get like an emotional attachment to the places you’re fighting in as much as the people you’re fighting with and against,” Hall says. “You don’t have any elves and you end up fighting someone that does have elves and you are going on the plains where there’s a load of this terrain around that the elf player can benefit from. All of a sudden, you really don’t want to be fighting at the plains. But I think that’s a really cool thing to play around with – this idea of the permanence as you’re playing as it develops your characters and makes them feel more like yours.”
ENTER THE ARENA
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Once the champions have deployed to the arena, it’s time to do battle. Each turn is divided into two phases, beginning with a strategic activation of each side’s entire warband simultaneously before swapping to an alternating format during the following tactical phase. Each activation allows for two different actions, condensed to movement, calling a banner and using any of the skills listed on the champion’s card, which is flipped over between phases for different sets of abilities in each phase. The strategic phase focuses on positioning models and strengthening them with buffs before the action kicks off in the tactics phase, meaning that models might be able to move further in the first half of each turn before slowing in the second if their movement stats are affected, for instance.
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GODTEAR
“Sometimes they’re the same, sometimes they’re different, sometimes they’re zero,” says Hall. “It entirely depends on when we want a model to be mobile. It’s handy for balancing. If I have a ranged damage character, it’s pretty obvious that the general thing you would do if you wanted to try and break the game would be have them quick in the strategy phase and then still have some speed in the tactics phase, so in the strategy phase they run up into position and then their activation in the tactics phase is shoot and run away, so they can literally never be hurt. “So we have to be aware of that, but it gives us some cool stuff to do. Using an example of if we were to ever have a dwarf with a tower shield, he could be quicker during the strategic phase, which is to show that he’s lifted his tower shield up and he’s moving up the battlefield. But then once we get to the tactics phase he’s only got a movement of one or maybe zero because he’s planted down and he’s ready to take it. His armour stat perhaps increases during that phase. So the stats can change, it depends entirely on the direction we want for the character. We have to be kind of considerate of if we were to change every stat on every side of the card, we’re literally doubling the amount of stats you as the player have to try and remember, which isn’t a great newplayer-friendly experience.” Hall reveals that Steamforged’s efforts in making sure Godtear treads the line between wargame depth and board game approachability has required the team to rethink how they create games. “A lot of Godtear developmentwise has been a lot more figuring things out, working out what works and a lot more prototyping than we’ve conventionally done,” he explains. “Very often, just in the way that a lot of the guys we have work here and the way that their brains work, it’s a lot of writing out rules, writing out cards, figuring things out and then playtest it. And try and get it done as numerically as you can possible first, to get as close to balance as you can get. Then start prototyping and ironing out kinks. Whereas Godtear’s changed significantly throughout the development path and has had a lot more, like, ‘Let’s prototype this out, see how it works, we can write the rules afterwards.’ But since January it’s been a lot of get rules written out, get cards designed, then playtest from what we’ve done once rules are there, see what works, see what doesn’t – I guess essentially establishing boundaries, because when the world is your ocean and I can put whatever I want on a card, life is very easy.”
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The hope
with Godtear is that you wouldn’t have to read the entire rulebook before playing.
This led to the decision to offer an early access version of the game to players wanting to be a part of the development process. Six of the champions, their followers and prototype components were included as part of the £120 set, with fans who picked it up able to discuss their thoughts on the game as it evolves and feed back to its creators. Playtesting ahead of a full release is a common way for designers to see how their game fares with those not intimately involved with its creation, but Hall says that it’s often seen as an activity reserved for hardcore gamers or people who eat, sleep and breathe a single game – a perception he hopes to dispel. “It’s very important in playtesting that there seems to very often be this common misconception that to playtest a game you have to be a previous world champion at it,” he retorts. “That’s so inaccurate, at least for the games we make, because we want the games to appeal to as many people as possible. That doesn’t just make sense from a business standpoint; that’s just as a creative person if you’ve made something you think’s fun you want that to appeal to as many people as possible. So we didn’t want to put any limitation on who could or couldn’t purchase this product because we want all different walks of life to be able to give it a go and let us know what they think.”
TEAR UP THE RULES
LEFT Parts of the terrain could gain attributes specific to certain races or classes, such as this goblin ABOVE RIGHT Although the champions aren’t restricted to a specific faction, their followers are pre-determined
Hall is well placed to blur the lines between miniatures and board games, having joined Steamforged a few years ago after becoming one of the top Guild Ball players in the country, before working on Dark Souls as a result of his fandom for the video game series. Godtear itself began life as a more conventional miniatures game in the mould of Guild Ball, using a tape measure rather than a grid of hexes. After the success of Kick Off!, a two-player Guild Ball starter set that presented the sports miniatures game as a more approachable all-in-one box and attracted a fresh wave of fans from outside of the typical wargaming audience, Hall says the team went “back to the drawing board”. “I don’t necessarily like to say there’s a massive difference between board gamers and tabletop gamers, but when it comes to developing a game there’s a huge difference,” he admits. Much of this shift in philosophy took hold in Godtear’s early rulebook, which was originally based on a template of the Guild Ball manual – a tome aimed at miniatures players already fluent in the genre’s concepts. In an effort to soften the often imposing learning curve, Hall began to examine the approach of other hex-based games. “Just down to the basics of, like, ordering,” he explains. “So, for example, the setup to play Guild Ball – the part where it’s like, ‘set out your three-by-three, this is your centre line,’ and all that sort of stuff – doesn’t come until about 10 pages in. Which to a board gamer could turn them off immediately because they just want to get in and start playing. So that’s a big change; if you are looking to target more of the board game audience then you’d probably put your setup and get the bits that actually get you playing in first. “A big difference between the Guild Ball and Godtear one [rulebooks] is the Guild Ball book, all of your defined
terms, terminology and conventions tend to come before you start talking through rules. Whereas in board games they are generally at the back in like a glossary or something along those lines. That is just a big difference between someone that predominantly plays tabletop miniatures games and someone that prefers to play board games: board games are aimed more at that ‘get going, you can work the rest out later’, whereas tabletop [miniatures] games tend to be more learn the whole thing and then jump in.” Hall says that Dark Souls had similarly taken a more miniatures-like approach to dispensing its rules by frontloading information. The divisive response to the game’s rulebook helped to further shape Godtear’s easy-to-grasp tone. “It’s very hard to pick up that game [Dark Souls] and play it without reading through the entire rulebook at least once,” Hall acknowledges. “The hope with Godtear is that you wouldn’t have to; you can go through in a page order and do it as it tells you and have a table set up and be ready to play a game, start playing and then, if you read something on a card and it says you push someone, at the back in the glossary it will tell you that a push means that you move their model away from yours. Rather than defining a push right at the start of the book.” With the game allowing Hall and his team to take a different approach to things from the ground up, Godtear is shaping up to be a beast like no other, bringing together Steamforged’s experience in miniatures and board games with the thoughts of its players to form a dynamic, evolving and highly ambitious hybrid. Hall stresses that several elements of the game are still in flux – as we talk he mentions countless ideas, such as community-driven storylines (with the potential for major character deaths decided by players), multiple season packs with new champion rosters and options for making the legacy elements work in an organised play setting, all of which are yet to be properly tested and might not make it into the game before it launches on Kickstarter at some undetermined point in the future. What is absolutely clear, though, is that the team isn’t afraid of reimagining what a miniatures game can be, and far from short of ideas for breaking the mould. Forget shooting for the stars – they’re aiming at nothing less than god tier.
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Critical Hit
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The world’s biggest Dungeons & Dragons campaign has changed the face of roleplaying forever – and its cast have had an absolute blast along the way. Critical Role’s Matthew Mercer and Liam O’Brien reveal how a birthday treat turned into a cultural phenomenon and what’s in store for season two
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Words by Matt Jarvis | Cosplay photographs by Pamela Joy
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C
ould you and your friends run your roleplaying campaign with ten people watching? How about 100? Or 1,000? What if it was an audience of hundreds of thousands? Or even millions? That’s exactly the daunting task faced by the cast of Critical Role, a Dungeons & Dragons campaign streamed live every week by Geek & Sundry, the web video network that’s also the home of Wil Wheaton’s hugely popular board game series TableTop. Since its all-star D&D show began, Critical Role has racked up tens of millions of views on livestreaming site Twitch and video library YouTube, including a staggering 6.7 million views of its first episode, Arrival at Kraghammer, which debuted in June 2015. The game that would grow into a show watched by millions began like any other roleplaying campaign – a bunch of friends sat around a table, having fun. In this case,
the organiser was Matthew Mercer, a professional voice actor with credits across video games, TV series and films, who put together a one-off simplified scenario for his friend and fellow voice actor Liam O’Brien’s birthday. “When we started this campaign in our home game, it was for mostly a bunch of people who I’d never played before,” Mercer says. “It was supposed to be just a one-shot for my friend Liam’s birthday, and we invited a bunch of our compatriots who had never played before and they all got immediately hooked, and it turned into a campaign.” Mercer, O’Brien and their friends – including several other actors – soon switched to D&D 3.5-based RPG Pathfinder and continued to play at home for two years, before one of the group, BAFTA-winning The Last of Us star Ashley Johnson, mentioned the campaign to Felicia Day, the cult actor who co-founded Geek & Sundry.
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ABOVE Matthew Mercer (centre) and the rest of the Critical Role cast: Ashley Johnson, Laura Bailey, Liam O’Brien, Marisha Ray, Sam Riegel, Taliesin Jaffe and Travis Willingham
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OPPOSITE Travis Willingham as Grog Strongjaw (right) and Ashley Johnson as Pike Trickfoot (left) BELOW Liam O’Brien’s Vax’ildan (left) and Marisha Ray’s Keyleth (right)
“Felicia was like, ‘Why don’t you... You guys should do that on our channel!’” Mercer recalls. “We went, ‘Ohhhh, I don’t know, playing D&D on the internet seems like a terrible idea. People will light us on fire.’” Much of the group’s hesitation was down to a reluctance to change anything about the campaign they had been running in private for years. “It was still our game, we playing for ourselves,” explains Mercer. “It wasn’t until Twitch became a thing that it was a scenario where we said, ‘If we can put us in a room, turn on cameras and not change any of how we play our game, then we’ll say yes.’ And so, for us, Twitch and streaming was the capability for us to just continue to play our game, not trying to change or alter it for an audience, just do it for ourselves and invite other people to come and watch if that’s something they wanted to do.” Geek & Sundry agreed. The result is a friendly, genuine series of videos that captures the sparky creativity of the group in episodes that can last up to five
hours or more, with the first campaign – following the Vox Machina party – split across 115 such instalments. “There are less brunch platters and mimosas for us now,” O’Brien jokes about taking the campaign to the masses. “Things were even looser around our home table, although I think they’re still pretty loose. One of the best parts of the stream, though, is that live element. The game still feels very intimate, because it is still just the eight of us around a table. But the live audience gives things that little electric current of immediacy. We know once we say something, either stupid or amazing, it is out there in the ether. It’s part of what makes theatre so magical. You know that there has never been a moment quite like the one you’re currently in.” Mercer, who takes on the role of the dungeon master throughout the series with the exception of a few special episodes, says that the cast’s familiarity with appearing on-screen helped with the leap to the public gaze. “Because we’re all performers by nature, our home games weren’t all that different,” he says. “We were all shouting at each other over the table and getting way
The live audience gives things that electric current of immediacy. Once we say something, it’s out there in the ether.
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into character and standing and flailing about wildly. So it didn’t really change the game so much as far as the presentation of it.” What has changed significantly, even from Critical Role’s beginnings, is its production values. The audio and video quality of the first few episodes – “It’s a little rough at the beginning,” admits Mercer – has since been polished by professional lighting, microphones and sets. As the person pulling the strings behind the world – not to mention providing dozens of unique voices for any NPCs encountered– Mercer’s own ability to layer in atmosphere and weave the group’s story has improved, too. “I’ve definitely fine-tuned and honed things as I’ve played and learned, as you do as anyone’s GMing a game – the more you play, the more you define your techniques and get better at certain things,” he says. “I will say, having that big of an audience definitely teaches you to be much more conscientious with your world-building. Because it’s one thing to create a story and a world for your eight friends who are sometimes having a beer or two and won’t notice your mistakes and won’t notice your plot holes, it’s another when you have hundreds of thousands of people on Reddit and social media who are every week picking apart the minutiae of your storyline.”
CROWD GAME One of Critical Role’s biggest draws is how much it feels like watching a Netflix or television series. The talented party’s impressive vocal talents mean that, even without much in the way of visual flair, watching or listening
to an episode gets you immediately invested in the story and its characters. There’s a similarly passionate following, too, with fans drawing artwork based on the heroes, discussing story beats and binge-watching older episodes while waiting for the next chapter. “It’s perpetually surreal,” Mercer says of the fandom. “It never stops and only continues to get more and more and more so. It’s hard not to fall into a trap of continuous imposter syndrome, ‘cause it doesn’t feel like we deserve this attention. It’s a phenomenon that even we don’t understand and we’re humbled by it, but we’re excited by it, too. Because it’s one thing to have a thing that people like, it’s another to have a community that’s so gracious and so happy to engage with each other and us. It’s special, it’s special. That’s the only way I can say it. I don’t know what it is, but I like it!” The show’s likeable players and engaging story have even seen it break out of the roleplaying niche and attract a wave of fans who have never touched a pen-and-paper RPG, some of whom go on to try out D&D after watching. “Part of the reason we even started Critical Role was the inevitably difficult conversation in a party or a coworker scenario where someone asks, ‘What, wait, what is Dungeons & Dragons?’” Mercer enthuses. “And that horrible moment where you’re like, ‘Well, you know, it’s– You make a character and then it’s like a fantasy, but you can be like a spellcaster, or you could be like a fighter, and it’s like there’s a lot of you, and there’s a person who’s a– Y’know? Nevermind.’ I’ve had that scenario happen so much in my life that I wanted to put something on video that could be
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something to show people very quickly and be like, ‘Oh, it’s just friends around a table telling a story, I could do that.’ “So now that we’ve built off that, the community is now reaching out to people in their circle who they think might really enjoy this but never had the opportunity to be exposed to it and be like, ‘Hey, watch this,’ or ‘Hey, come over on Friday and see if you wanna jump in and give it a shot.’ I’ve heard story after story of people getting their co-workers into it, families – you know, those tenuous teen years between parents and teenagers absolved by having a family D&D night every week. That to me is the core of it; it’s bringing people together and sharing a really amazing experience that you all create together. That’s a very fulfilling experience and it just builds social skills, it builds problem-solving skills, team-building. I owe so much of who I am today to Dungeons & Dragons and roleplaying games, and it excites me to think that so many other people are now getting a chance to learn through that same lens how to better themselves.” “I think we all continue to prove that it’s a game everyone can play,” O’Brien agrees. “Hell, I think tabletop RPGs are games everyone should play. I think they make us better people. Everyone has a story to tell,
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and the beauty is, you get to write anything you want. And anyone with kids? Run a game for them!” Most friendship groups are unlikely to involve a line-up of experienced voice actors accustomed to embodying a character and projecting an alternate personality to a room of people – even close friends. But while Critical Role may be an idealised version of roleplaying for some people, its stars are quick to dispel the idea that it should be treated as the template for a perfect experience. “First and foremost, there is no requirement for you to do voices or to be really into character,” Mercer reassures. “Especially at the very beginning of a campaign, that’s something that comes with comfort. Most of the people I’ve played with most of my life have not been actors, they’ve all been people that went on to become game designers or tech experts. I grew up with the nerd crowd, we were the computer club in high school. It was those people. So I was probably the more outgoing of most of my gaming groups growing up, so by no means do you have to be a performer.” “Don’t stress. Embrace feeling foolish,” O’Brien adds. “The only goal you really need is having fun with each other, making each other laugh. And don’t wait ‘til you ‘feel ready’. Or perfect. It’ll never be perfect. But it will be great.”
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For confident players that do want to introduce a little more theatricality to their games, Mercer suggests that even basic lessons in improvisation can pay dividends. “Not only does it help keep you clever and quick, which is a great thing to have in a lot of roleplaying games, but it’ll help you feel more comfortable jumping and taking charge in a challenge – which as we all know when you’re playing D&D, sometimes you have that moment when everyone’s like ‘Urr, I don’t– Do you wanna? I don’t know– I– I’ll g– Oh, okay, you go ahead,’” he says. “Improv helps you feel more competent in taking the spotlight when nobody else will and just keep the story moving forward, so that is a helpful skill set to have. “If that’s where your comfort level goes and you want ascribe to be that, then just clearly define your character’s personality, what their goals are, what their fears are, what their worries are, and try and add an element to their backstory that’s a mystery even to you as the player that the GM can play with. Because that helps you start the game with a strong idea of what the character’s decisionmaking would be based on and over time you’ll feel more comfortable in those shoes. Once you feel more comfortable, you’ll generally be more comfortable in stepping forward and embodying the personality of that character whether that be a voice or physicality or just a presence. It doesn’t have to be as big as us. We’re all actors,
OPPOSITE Laura Bailey’s Vex’ahlia (left) hangs out with Johnson’s Pike (centre) and Ray’s Keyleth (right) BELOW Vax and Vex’ahlia are siblings as well as companions in the Vox Machina party
that’s our skillset, so of course that’s what we’re going to use to tell our story, but don’t feel like you have to do that by any means. Some of the best games I’ve ever played have been with non-actors and in hindsight, in memory I don’t recall it being any less magical. So please don’t feel that pressure.” Although the quick wits and on-the-spot invention of its players provides many of Critical Role’s best moments, the show’s casual surface is held together by hours of work done in the background. As DM, Mercer reveals he plans between four and six hours of content for each episode, taking between an hour to an hour and a half of prep for each hour of actual gameplay. “I have, when I’m preparing like a story arc, I’ll usually beat out the general arc – what kind of important beats should happen – and develop the in-between on a more immediate basis, meaning episode to episode,” he says. “When we have a session, as we play through that bit of the arc, I’ll try and prepare in advance where I think they might go within that session. “If we’re going into another big story arc it’s going to be a lot more front-end prep to make sure I know where we’re going. I’ll beat out the loose locations and events that will happen, I’ll create a bunch of NPCs that are intrinsic to the storyline and some that are not that I can just plug in wherever – they can help kind of give them some direction – and then prepare some very loose possibilities if they go
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completely off the rails, which inevitably they do. That’s the nature of roleplaying games! As much as you prepare, it’s never enough. You’re usually pulling stuff out of your ass left and right, and that’s part of the thrill of GMing.” Mercer laughs as he recalls plenty of times where decisions made by the rest of the group had resulted in his hard work going to waste. “Plenty of social and combat encounters,” he says, when asked which of his plans had never come to fruition. “Y’know, whole possible dungeon-delve scenarios that just never ever came up where they completely skipped over. “There would be NPCs – like, for instance, in the final arc of the last campaign, I’d created a creature that was going to be a Gollum-esque-type entity, where it was semineutral but it had information on the villain and they could encounter it and it was going to be one of the only social encounters in this dungeon they would have, as most of it was just a climb towards the big bad. So I had described it by itself, looking kind of pitiful on its own as it’s, like, feasting on this corpse, and the first thing one of our players did was throw his daggers at it and kill it in one round. I was like, ‘Alright! Well, moving on...’ He had a name! I showed him after the campaign, I’m like, ‘He had a name, Liam!’”
A FRESH START After wrapping up its first season after two years, early 2018 saw Critical Role launch into a brand new campaign, with
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ABOVE The Vox Machina party from Critical Role’s first campaign OPPOSITE Critical Role is streamed live on Twitch each week, with videos going up on YouTube afterwards for fans to watch – and rewatch (Geek & Sundry)
a new setting, new story and new characters – which, of course, means new voices. O’Brien’s human wizard Caleb Widogast (accompanied by his unlikely goblin partner, Nott the Brave, played by Sam Riegel) replaces his fan-favourite half-elf rouge-paladin Vax’ildan from the previous season. He’s joined by Laura Bailey’s tiefling cleric Jester, Marisha Ray’s human monk Beauregard, Travis Willingham’s half-orc warlock Fjord, Taliesin Jaffe’s tiefling blood hunter Mollymauk and Ashley Johnson as aasimar barbarian Yasha. Where the group’s previous characters had established their backstories, relationships and personalities over hundreds of hours to the delight of fans (as lengthy wiki entries will attest), the second season sees the players starting completely afresh – an exciting but intimidating prospect. “Dungeons & Dragons has so much range, I’m really just wanting to try out some of those other avenues I haven’t had a chance to explore yet,” O’Brien says. “I was almost magic-free for the entirety of the last campaign, and when I did acquire some, it was fairly light. I’m both nervous and excited to wrap my head around all the ins and out of the wizardly path. Plus, I’m pretty sure I’ll enjoy inhabiting a different headspace than Vax in the last campaign. He was very rash, headstrong, and uncompromising in the ways he strove to do right. Which I loved playing. Caleb is not cut from the same cloth, however. Not by a longshot. And every actor likes to try on different hats.”
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The group first meets in an inn in the city of Trostenwald on the continent of Wildemount, a more politically incensed region than the land of Tal’Doreiexplored by the Vox Machina party. With the players taking on new roles, the different landscape – both literally and metaphorically – similarly provides their dungeon master with the opportunity to paint on a blank canvas. “I’m curious,” says Mercer. “I want this campaign to have a different narrative flavour to it. It’s going to largely depend on what the players want to, what they want to pursue and what threads catch their attention. This continent is designed to be a little more politically involved, it has a lot more moral grey I think they may well encounter in this campaign versus the previous one where it was a very clear, like, good versus evil. It was pretty easy to pick which side you’re on. It may be a little less easy in this campaign, which I think will be very unique for them at the very least. For those players, who are used to very much like, ‘Oh, that’s the bad guy, we have to fight, let’s go kill it!’ Y’know. So I’m curious to see how that plays out.”
REMAINS OF THE PLAY One and a bit seasons in, there are already more episodes and hours of Critical Role than many longrunning television shows. (By way of comparison, the 143 videos counted as part of its ‘Campaign 1’ YouTube playlist is over twice the number of episodes in total for Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad and The Wire, even without taking into consideration the RPG show’s much longer individual runtimes.) The Vox Machina campaign ran for more than two and a half years, hinting at a possible length for the second season, but Mercer admits he has “no idea” how long the latest story will last.
“To kind of show the microcosm of it, you’ll prepare a session and be like, ‘This will feel like a good solid four to five hours of gameplay, I feel pretty good about this,’ and then the players will get through the first page and that one session prep will last you three sessions,” he says. “Comparatively, I’ve prepared a similar amount of work and they’ll breeze through it in an hour and then we’re all living in this blank space where I loosely have an idea of where we’re going and we’re just making it up as we go along. So it’s hard to gauge a length when the nature of the game is to be so amorphous and open. I don’t really feel there’s a need to ascribe to a specific structure or a specific length, I just kinda wanna see where the story takes us, and when it feels like it naturally has ended then that’ll be the end.” His players are equally clueless about where the sprawling tale could go next. “I’ve no clue,” O’Brien says. “And that’s the beauty of it.” With Critical Role’s audience only continuing to grow and its cast’s creativity seemingly endless when it comes to bringing their world to life, there’s no end in sight yet for the story that began as a one-off birthday scenario and was propelled into the cultural stratosphere. “It was kind of an unexpected opportunity that we didn’t think was going to go anywhere and, thankfully, we were very wrong!” Mercer says. “As far as I know, I’m going to keep doing this as long as we want to keep playing together and telling stories. I’ve been playing roleplaying games for over 20 years and I haven’t got sick of it yet. So we’ll see. It’s such a fulfilling creative process to do this with your friends and so I don’t– There may come a day where we stop because of life reasons, health reasons, who knows? But for now, I haven’t even looked that far ahead, I’m so focused on the now and what’s happening with the story now.”
Critical Role is all about Dungeons & Dragons, but what other roleplaying games do the cast enjoy? We asked two of its stars
Matthew Mercer: D&D was my introduction to it [roleplaying]. I grew up a hardcore Tolkien high fantasy nerd, so it’s definitely my preferred place, but I’ve played a lot of other RPGs that I enjoy thoroughly. I’ve played a lot of Traveller, I’ve played Exalted, I’ve played Deadlands, I’ve played the Warhammer Fantasy roleplaying game, I’ve played Diaspora, Paranoia, the old Star Wars RPG. I’ve played a lot of them throughout the years but D&D has kind of been my go-to comfort food, if you will. For me, I think I just like telling stories and swords ‘n’ sorcery tales. I just love fantasy races, I love the idea of small individuals becoming heroic characters in this high fantasy setting, so D&D is just a natural fit for me, I guess. As much as I try and pontificate about other great systems that I’ve really enjoyed as well, I keep going back to D&D. Maybe it’s the nostalgia. Liam O’Brien: I think my first encounter with tabletop was pretty typical. A classmate let me borrow the D&D red box, and I instantly fell in love with it. I spent much of my high school years playing D&D, Cyberpunk and RIFTS. That’s when I fell in love with the fantasy genre. The most gaming I do outside Critical Role is the GMing I do for my kids. I run one to two games a month for them. My son has a game with a few friends, as does his younger sister. I am actually loving running her and her four friends through a sanded-down version of Curse of Strahd. I gave her a choice of any adventure module on the shelf, and she was adamant that they slay vampires. It is so damn fun to see them all thrill at the danger and problem solve their way out of it.
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H AV E Y O U P L AY E D ?
TWILIGHT STRUGGLE
The Cold War heats up in this tense head-tohead battle for global control that’s become one of the most celebrated wargames of all time. Who knew nuclear peril could be so much fun?
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Words by Matt Jarvis wilight Struggle is a wargame like no other because the Cold War was a war like no other. Beginning in the aftermath of World War II, the nearly 50-year conflict wasn’t fought directly with guns, tanks and bombs like the terrible battles of the first half of the 20th century. Instead, it was a war of subterfuge and psychology, where for the most part the threat was the idea of using weapons rather than actually using them – the locked horns of potential nuclear war between the opposed US and USSR looming large for decades. Such a singular conflict could only be recreated on the tabletop in a similarly unique way. The squads of miniatures and global movement of troops that had become a hallmark of wargames based on the two World Wars just wouldn’t be the
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right way to accurately portray the mind games and subsurface tension that pervaded the clashing ideologies of the East and West. Released in 2005, Twilight Struggle propelled its taut action with a tug-of-war card-based system that saw two players – each representing one side of the conflict – exerting their political pressure across the world, attempting to build their influence to a point where their opponent was forced to concede. At the centre of the game was a deck of cards based on real-life events that presented opportunities for the players to swing regions to their side, but risked handing advantages to their rival, forcing the players to manage their limited options from the beginning of the war through to its end days. The game’s intense atmosphere and historical grounding, combined with its straightforward to understand but highly strategically complex gameplay loop, made it an instant classic, winning multiple awards and dominating the top of BoardGameGeek’s overall rankings for six years until it was dethroned by Pandemic Legacy in early 2016. Today, it remains at the top of many players’ all-time lists and continues to influence and inspire various other games.
WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT? If you’re wondering where the name ‘Twilight Struggle’ comes from, it’s an extract from the inaugural speech of John F. Kennedy in 1961, made at the height of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. Despite being one of the shortest inaugural speeches by any US president, it remains one of
the best ever delivered. (Trivia: it also contains the iconic statement, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”) “Now the trumpet summons us again, not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle – though embattled we are – but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle.” The title neatly summarises the commitment of designers Ananda Gupta and Jason Matthews to Twilight Struggle’s historical elements. Each turn roughly simulates three to five years of the 45-year Cold War, ending in 1989, with its three decks of cards introducing early-, mid- and late-war events in line with their occurrence in reality. For example, Margaret Thatcher and Chernobyl appear towards the end of the conflict, while Che Guevara can be played during the middle of the conflict. These cards drive the central fight for control of various regions around the world, each with an influence number for the US and USSR. The numbers can be increased or decreased with card effects, handing jurisdiction to either side. This is affected by a ‘stability’ value in some areas, which is the minimum difference in influence required to take control of the region. The most important countries are marked as ‘battlegrounds’, conflict in which can impact the overall stability of the world, tracked using the DEFCON level – the US’ real-life defense readiness condition. If the DEFCON level (which starts at five) degrades to DEFCON 1, representing imminent nuclear war, the current player loses – although, given the context, it’s not good news for anybody. Luckily,
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LEFT Twilight Struggle simulates the entire Cold War ABOVE Event cards can benefit your opponent RIGHT The players fight for global influence
DEFCON deescalates at the end of each round, but can be manipulated by clever players to trigger a loss for their opponent. Controlling a region earns victory points (this is still a board game, after all). It’s not as simple as a straight race to earn the highest score, though. Points are tracked on a scale that swings between the US and USSR – earning points moves the tracker in either direction, with zero in the middle. If one player manages to hit 20 VP or more, they instantly win. If a match – which can last for three hours or more – gets all the way to the end of turn ten, the most VP wins instead.
HOW DO YOU PLAY? While it features an impressive global map board and tokens, Twilight Struggle is a card-driven wargame at heart. Each player begins the game with a hand of cards and refills at the beginning of each subsequent turn, usually retaining one card from the previous round. Turns begin with the enactment of a ‘headline event’, which forces players to play an event from their hand to begin the next series of actions. Players can choose to use their cards to gain influence in a region, but the cards can be used for a multitude of other actions, too. One option is to declare a coup, which involves rolling a die and checking it against a region’s stability to potentially remove their rival’s influence, opening up the area for their own intrusion. Realignments can similarly be attempted by both sides rolling a die, with the losing player suffering a loss of influence equal to the difference. Playing military actions, such as a
coup or war event, adds to a nation’s military track, which must be greater than the current DEFCON level at the end of a round or risks taking away victory points – encouraging players to exert their military presence around the world. Just as there was decades ago, there is a second battle occurring in the background of the conflict – the space race. Players can invest their cards in progressing their nation’s technological advancement in launching rockets, earning rewards such as victory points for successful advancements. Not so complicated, right? Where Twilight Struggle’s true complexity lies is in its timing. This is because there is a key rule to playing cards that serves as the main source of tension and decisionmaking. Cards can be favourable to the US, USSR or both. If a card is favourable to the player using it, they can enact the event on it instead of using it for another ability. However, either nation can play cards that are favourable to their rival for influence, coups, realignments and the space race, but doing so grants that player the chance to trigger the event on the card. Giving your opponent an advantage is unavoidable, so choosing when and what to give them will ultimately decide the victor. Also in the deck are scoring cards, which cannot be used for normal actions (known as operations) and must be played by their holder, earning victory points for both players depending on how many battleground countries they control at the time. There’s a similar complexity to the China card, which starts as a card in the USSR player’s
WHY SHOULD YOU TRY IT? As well as being a fantastic history lesson due to its deep-rooted accuracy and wide-reaching simulation of one of the most studied and analysed periods of modern times, Twilight Struggle is a masterclass in tight board game design and challenging competition. The basics are easy to pick up – most of the game comes down to simply picking a card to play and choosing from the small pool of ways in which you can use it – but the drastic effects of choosing when and how to use each card makes learning the game’s deep strategy an endlessly fascinating endeavour. Like every great competitive game, there’s an element of psychoanalysing your rival and attempting to second-guess their next move, leading to incredible moments. Twilight Struggle may recount a tale that has already taken place, but its multifaceted gameplay and the constant offering of interesting decisions and tense moments mean that each playthrough also forges a new story between its two players. It is both history and history-making – and there’s few games that deserve their place in history more.
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hand and can be used for operations, but must then be passed to the opposing player, who must wait a turn before it becomes available for use once again. The player with the card in their hand at the end of the game gains an extra victory point, but playing the card can help swing a decisive battle for control.
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KICKSTARTING F R O M S C R A T C H
Holly Gramazio turns to creators that have already succeeded at finding an audience on Kickstarter – and the crowdfunding site itself – to ask for essential advice on perfecting her campaign
Put in the work in advance to get everything ready, because once you hit launch there’s no going back.
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hen we first decided to run a Kickstarter for Art Deck, we asked a few friends for advice and they gave us airy general suggestions. “Ooh, have a super fancy deck as a reward.” “A good video is important.” But as we’ve drawn closer to our proposed launch, everything’s changed. Now that it seems real, people tell us incredibly specific things like “remember to put linktracking on your external ads,” or sometimes they just look away with an expression of blank dismay, mutter “It’s SO MUCH WORK,” and stare without blinking at a nearby wall. So what advice comes up over and over? What does everyone want us to know? We talked to George Buckenham from Sensible Object, a startup whose co-op digital-physical Beasts of Balance raised £168,000 back in early 2016; its recent expansion did even better. George’s key piece of advice was to put in 90% of the work in advance. For Sensible Object, this included sending out review copies a few weeks in advance, talking to influential people who might support the game, reminding those people the day before launch, prepping a list of things to write and tweet and Instagram about for the first days of the campaign – a carefully targeted process in service of a strong opening, aimed at an initial 24 hours that would give the project momentum.
Of course, unlike Sensible Object, we aren’t trying to raise a hundred thousand pounds, so we probably don’t have to set our standards quite so high. We can take the core lesson of “get ready and focus on a good launch,” and think about what that means for us. Next we spoke to Jen Carey, whose recent party game Rampunctious: The Game of Terrible Puns raised around €13,500 – closer to our own scale of ambition. Jen also emphasised the importance of having people who are ready to pledge as soon as the project goes live – friends and enthusiasts and people who’ve played the game. But then she talked about how to keep that initial interest going, and how much of that you can plan in advance. “If you’re making a casual game then Facebook ads are worth investing in,” she told us – but audiences you find through Facebook ads might not have backed a Kickstarter before, so if that’s your audience, it’s really important to talk them carefully through the process of backing a project and what that means. Jen also talked about tagging all your links so you can tell where backers are coming from – it’s easy to forget, but knowing from the start what’s working can make a big difference. Just to double-check all this advice, we also had a quick chat with Luke Crane, Kickstarter’s head of games. Luke answered a couple of UK-specific questions. Listing your reward levels in pounds (rather than dollars) is something UK makers can be nervous about, but it really doesn’t make much difference. However, being able to send out orders from a US address really can be a big deal – a lot of your possible backers will be based in North America and could be put off by international shipping. Luke stressed that tabletop games are a unique area, and that advice you might see about non-game Kickstarters isn’t necessarily transferrable. In tabletop games, there’s a huge interested community who you can talk to about your game; in fact, over half the tabletop games on Kickstarter are successfully funded. But this doesn’t mean it’s easy – “over half succeed” also implies “almost half fail”, and that sophisticated and active community may be ready to ask difficult questions if it looks like you aren’t fully prepared. “Launch when you’re ready,” Luke told us more than once. The thread running through all this advice was very, very clear, and a little bit scary: put in the work in advance to get everything ready, because once you hit launch there’s no going back.
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HOW WE MADE
THE RESISTANCE
Don Eskridge’s devious social deduction debut was a rich mix of manipulation, deception and accusation. Nearly a decade on, the designer discusses the influence of improvised comedy, the controversy of teaching people how to lie and his playful approach to what comes next Words by Owen Duffy
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utside of the realm of politics, it’s hard to think of anyone who’s done as well out of rampant dishonesty as Don Eskridge. The creator of hit deception and bluffing games The Resistance and The Resistance: Avalon, he’s built his career on the back of sneaky and sociable releases. While his early games are considered classics of the hobby, he’s more recently founded his own publishing company, Orange Machine Games, to produce Abandon Planet and Black Hole Council – both of which also lean heavily on subterfuge and manipulation. We spoke to him to hear the story behind The Resistance’s enduring success, and to find out why shamelessly lying to your closest friends can be so much fun.
VIVE LA RÉSISTANCE Where most game designers trace their path into the tabletop industry to teenage games of
Dungeons & Dragons or Magic: The Gathering, Eskridge’s formative years took a decidedly different route. “When I was in high school I got into an improv comedy group,” he says. “I was kind of socially awkward, but we were doing this thing that I thought was fun and cool, and it helped me open up a lot. We had such a dumb name, the Comedy Commandos, but it was fun. And then I did some more in college, and when I lived in Korea. “Finding out how much I enjoyed interacting with other humans in funny, weird ways certainly played into the love that I have now of social games, social deduction. And I would say that the connecting tissue between all my games is that they’re all about ways that people communicate with each other: how that gets weird, how that gets funky, how they react.” This interest in social interaction was at the core of Eskridge’s first and best-known game: The Resistance. Set in a futuristic dystopian
society, it divides players into two teams: one a group of revolutionaries fighting to bring down a despotic empire, the other undercover agents of the regime, aiming to infiltrate the rebel ranks and ensure the continued reign of their totalitarian paymasters. The game revolves around a central mystery: while the imperial spies know who their partners are, the rebel agents have no idea which of their fellow players are friends or foes. The result is a whirlwind of betrayal, accusation and recrimination, with one team trying to uncover the traitors in their midst and the other doing their best to deceive and misdirect them. Eskridge says the idea for the game came to him while he was studying in France, where he encountered another game of bluffing and secret identities. “I played Werewolf for the first time in France,” he says. “It was Les Loups Garou de Thiercelieux, which was released in the US as The Werewolves of Miller’s Hollow.”
LEFT The Resistance saw one or more spies infiltrating a group of rebels to sabotage missions while avoiding getting caught
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RIGHT Social deduction classic Werewolf partially inspired The Resistance
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HOW WE MADE T H E R E S I S T A N C E
One of many releases based on the publicdomain game known as Werewolf or Mafia Mafia,, The Werewolves of Millers Hollow cast players as citizens of a town plagued by a supernatural menace. Over a series of rounds, or ‘nights’, werewolves would kill off townsfolk, only for the populace to take revenge by murdering those suspected of being the source of the lycanthropic threat. It was a game of suspicion and deep-seated paranoia but, for Eskridge, it had some flaws. “I thought it was great, but it had problems,” he says. “People got kicked out of the game. There wasn’t any solid information about who the bad guys were. You needed someone who wasn’t playing to be a moderator. “I felt sure that there was a way around those things, so I just played around with various ideas and about a year or so later I was working as a counsellor at this two-week camp for high-school kids, and I had an idea: what if instead of accusing and killing people, you had to trust them and give them the opportunity to betray you?” Eskridge’s idea took Werewolf’s core and refined it, removing the element of player elimination as well as the need for an in-game moderator to act as a referee. It saw rebels embark on a series of missions, with their leaders recruiting different team members for each attempt. Imperial agents could secretly sabotage a mission, and repeated failures would cost the rebels the game. It made it critically important for commanders to work out who was trustworthy, and who might stab them in the back. “I tried it with the kids at this camp and they really liked it,” Eskridge says. “I was like:
ABOVE There’s no player elimination in The Resistance OPPOSITE BELOW Players secretly vote on whether missions succeed
‘OK, wow, there’s something here.’ So that was the initial lightning bolt, and from there it was just a case of working on the numbers. How many spies? How many resistance members? How many players per mission?” With the finer details in place, Eskridge was keen to get his game into players’ hands. Rather than pitching his idea to a publisher, though, he released it for free on the website BoardGameGeek. “I just wanted to get the game out there and get people playing it,” he says. “I still want people to play games – that’s my goal, just to get people to have fun. I liked the game, and I didn’t know anything about the publishing world. I didn’t know how to approach a publisher, I was just like: ‘Hey, people! Play this!’” The free game proved popular, though, and it led publisher Indie Boards & Cards to approach Eskridge, interested in producing a commercial version.
“I put it on BGG as just two pages of rules that you could play with a deck of cards, and people played it,” says Eskridge. “They started reviewing it, and that’s how Travis [Worthington, CEO] of Indie Boards & Cards found it. He contacted me and was interested in publishing it. He made an offer and I thought it sounded pretty good. “I didn’t really think it would be some huge career. I knew that there were people who made games, but I didn’t know much about it beyond that. But I knew there was a possibility, and it grew from there. “It was thrilling to see people get their hands on the game, and it definitely changed interactions with some people. When I hung out with some old improv friends from college, I didn’t even know they were into games. But I told them I had worked on The Resistance and they were like: ‘Oh my god!’”
A NEW QUEST
In real life we don’t get to say a lot of the fun things that you get to say in The Resistance: ‘You’re a spy! You’re a liar!’ 40
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With The Resistance receiving such a positive response, Eskridge soon found himself looking for ways to expand on the game’s simple, streamlined mechanisms. “It wasn’t long after The Resistance was published that I started having some more ideas about what to do with it,” he says. “I think some of those ideas existed already, but especially when you’re such an early designer, you hesitate to put too much into a game because you don’t know whether the base game will be successful. So I had some ideas already, and then I
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started playing with the idea of different roles the characters could have.” Those new roles would eventually emerge as The Resistance: Avalon, a more complex take on the original game’s blueprint that swapped its cyberpunk setting for the court of King Arthur, with players becoming loyal servants of the crown or minions of the evil usurper Mordred. Along with the change in theme, players gained a clutch of new identities, complete with special abilities that subtly altered the game. The most interesting, though, was Merlin, who knew players’ true allegiances, but had to keep his own identity secret to avoid being assassinated, meaning that he could only divulge information through vague hints. “I was designing an expansion, I didn’t know that Avalon would have its own theme entirely,” says Eskridge. “So Merlin wasn’t even Merlin, he was the commander. Percival wasn’t Percival, he was the bodyguard. “What I was trying to do was to provide more opportunities for deception, more logical layers. So, for example, the bodyguard Percival knows who Merlin is, so what’s his strategy? It’s to protect Merlin. So how does Percival do that? He could claim to be Merlin himself. He could act like he doesn’t know Merlin at all, that he’s just an ordinary servant of Arthur. There’s more than one strategy that a character can use to achieve his or her goals. So I made different characters to allow different groups to play with those different strategies, and just develop their own metagame to try to mess with each other’s heads as much as possible.”
LOVE THE WAY YOU LIE Like The Resistance before it, Avalon met with an enthusiastic reception. Existing players
enjoyed the new challenges thrown up by its roles, while its hint of added complexity appealed to an audience looking for more than just a sociable party game. And in the years following its release, bluffing, deception and hidden identities remained some of the most popular recurring elements in game design. Deception: Murder in Hong Kong took a similar approach, but added a visual element, with players struggling to identify a murderer in their midst using pictorial clue cards. One Night Revolution used the original Resistance’s dark future setting, but played out over a single round with games taking minutes to complete. Cold War-themed spy game Secrets injected a dose of anarchy, with players’ roles changing so rapidly and unpredictably that they couldn’t be sure what side they themselves were on, let alone anyone else. Why is there such an enduring demand for social deduction games? For Eskridge, they’re a chance for people to interact in ways that aren’t socially acceptable in day-to-day life. “I think people just like talking to each other and messing with each other,” he says. “In real life we don’t get to say a lot of the fun things that you get to say in The Resistance: ‘You’re a spy! You’re a liar!’ Because in life, there are liars, there are bad guys, and how often do you get to say that to people’s faces? I’m not saying you should, but you don’t get to say that very often. So I think The Resistance and those sorts of games give a kind of catharsis. It’s a release of all those things that are really just fun to let out. “And in life we’re always thinking about why other people are doing things. There are ways that we’re very open and talk to each other and maybe even scream at each other, and then there are things that are subtle, like maybe
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HOW WE MADE T H E R E S I S T A N C E
Whereas in The Resistance players were just spies or rebels, its follow-up Avalon cast them as specific characters with unique abilities people being passive-aggressive. We go through these layers of motivation trying to figure things out about each other. And in The Resistance and Resistance-type games, you get to say: ‘He didn’t fail this mission on purpose, in order to get our trust, and now he’s playing you in order to get on this mission, and I’m willing to bet that he’s not going to fail that one either because he knows that I’m onto him…’ So it gives us a chance to talk about those logical layers that we’re already thinking through in our heads. “It’s about exploring interactions, both overt and subtle.” Of course, there’s also the argument that there’s something inherently appealing about being able to lie to your friends and family. But it’s an idea that Eskridge doesn’t seem entirely comfortable with. “Occasionally it gives me pause,” he says, “because it is kind of true that the game teaches people how to lie. But I also just have to think about how it teaches people how to trust. It really is the full spectrum but, I agree, it is very fun to lie to your closest friends and family and betray them in the end. “It can also set off some strong emotional reactions. I once saw the wife of a friend of mine actually toss her glass of wine onto a hardwood floor. It shattered everywhere and she shouted: ‘Why don’t you trust me!?’”
THE FUTURE’S ORANGE Now, almost a decade after The Resistance was first released, Eskridge is designing and publishing new games under his own
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banner. In 2016 he founded Orange Machine Games, a publisher dedicated to “explosively interactive” games for large groups of players. Its first release, Abandon Planet, saw players struggling to escape a world being bombarded by meteors. Each round saw part of the planet destroyed, removing critical resources from the game. It forced players to form partnerships to escape into the safety of space, leaving others behind to face their doom. Eskridge explains that the idea came to him while he was tinkering with components. “I was playing around with hexes, basically Catan hexes,” he says. “I was like: ‘Okay, this mountain blew up, this is gone. So if it’s gone, it makes this one more valuable.’ “It’s another element of improv. ‘If this, then what?’ You had the idea of modular, exploding, changing terrain, and the idea of needing to find a partner in order to win together. And then I added the idea that you could partner with anybody except the players to your left and right, so you had built-in enemies. You have this changing environment, you have potential allies and you have known rivals. So I just developed that, and it became Abandon Planet.” This process – tinkering, playing, chopping and changing various elements – is key to Eskridge’s approach to design. “It’s kind of clichéd,” he says, “but I’d say that my design process itself is playful. I’m not worried about having the perfect idea, because I know there are tons of great ideas. I just want to grab at something. It could be a totally
original idea, or it could be some interesting interaction in some other game. “So there could be an interesting interaction in Agricola. And I know I’m never going to make an Agricola. I know that I’m not interested in pushing around cubes, I know that I’m not interested in the idea of multiplayer solitaire. But I might say: ‘Oh, this is a really cool little bit of Agricola. So how can I take that and change it and bring it to a group of four to eight players? What happens then? How can I change the fundamental mechanics, and is it neat? Is it fun?’” More recently, Orange Machine successfully funded its second release, Black Hole Council, on Kickstarter. A game of negotiation and hidden motives, it casts players as corrupt and venal galactic rulers vying for political influence while voting to cast planets into a black hole. “The plan is to do a game for each letter of the alphabet,” Eskridge says. “So you had Abandon Planet, Black Hole Council and I can reveal that the ‘C’ game is currently titled Crunch. It’s about giant robot mechs fighting one another on intergalactic TV. “It’s kind of like rock-paper-scissors, but with more complexity and more context. So you’re in a circle and, for example, you’re going to shoot the player on your left and dodge the player on your right, or maybe set a trap for them. There are five or six different actions that I’m working on right now. “I’m interested in creating a game that’s accessible for non-gamers, and that’s what Crunch is going to be.”
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HOARD GAMERS
While most of us buy games for the experience, others make it their lifetime’s work to obtain a complete collection. How far would you go for the ultimate set? Words by Joshua King
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hen $20,000 of Magic: The Gathering cards were stolen from Cassius Marsh’s car, he was distraught. Not because of the cost – the multimillionaire NFL star could afford to replace them – but because he loved his collection. Tabletop gamers of every ilk will have a collection on some scale, from battered boxes of Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride to whole shelves of titles to play. As a gamer’s love of the hobby grows so, naturally, does their collection. But while creaking cupboards of boxes and boards are just a byproduct of actually playing for most gamers, for a small group of people the love of the hobby comes in the collecting. These are the collectors who gather limited editions, hunt every last trading card or amass as many titles as they can get their hands on. Colorado couple Sheila and James Davis hold an astounding 14,000 games on their shelves. It is one of the largest collections in the world. When the pair first met they had a ‘small’ collection of a few dozen games. Now – 20 years on – their almost inconceivable inventory fills their cavernous basement. James says: “It’s like any other hobby; you do it because it is fun. Also, Sheila has the collecting gene. Her entire family collects things – although they’re smart and collect small objects instead of boxes of cardboard. “After we married, Sheila kept collecting while I am most interested in playing. It’s a perfect marriage.” The Davises used to carefully organise their archive but stopped when it lost its lustre and became a chore. Instead they estimate the sum total of their games currently stands at 14,000, including RPG manuals, expansions and card games. “In other words, we don’t have 14,000 fullsize game boxes,” James says. They have a small number of titles set aside which have never been opened – either because they are too valuable or too rare. But, unlike many collectors, the Davises view their prized possessions as games to be played. James says: “That’s one of the best benefits of collecting games over knick-knacks – you can invite some friends over, open a game box and enjoy each other’s company. “Of course that’s after spending a half hour deciding which of the games to play,” he laughs.
“It’s not going to be possible to play them all. Keep in mind that many games – wargames for example – are dozens of hours long. A single RPG campaign could take months. “Factoring in sleep, work and life, there’s not enough time to play them all even if we wanted to.” The Davises say they keep a tight rein on their spending when it comes to the tabletop. The collection has grown steadily over two decades with titles picked up cheaply at thrift stores and game convention auctions. “That’s a very long time,” James says. “Also, we rarely sell games so over 20 years it accumulates. “It is fun to find a gem occasionally. But that’s really never been the impetus for the collection.” If there were to be a holy grail for the couple, it would be a “super rare” game such as 3M’s Thinking Man’s Basketball. For most
of 100, 250 or 500 games. The awards are visible to everyone who visits the site and transforms gathering a large collection into a badge of honour. But people are not amassing hundreds of boxes and thousands of meeples simply to accumulate internet points. Collecting can be a passion, an obsession and a calling. Alden says: “I collect games because I see each one as a unique piece of art. I also collect based on the feelings I have when I play them. “I will look at my shelf and remember the good times I had playing the game – even if I never get around to playing that game again.”
THE MONOPOLY GUY
Collecting is like any other hobby; you do it because it is fun. other gamers, however, the Davis basement holds more than enough treasures to last a lifetime. (Fittingly, the collection is guarded by two Killer Rabbits of Caerbannog from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.)
UNDER CONTROL My own collection of games numbers only in the dozens, and yet I have trouble keeping track of them. So how do serious collectors manage? To keep their treasure troves in order Sheila, James and others have turned to the nerve centre of the tabletop hobby: BoardGameGeek. The website is a definitive database of more than 80,000 games and allows users to catalogue their own collections while browsing those of other gamers. BoardGameGeek co-founder Scott Alden himself boasts an impressive 2,551-game cache. He is pleased users can track their own collections on his site. “It helps you avoid buying the same game multiple times,” Alden says. The database awards users bronze, silver and gold medals for logging a collection
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A collection of staggering size does not need to span thousands of titles, however. What if it included just one game? Well, Neil Scallan has the monopoly on that kind of collection – literally. Scallan – who appropriately works in logistics – holds the world record for most Monopoly boards owned. It is the purest form of collecting: seeking out every iteration of a single product. He has sets from around the world including brand and city special editions. When the Guinness Book of Records visited his collection to confirm the record they discovered Scallan also owns around 1,000 duplicates. Many of those duplicates are now on display in a museum in Belgium, the remainder safely sealed in their wrappers at a storage facility. Scallan values his collection at over £200,000 – nearly enough to buy a real house on Old Kent Road. Scallan says, “Once the boxes open, they lose their value. If they fell over, the money and the houses would go everywhere and it would be a nightmare. They’d be a nightmare to store.” Driven by collecting, Scallan says he “doesn’t mind” playing but grew weary of everybody playing with different rules. “It’s the hunt I like. Maybe they’re the new antiques. Most days I’m hunting down new games online. Even if you find them it can be impossible to buy them. So many countries are doing them now – they’re pumping them out and postage is so high.” A community of collectors has grown up around Monopoly who share a friendly rivalry about acquiring strange and unusual editions of the often-maligned game. Scallan has even found himself in an international bidding war with some of his friends.
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BOARD GAME COLLECTORS
With more than 2,000 copies (as well as some duplicates), Neil Scallan holds the Guinness World Record for owning more sets of Monopoly than anyone else, ranging from a One Direction edition to spin-offs inspired by Heinz and McDonald’s Brazil
“Our Holy Grail set is the Millionth Edition,” Scallan says. “There were only 100 made and they were divided around the world so there are so few available. “I bid for one on eBay. I was winning and decided to make a stupid £250 bid on it because it was so rare. Then, would you believe it, in the last seconds someone outbid me. “I was fuming but it turned out it was a friend of mine in South America.”
CARDBOARD COMMODITY Collecting in the 21st century has become a luxury hobby in itself as disposable incomes are limited. On online auction sites, prices of collectible titles are actually falling as people look to offload them for whatever cash they can get. Buyers in the UK have also been struck by the country’s turbulent place in the international market. Uncertainty surrounding Brexit increased Scallan’s shipping costs from the continent by as much as 40%. At the same time, manufacturers are actively designing sets for collectors – more and more special editions of existing games are popping up on crowdfunding site Kickstarter. The zeal with which some collectors hunt down games is impressive and difficult to comprehend. It means investing time and money – sometimes in colossal sums – for items collectors do not so much want as need. Scallan says: “There are some sets we don’t
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like. One Direction – we as collectors, do we want a One Direction set? Niall Horan might be upset at that. We get it because we collect but we don’t really want to buy it. “My games are stacked in safe storage. The room I have is huge, but I need it for my 2,000 sets and a further 250 duplicates I store there. The rest are on display in Belgium. “I spend over £200 a month just to pay for storage. That’s dead money. A lot of people think it’s mad. The Sun newspaper branded it ‘Monotony’. But when I show people, they start to get interested.” Scallan was recently presented with his 2,000th edition by Mr. Monopoly himself on top of Sydney Harbour Bridge. To avoid dropping pieces onto traffic below, the organisers emptied everything out of the box and clipped it on to their hands for the presentation. With sets as varied as Heinz and McDonald’s Brazil already in his collection, Scallan remains eager for more. “Coca Cola has made nine sets but I’d love an Irn Bru set from Scotland. I wonder if they could do that?” Whichever set does come next, he promises to keep collecting.
ALWAYS BE COLLECTING As Scallan’s collection shows, the makers of Monopoly have successfully franchised the product to thousands of companies and tourist sites around the world. It is a business
model that makes the game eminently collectible. The developers of smash hit titles like Pandemic and Ticket to Ride have followed suit, releasing reworked editions of the game set in different locations and time periods. Catan has just had a Game of Thrones rebrand. And, of course, developers are always prepared to release the obligatory Lovecraftian Cthuhlu edition. Other manufacturers have taken it a step further, creating games that are played with collectible pieces such as trading cards or miniatures. Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 allow collectors to buy and paint – transforming them into their own works of art. Wizards of the Coast has released thousands of unique Magic cards over the years – as of 2016 more than 20 billion had been printed – and there is an active secondary market. Cards are traded online like stocks and shares, their price rising and falling with changing competitive playing styles. The famously scarce Black Lotus card – which is available online today for as much as $13,000 (£9,300) – is perhaps the shining example of a tabletop game piece as a collectable. So while many if not most tabletop enthusiasts revel in the joy of cracking open a new box and getting to grips with the rules, there are others who love nothing more than preserving their packaging. These collectors have taken the satisfaction of buying a new title to its most extreme. In a way, their shelves are an indispensable vacuum-packed history of the hobby. Cassius Marsh may never see his lost Magic cards again but he has not lost the love of the game – last year he competed in the Las Vegas Grand Prix tournament. Now he’s got a lifetime to build a collection all over again.
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the independent shelf FREAKFACE!!!
The follow-up to cult horror hit Psycho Raiders is a brutal race for survival in a twisted world. Forget about a fair fight and start running
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ometimes you just have to march to the irregular beat of your own drum. Arthouse design studio Emperors of Eternal Evil does just that. Lead by the inimitable Nate Hayden, this group comes across as a band of metalheads who took a wrong turn and ended up designing small-press board games. Their discography includes the now-classic Cave Evil, a phenomenal underground battle of necromancers where you dig tunnels and harvest gore, and Psycho Raiders, a magazine-packaged horror jaunt fit for Halloween gaming. FREAKFACE!!! is the much-anticipated follow-up to Psycho Raiders. Transporting us back 40 years, this slasher has players taking on the role of a group of terrified teens or their horrific pursuers – a bloodthirsty carnival freak show. This is a title that’s all about atmosphere. It’s packaged in a magazine which offers a low-fi underground aesthetic fit for the zines of yesteryear. There’s this taboo feel as the material is peppered with crude comics, advertisements and even a bizarre centrefold. It proudly exclaims that anyone below the age of 18 is not permitted to play. It’s a wild ride that you won’t soon forget. Once you’ve cut out the sheet of cards and photocopied the diminutive character sheets, you’re ready to rock. The crude components and chilling artwork set the mood for the oncoming slaughter. The teens start in the middle of the huge tent, stuck in a mirror maze and surrounded by hostiles. The gun sounds and the carnage begins. All you need to do is make it off the map edge. It’s a twisted sprint through the maze, beyond the track containing a huge piston robot, and past several of the die-o-rama displays. The catch is there will be a diverse cast of mutants, showmen and brutes hunting you down. Direct combat is illadvised as the carnies are much stronger and more capable than your feeble youth. They’ll cut you down and eat you alive, and it’s simply not fair.
Words and pictures by Charlie Theel FREAKFACE!!! is not concerned with fair. This is a horror simulation that wants to invoke atmosphere and terror. The fact that it accomplishes this with such meagre components is absolutely astounding. The catch is that you need a group willing to buyin to this artistic direction. Players need to be committed to embarking on this ghastly narrative and willing to explore concepts normally outside those traditionally labelled as ‘fun’. Making matters more difficult is the game’s penchant for fighting you at times. The map is very muddled and it’s challenging to discern the location of walls and other terrain. This is more egregious than Psycho Raiders as
All players need to do to win is make it off the edge of the board to survival – harder than it sounds
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FREAKFACE!!! has a more complicated landscape with tent walls, trees, tracks for the constantly moving love carts, a maze of mirror walls and a host of other obscurities. Charm and a completely unique experience can certainly cover for a few blemishes. The trick here is finding an open-minded and enthusiastic group of individuals who will dive into the depravity of the carnival of horrors. Those who commit will be rewarded with batty tales of throwing a jar of spiders at a stitched together mass of body parts while Lucinda nearly escapes before being run down by a carny atop a steel horse. That insanity is as sweet and horrific as it gets.
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RAISING HELL
Nazi-punching, devilishly funny and wonderfully weird, Hellboy is the superhero that the tabletop – and the rest of the world – needs right now. James M. Hewitt offers a peek at what his upcoming co-op comic-book adventure has in store Words by Matt Jarvis
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nung Un Rama is a half-demon detective of the supernatural summoned from Hell to Earth in the early 17th century, but he’s perhaps never felt more relatable than in 2018. Maybe it’s because Hellboy – as he’s better known – has a burning hatred for Nazis and equally heated passion for punching them with his indestructible Right Hand of Doom, a pastime seemingly on the rise. Or is it possibly because his ironic sense of humour gels perfectly with a world of nonstop memes and in-jokes? It could simply be that it increasingly feels like the world’s greatest paranormal investigator is needed to just make sense of the last 12 or so months. It’s something that writer and artist Mike Mignola probably didn’t see coming when he created the series in the early ‘90s, drawing on a mixture of pulp adventures, supernatural horror and detective stories to craft darkly twisted tales. 25 years, dozens of books, two blockbuster films directed by Guillermo del Toro and an upcoming big screen reboot later, Hellboy doesn’t quite stand alongside Batman, Superman or Iron Man in the pantheon of modern superheroes. Instead, he’s become a comic-book figure of a different kind altogether, symbolising a more distinctive and downright stranger ilk. It’s this singular tone that James M. Hewitt insists is at the heart of his upcoming co-op board game based on Hellboy, which is set to heat up crowdfunding site Kickstarter in late April. “One of the things we were keen to do from the start was make sure that we’re definitely sticking to the comic vibe rather than the movie,” Hewitt says.
“Don’t get me wrong: I love the Hellboy movies, but they’re very much a different slant on things. The Hellboy comics, for anyone that’s not read them, they’re kind of dark, twisted fairytale detective stories at their core. “The stories tend to kind of have weird twists and turns, it’s not quite as action-packed as the films went. That is kind of what we’re looking at with the game.” A different kind of superhero requires a different kind of board game. Whereas other comic-book efforts, such as the recent Batman: Gotham City Chronicles, often focus on their stars’ prowess at taking down baddies in direct combat, Hewitt describes his approach to Hellboy as more akin to Lovecraftian narrativedriven adventure game Mansions of Madness. Players control Hellboy and other members of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense as they investigate a variety of mysterious happenings – typically, the designer adds, “tied to ancient gods, cults, frog monsters, fairytales, spooky things”. “For me, generally, whenever I write a game, I really want to capture the feel of whatever the story is,” he explains. “Especially something like this which is very thematic and narrative-heavy. So it was a case of going back, reading through the Hellboy comics, finding out what the crux of it is, what you can turn into a game there.” The inclination for exploration and mysterysolving over punching first and asking questions later doesn’t mean that Hellboy never gets a chance to show off his superhuman strength, mind you.
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“Monsters are jumping out of the shadows and you’re fighting them and that, but really the focus is on the investigation,” Hewitt reassures. “The game all builds up to a big final confrontation, because that’s generally the way the Hellboy stories go: it all ends up in a massive punch-up against some huge demonic alien entity thing. So that’s kind of what we wanted to capture. The shape of a game, if you like, is you’ll have a section where you’re walking around the board investigating for clues, looking for things. Strange things are going on and eventually it will all escalate rather rapidly into a big final confrontation.”
DEVIL IN THE DETAILS Hellboy’s commitment to weaving an interesting story for its players also means breaking with another trend. The game will be fully co-op, forgoing an asymmetrical competitive mode as seen in the one-versusmany setups of games such as Gotham City Chronicles and the original Mansions of Madness’ dungeon master-like keeper. “One of the things with Hellboy is the bad guys are very often otherworldly, inscrutable, unknowable horrors, and it seems weird to have them played by a human player, y’know?”
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HELLBOY
Players control Hellboy and B.P.R.D. agents as they investigate mysteries and battle the forces of evil Hewitt justifies. “So it was this idea of you’re playing narratively, and the B.P.R.D. are very much a cohesive unit; there are elements of internal conflict that come up through the comics, but overall they are a cool, awesome, cohesive team that work together against the bad guys. We just kind of wanted to get that across, keep it nice and simple. “That thematic idea of mystery and discovery plays into the game because you don’t necessarily know what this big confrontation at the end is going to be. So letting all of the players experience that mystery and intrigue at the same time is quite cool. I’ve always had a thing with one-versus-all-type games: your Descents, your Imperial Assaults, your Star Sagas. I like them, but I always end up being the one player by myself because I’m the one that knows the rules the best. I often find that I end up tempering my enjoyment to make sure everyone else has a good time. It’s games master syndrome, I suppose. As a designer I like the idea of games where you haven’t got one person standing by themselves. I’m not saying it’s always a bad thing – there are a lot of games that do it very well – but this is a chance to do something different.”
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Instead of a human opponent or companion app replacement, a la Mansions of Madness’ second edition, Hellboy’s antagonistic forces are driven by a deck of cards referred to as the ‘Deck of Doom’ – a nod to Hellboy’s stone fist. The deck is made up of a mixture of universal events alongside cards related to the specific villain or location of each scenario that aim to make each playthrough feel like a single unified story leading up to the finale rather than a series of unconnected incidents – “a Chekhov’s Gun thing,” Hewitt suggests. “Rather than being a bunch of random stuff that just happens for no reason, it’s all going to be tied into the particular confrontation you’re building towards at the end,” he details. “When you come to play a game you’ll determine either randomly or by player choice which confrontation you’re going for, so which of the bad guys it’ll be that you’re facing off against – it could be Rasputin, who’s one of the big bad guys [or] Hecate, who’s another one. There’ll be a bunch of confrontation cards for that character. You’ll pick one and it’ll be kept secret until you hit it, but you’ll know that’s who you’re facing. That will seed additional cards into the Deck of Doom; for example, into the exploration cards which tell you what’s in each room you come across.”
The nefarious plans of Hellboy’s biggest bads are given a further sense of urgency and tension by a mission clock that ticks away from turn to turn as the players explore and prepare to tackle the villain, immediately triggering the final confrontation if it hits 12. “A lot of the stories in Hellboy have this feel of a race against time, so there’s some kind of big evil thing happening; there’s the big ritual and they’re racing to stop it or whatever it might be,” be,” Hewitt says. “We’ve codified that with an actual mission clock, which is a component on the board where time ticks by and every turn that might progress along.” The Deck of Doom can be customised between games, offering a new way of experiencing new combinations of monsters, locations and events each time that Hewitt hopes will keep the stories fresh for a while to come. “It becomes quite a modular thing, so rather than there being a list of six cases you play through, it becomes sort of remixable,” he enthuses. “But it will all feel cohesive with an ongoing story built throughout because of the way the decks are built.” This replayability extends to the bosses included in the game, which can be vanquished in a number of different ways. A villain you need to simply kill in one mission might need to be buried by destroying the pillars in a room in another. Comparing the experience to the levels of a video game, Hewitt suddenly bursts out with an example that, it’s fair to say, we weren’t expecting to hear. “It’s a bit like in Sonic the Hedgehog: you face Doctor Robotnik several times but every time he’s doing something different,” he laughs.
HELL TO PAY Hewitt is no stranger to handling characters with heft in a universe with decades of history. Before forming his own independent studio, Needy Cat Games, last summer, he worked at Games Workshop, helping to expand the Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000 and Blood Bowl universes with both updated editions and original board game spin-offs. “It’s interesting, because one thing with Hellboy is there is this big broad universe,” he considers. “Even though there’s a load of detail, huge swathes of it are kind of unmapped. Whereas you look at something like Warhammer 40,000 – which has been going for 30 years and had tens of thousands, probably, of pages of text written about it between novels, expansions and whatever else – you can feel very much like you’re working within a very established framework.”
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While Hellboy presents more creative freedom, Hewitt doesn’t have carte blanche. For one, his game obviously needs to include its title character – and translating supernatural abilities to gameplay comes with its own challenges. “One thing that is interesting in adapting a comic book which is about one central main character, because Hellboy is the story: because one person will probably be playing Hellboy, you have to make sure they don’t feel like they’re way ahead of everyone else in terms of what they can do,” Hewitt explains. To solve the problem of having players squabble over who gets to be the star of the show, Hewitt has ensured that all of the B.P.R.D. agents have an individually engaging play style, with contrasting but complementary mechanics that hold their own against Hellboy’s pure strength. “So if you want to be Hellboy, you’ll be very punchy, you’ll be very resilient, but you might not have some of the cool stuff,” he continues. “For example, Liz Sherman, who’s one of the members of the team, is pyrokinetic and she’s like playing a mini-game where she’s trying to balance the utility of her firepower; she doesn’t want to overload and risk harming herself and others around her. So the characters all have these unique mechanics that play in. That comes from trying to make a comic about one protagonist and a supporting cast, turning that into a game that four people can play at the same time.” If Hellboy’s Kickstarter is a success a number of expansions are already planned, including an adaptation of the Hellboy in Mexico storyline – a series of tales set over a five-month “drunken weekend” in the 1950s. With the game based exclusively on the comics – the project was actually started before next year’s cinematic reboot had been announced – there are no plans to tie into the upcoming film, but Mignola’s original universe leaves no shortage of adventures to be had. “I’d read the Hellboy comics years and years and years ago when I was a student,” Hewitt recollects. “Since then, there have been so much more. The universe has expanded massively. It’s interesting though, because Mike Mignola’s kept a really close eye on it, so it’s all very cohesive, it all has a lot of internal logic and it does make sense. When you first read the Hellboy comics, it’s a bit baffling, it’s like: ‘What the hell is going on?’ But as you go through it, it really starts making a lot of sense. So for me it was a case of going back over something I’d enjoyed quite a long time ago, rediscovering it and digging into it in more detail. I’m still ploughing through
a mountain of comics, but it’s lovely because there is so much in them that will lend itself really nicely to gameplay. “It was quite an interesting challenge, but I really enjoyed building a game just from the ground up around the idea of these comics. It was a real chance to look at every mechanic and go: ‘Right, does that fit? Is that the kind of thing that belongs in this game? Is that just in there because it’s an obvious choice?’ So hopefully what people will find is, when they play it, it will really feel like Hellboy.”
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THROUGH THE AGES
AREA CONTROL
Claiming global domination has been a mainstay of tabletop strategy for decades, but taking over the world has come in many forms, from Risk to Small World
Words by Sam Desatoff
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n 1959, Parker Brothers published Risk: The Game of Global Domination. As that subtitle might imply, Risk is all about control – control over the game’s six continents, each of which are divided into a number of territories. The goal of the game is to control every territory on the board, which is why Risk has a reputation of being a long and drawn-out experience, a reputation exacerbated by the fact that combat is determined by the luck of dice rolls. For all its frustrations and faults, Risk was a pioneer in the board gaming landscape. The concept of area control has since gone on to become a genre of tabletop game with a growing number of entries that each put their own spin on a decades-old mechanic. Today, there are hundreds – if not thousands – of area control games, but they each owe their existence to a legacy of important precursors. Before we dive too far into this list, I want to acknowledge that there is a bit of a debate concerning the genre and its name. ‘Area control’ and ‘area influence’ are sometimes considered different genres, with ‘control’ referring to games where only one player can occupy a space at a time, unlike in ‘influence’ games where multiple players can be in a space at once. This list is largely going to ignore the difference between ‘control’ and ‘influence,’ as arguing semantics would simply limit the breadth of fantastic games that deserve recognition.
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In 1995, Hans im Glück published El Grande, a game that sees players wrestling for influence in medieval Spain. Each region is worth varying amounts of points, and the player with the most influence in a region will score the most points. There’s also the castillo, a separate region to which players can secretly add influence. To this day, El Grande is considered one of the best area control games thanks to its easy-to-learn rules, and the fact that it plays for a fixed number of rounds means sessions rarely feel long-winded. The Spiel des Jahres, Germany’s coveted Game of the Year award, recognises innovation in game design, and in 1996 that honour went to El Grande. In 1999 another area control game took home the prize: Michael Kiesling and Wolfgang Kramer’s Tikal. In Tikal, players take on the role of archaeologists who are uncovering temple ruins deep in the jungle. The game uses an action point system; each player is allocated ten points per turn and can use them to uncover temples, build new camps and explore more of the jungle. The point system provides greater flexibility than other games of the time, but it can also result in some serious analysis paralysis, which can cause sessions to drag a bit. 2005 saw the release of Twilight Struggle, a pillar of the area control genre. A game built for two players, Twilight Struggle sees players on opposite sides of the American-Soviet Cold War when the two countries were teetering on
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the edge of nuclear conflict. Players use their hand of event cards to exert influence over countries all over the world, influence that is reflected in the game’s unique victory point track. Both sides share one victory point track that represents the fierce tug-of-war that the US and Soviets were engaged in throughout the conflict, and the heavy use of historical events makes Twilight Struggle surprisingly educational. The game was so revered that it even sat atop the BoardGameGeek rankings for quite a while. For many, 2009’s Small World has become the definitive area control game, and it’s not hard to see why. Featuring a stable of colourful fantasy races with unique powers, Small World is equal parts accessible and strategic. The premise is simple: you earn one point for each region you control at the end of your turn. Each race has a different ability and is paired randomly with a power so that each game is unique. Today, there are a number of prominent designers working within area control. Eric M. Lang, for example, has put his stamp on the genre with games like Chaos in the Old World, Blood Rage and Rising Sun, and recent hits such as Ethnos and Inis prove that there is still a lot of unexplored territory within area control. But for all the innovation and iteration the genre has seen, it owes its existence to a 1959 game of global domination.
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Inside the World of Indines Marvel and DC aren’t the only ambitious shared universes out there. D. Brad Talton Jr. takes us on a tour of the fantasy home of Level 99’s games Words by Eric Watson
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hared universes have been tearing up the box office for the last decade, but it’s not exactly a popular avenue for board game publishers to explore. American indie designer Level 99 Games has carved a successful niche in the last few years thanks in large part to its World of Indines, an animeinspired fantasy world designed and nurtured by the studio’s president D. Brad Talton Jr. The latest game in the Indines universe, Empyreal: Spells and Steam, recently hit Kickstarter, with a release planned for later this year.
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A WHOLE NEW WORLD “I originally created the World of Indines for a homemade roleplaying game back in college,” says Talton in an interview over Skype. “Some of the characters were actually player characters played by my friends. Hikaru and Khadath – the two characters on the cover of BattleCON: War of Indines – were player characters in our campaign.” BattleCON was Level 99’s first published board game. It’s designed to implement the strategic timing and positioning of 2D fighting video games like Street Fighter. Players choose from a large roster of diverse characters,
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combining standard moves with their characters’ signature styles to unleash combos and stuns. The game wasn’t initially designed as an Indines title. “I originally wanted to license a bunch of different universes for BattleCON, the same way we’re doing Exceed right now,” Talton explains. “But this was my first game. I wasn’t able to get a licence from, say, [Street Fighter studio] Capcom.” Talton turned to his own fantasy world. The World of Indines has since become the face of BattleCON through four major releases, as well as appearing in several other big- and smallbox games.
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Competitive fighting games require knowing how to excel with, and counter, every character, making the World of Indines a perfect fit. “The characters are the key focus and the world forms a backdrop for them to play out stories and interact,” says Talton. “It’s very much an anime/manga-inspired universe. It’s a world where anyone can change the world with enough heart and planning and vision for the future.”
CHOOSE YOUR FIGHTER Level 99 goes beyond surface-level character design by providing detailed backstories and lore for each character. Talton has an internal lore book, though “not all of my information is accurate; even my own view of the world and lore is evolving constantly”. Its latest release in the universe, Trials of Indines, features several paragraphs for each character, explaining the motivations and connections between its ten new fighters. It helps to have an established world when designing new characters. After four BattleCON releases, there are over 60 characters to battle with. “When making a new BattleCON character, we think about a new mechanic or gameplay we want to introduce,” says Talton. For the Fate of Indines character Thessala Three, he had an idea for a fighter with their own tech tree that unlocked over the course of a match. “What kind of theme would work with that? What if she was this T-1000-type robot that could change form and evolve? We put that into a character and figure out a way to justify it within the world. It’s a complex world and a lot of fun to write for.” Sometimes it’s the story that becomes the first seed in a character’s development. “Other cases we have a character that we’ve mentioned in the lore and we want them to be playable in the game,” Talton says. “For them the storyline came first and we find gameplay to match. Those are the toughest characters
The World of Indines series includes plenty of fighting games, but has also experimented with other genres – such as railway management in upcoming instalment Empyreal to design as sometimes they’re not really made for combat. In general we think of the needs of the game and find a character – or make a character – to fill those needs.” Each Indines game features ongoing plots and events that advance chronologically. War of Indines introduced the world and initial characters, while Argent: The Consortium centred around the fate and control of magic. Devastation of Indines featured a massive war between demons, gods and aliens. The current ongoing trilogy of mini BattleCON games follows yet another storyline, this time focusing on a dark mirror underworld called the Underlands. Despite all these events, Indines remains a character-focused world, and much of the appeal is seeing how these characters change over the years. “This is a living universe, and characters can evolve over multiple games; they may be a fighter in BattleCON, a teacher in Argent BattleCON Argent, and
working for the industrialisation of the world with Empyreal,” Talton says. “I really like shared universes, I like transmedia stuff where you see the same character show up in different places and they have the same mechanics and gameplay.” For example, Runika Zenanen is an artificer who first appears in BattleCON: Devastation of Indines. She’s also a playable character in the dexterity game Disc Duelers Duelers, where players can simulate her large golem hand by placing their literal hand on the playing field. She’s going to show up again in Empyreal as an owner of one of the train companies, using her tech-savvy powers to produce more mana than her competitors. “You get the idea that this is a tech-focused, builder character with a magic-battery motif,” Talton says. “Same character, used in different ways in different games.” Using the World of Indines in other games also brings in fans that might nor normally look twice at certain genres. BattleCON is a one-on-one card and board fighting game. Disc Duelers is a disc-flipping dexterity game. Argent is a worker-placement Eurogame, and Empyreal will be a railway management game.
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WORLD OF INDINES
World of Indines games often share characters and events; for example, Runika Zenanen first appears in Devastation of Indines but also pops up in dexterity game Disc Duelers and Empyreal
SEVENTH HEAVEN
“A lot of players who normally wouldn’t touch a genre will give it a try because they recognise the characters and the world,” Talton says. “They want to see what their favourite character is up to now. Now they’re the chancellor of a magic university! It’s a lot of fun. Or with Empyreal – it’s a railway game but you can play as Runika. People get excited, even if they’re not excited for that particular genre.”
ACROSS THE UNIVERSES Despite the flexibility and brand recognition, Level 99 doesn’t use the World of Indines for every game release. In 2016 the studio launched Exceed, another fighting game, this time using a more randomised system of card drawing. “Exceed was actually BattleCON 2 for a long time,” said Talton. “We were going to revise the system and reboot the whole series. We decided it wouldn’t be wise to do that so we created a standalone game.” For Exceed’s fighters Level 99 turned to Jasco Games, another indie game publisher. “One time, [Jasco president] Jason Hawronsky was driving through Albuquerque and said, ‘Hey you’re that guy that makes fighting board games, we should hang out,’” Talton recalls. “We did, and he told me all about the Universal Fighting System card game, and I said we should work together. We had an instant rapport.” The two companies ended up trading character licences between their two fighting
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games. “They traded us Red Horizon for Exceed, and we gave them World of Indines for UFS,” Talton says. “It’s neat to see your characters come out in another game like that.” The two companies would collaborate again for Mega Man Pixel Tactics, using Jasco’s Mega Man licence and Level 99’s successful Pixel Tactics series. Level 99 most recently worked with Penny Arcade for the recently released Automata Noir, combining Penny Arcade’s 1930s android comic with its own Noir: Deductive Mystery Game. “I talked to [Penny Arcade co-founder] Jerry Holkins on Twitter and he was like, ‘I love your games,’ and I was like, ‘I love your comics!’” says Talton. “We got together at PAX South one year and chatted. I showed them all our games and they were really impressed with Noir. I suggested we could use their crime noir series, Automata. So we did! We also brought Carl into Exceed as a bonus fighter.” Talton enjoys working with licences, particularly other board game companies. Several of Level 99’s series, such as Exceed and Pixel Tactics, are easily malleable to include other licences and franchises. “If we can get seven images of character art we can put them into Exceed,” says Talton. “For Pixel Tactics we just have to draw pixel art, and it’s easy to figure out what mechanics work for the game.”
Occasionally, Level 99 produces something completely new, as was the case with its massive CCG-simulator Millennium Blades, and the second season of Exceed. “Millennium Blades was such a specific game it needed its own theme to work,” said Talton. “We decided the World of Indines is a property within the world of Millenium Blades. So, for example, they watch Indines TV shows or purchase Indines comic books. There are fun Easter eggs that connect these worlds.” The upcoming second season of Exceed will feature Seventh Cross, an all-new world designed by Talton. “I wanted to do something that was a little more genre specific to horror, and more of an older audience,” says Talton. “For World of Indines we make it available for both kids and adults to play. But I wanted to do something that would appeal more directly to that Bloodborne, Dark Souls crowd.” The world of Seventh Cross will feature more mature art and storytelling, with a gothic horror theme that evokes Castlevania and Lovecraft. The marquee Seventh Cross game, Seventh Cross: Hunters of the Church, will be a big-box adventure game. “It’s a big miniatures game, about the size of Gloomhaven,” explains Talton. “I’ve been working on it for about two years and really excited about it.” Level 99 plans to launch the Kickstarter campaign for Seventh Cross later this year. As an indie company, Kickstarter is pretty much a requirement for the large game releases that Level 99 likes to produce, but it’s also an effective way to engage with fans over the years. “For me personally, I really like interacting with the fans, getting ideas for the games, especially with our creative tiers where fans can name a character or put something in the box,” Talton enthuses. The World of Indines has created a shared world not just for Level 99, but also for fans to engage with and return to, year after year. “I still recognise names from our first Kickstarter projects who have come back for everything we’ve done since, through tough times and great times. Our fans know we’re going to pull through for them, and always have in games past.”
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Play it smart What’s in a game? Our doctors consider what allows the tabletop to stand apart from its digital counterparts
of tabletop games can’t offer the fantastical sensory immersion of triple-A videogames is, we argue, one of their strengths. Of course tabletop games can be immersive, be it through puzzle-solving or imaginative activity, but the experience remains firmly located in the material world. In other words, social interaction and an awareness of play as an activity remain at the fore. It’s this social side of tabletop games that we’ve found most valuable in our work. While video gaming is by no means a solitary activity, its networks are more often than not virtual. (Nintendo’s Wii console being a notable exception.) In playing tabletop orth ngw Illi Sam and Doctors Paul Wake games, we see the immediate reactions of fellow players, read their body language and his month finds us part way through can comment (in all manner of ways) on their a project that uses tabletop games decisions. For our purposes, the metagame is a to promote public engagement vital part of the gaming experience and some of with STEM (Science Technology, the games we’ve been using, such as Pandemic Engineering and Mathematics) and Fluxx, are clearly designed with the metagame subjects. It’s a project that has involved us thinking in mind. Where we’ve introduced games that through the benefits of using tabletop games in aren’t so heavily invested in the meta, such as communicating complex ideas, and, more often Terraforming Mars, we’ve found that encouraging than we’d expected, articulating the ways in which gamers to play in teams helps to increase the these benefits differ from those of their digital opportunities for meaningful social interactions. counterparts. It turns out that when you say ‘game’, As team games of Terraforming Mars suggest, people tend to start thinking about video games. tabletop games are easily adapted by players, even So, what makes tabletop games different (feel free during the process of play. While players of video to think ‘better’) than video games? games can and will experience games in ways that Most obviously tabletop games – the clue’s might surprise the game’s designers (speedruns in the title – are played around a table. The being an obvious example), without access to the implications of this are huge, and they are to do game’s underlying code these experiences with cost. However expensive tabletop games will remain within the parameters of the game might seem to some, when it comes to investment as designed. By way of contrast, in space and resource they’re a total bargain. tabletop games often There’s also something to be said for the include design elements embodied experience on offer. While video that encourage adaptation games, and more obviously virtual reality experiences, use high-quality sound and graphics to draw players into the game environment, Mysterium’s ’s silent ghost tabletop games make the dual location of play – in player feels drastically both the game world and the real world – very different in its digital version clear. That the card, wood and plastic components
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(cardboard-coding being a widely-held skillset). Small World, for example, provides blank cards that encourage players to modify the game to their aesthetic tastes and playing styles: Tree-Hugging Beholders, anyone? None of this is to say that video games can’t be social, adaptable or tactile. But they certainly offer different experiences. This becomes abundantly clear when tabletop games are translated into digital media. Take Asmodee Digital’s adaption of Mysterium for example: while mechanically it remains almost identical to the original tabletop version, receiving clues from an ‘unseen’ ghost (either an AI or another player somewhere else in the world), rather than having the ghost ‘in the room’, so to speak, alters things dramatically. That said, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are busy harnessing “‘mind-reading’ technology to decode complex thoughts” – so perhaps the next update of the Mysterium app will be something truly astonishing… Taken together, these things suggest that the ways in which gamers interact with tabletop games, and with other players, differ dramatically from the experience of playing video games. Perhaps most importantly, they create a shared space in which complex topics can be discussed and debated, and it is this capacity to create dialogue that makes them such a productive means of public engagement. Paul Wake and Sam Illingworth are Manchester Metropolitan University academics and co-directors of the Games Research Network
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THE FIRST
P O T E L B TA Y T I R B E L CE
He popularised the meeple, revolutionised the way we score games, pioneered countless mechanics from area control to action points and has won the fabled Spiel des Jahres award more times than anyone else. Meet Wolfgang Kramer, a true living legend of gaming Words by Matt Jarvis
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hen we talk about ‘designer board games’, there’s sure to be the same names that inevitably pop up. Rosenberg, Leacock, Teuber, Lang, Knizia. A name that might not be top of the list for many modern players, especially here in the UK, is Wolfgang Kramer. Yet, the German designer has perhaps done more than almost anyone else to shape gaming as we know it. Kramer first started designing games in the mid-1970s, crafting abstract titles before layering in theme from the beginning of the ‘80s: “I liked it much more to work with a theme,” he says today. Among these games was Heimlich & Co., a game about moving spies around a board with a hiddenrole element. Simple as it seemed, the game was revolutionary upon release in 1984, becoming
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the first widely available title to popularise both meeples (although they wouldn’t be called that until Carcassonne was released nearly twenty years later) and a scoring track around the edge of the board – the latter even became known in Germany as Kramerleiste (‘Kramer bar’) in honour of its designer. Kramer had actually invented the scoring track as part of a promotional game released in 1982 called Das Große Unternehmen Erdgas (‘The Large Companies of Natural Gas’), but Heimlich & Co. established it as a fixture in board games for decades to come. Heimlich & Co. would go on to receive the 1986 Spiel des Jahres, the prestigious German Game of the Year prize that Kramer collected for a second time the following year for Auf Achse. While the game itself was less groundbreaking
than Hemlich & Co., Kramer’s back-to-back wins marked the first time the Spiel des Jahres had been won by the same person. By 2001, Kramer would have claimed the Spiel des Jahres five times – an unbroken record to this day.
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Kramer’s success allowed him to become Germany’s first full-time games designer in 1989, with his eminence fuelled by his wide-ranging oeuvre and prolific output, spanning from light card games to the hybrid computer-board game forerunners of today’s app-driven titles. “I tried to design at least one game for each genre,” he reveals. Initially working on projects by himself, then with the help of his wife and friends, Kramer
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a lot since the ‘70s; much more mediums report now about games, but when we have the same reputation as books we have reached our aim.”
When games have the same reputation as books we have reached our aim. eventually began to collaborate with fellow designers, most notably Michael Kiesling and Richard Ulrich. “When I design games with a partner the designing is more alive and more interesting,” Kramer says. “But it doesn’t change my design method; I like it to discuss mechanisms and variants. Two persons see more, have more ideas and test more. But I have to share the royalties.” It was with Ulrich that Kramer created El Grande, the influential 1996 area control title that would go on to inspire the gameplay of countless other Eurogames. It was one of two Spiel des Jahres winners from the pair – the other being 2000’s The Princes of Florence – but it is El Grande that Kramer singles out as his favourite creation. “It has several new and original mechanisms and I like the mix of strategy, tactic and luck,” he explains. A few years later, Kramer and Kiesling designed the so-called ‘mask trilogy’, beginning with 1999’s Tikal and continuing with Java and Mexica, which pioneered the concept of players spending a pool of points on a choice of actions. Tikal and the following year’s Torres,, also created with Kiesling and considered a heavy influence on the ‘mask’ games, added another two Spiel des Jahres awards to Kramer’s mantelpiece. Despite the legacy of his more complex games, Kramer’s most successful release is 6 nimmt!, a simple game about laying down numbered cards in ascending order that can be played with big groups. The game has sold more than three million copies since its release in 1994, and continues to shift a further 200,000 boxes each year. “Since about seven years [ago] we have had two game markets: one for gamers and one for the other people which play seldom and which are inexperienced,” Kramer says. “The market for gamers is a small market. The market for inexperienced people is a big market. I try to design games which are suitable for both markets. These games are seldom and very difficult to design. Two of those games are Catan and Carcassonne. Until now I succeeded only once in designing such a game: 6 nimmt!”
THE PAST REBORN Kramer continues to put out his own designs every year, but his older games have also been revitalised
ALWAYS SEARCHING
for a modern audience. This includes Kramer’s debut, Tempo, an abstract racing card game released in 1974 that was rebranded multiple times throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s. Its latest reiteration is last year’s Downforce, a reimagining co-designed by legacy innovator Rob Daviau to which the original designer contributed special abilities. “I like the idea to restore good, old games,” Kramer says. “I would like to revive Asara and The Palaces of Carrara. I would change the mechanisms in the direction of a game for players. I also would like to publish Big Boss once more as a family game.” Kramer’s impact on the modern state of tabletop gaming is undeniable. Yet, while he is celebrated by in-the-know gamers, his name isn’t nearly as widely recognised as many of the present-day designers for whom he blazed a trail. It was creative forces such as Kramer who helped establish players’ awareness of a designer as a form of author, decades before credits would become commonplace on the front of game boxes. “I think books are much more acknowledged than games,” he observes. “Therefore the reputation of games could be better and we all can do our best to improve this reputation. We have achieved
ABOVE Tikal kicked off Kramer and Kiesling’s ‘mask trilogy’ and earned the pair a Spiel des Jahres win
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As analogue gaming continues to flourish, propelled by systems and concepts that wouldn’t exist without Kramer’s groundbreaking work, the veteran designer continues to consider the next major step innovation on the tabletop could take. “I think the combination between the card/ board games and computer games will be a strong genre in the future; in this genre also belongs the combination card/board games with the internet and mobile phones,” he predicts. “In the future it is not necessary to read rulebooks. You learn the rules by playing. I also think that it is possible in the far future to design games with artificial intelligence. “ Today, in his seventies, Kramer still shows little sign of exhausting his creativity and enthusiasm. When we speak, he is working on “a complex game for gamers, a 3D family game and two other family games”, with a new 6 nimmt! spin-off and board game also in the works ahead of the game’s upcoming 25th anniversary next year. He may already be one of the most important figures in gaming history, but there’s no plan to fade into the past. “My wish and my aim is to get the Spiel des Jahres award once more,” he reveals. “Another wish is to find a totally new genre for games. “I search all the time for great ideas for new games. You see, I am still busy and I am a searcher ‘til the end of my life.”
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LIONS, TIGERS AND DRACULA A former animator is bringing a touch of Disney magic to card games. Tania Walker talks monsters, ladies and why every drawing counts
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or many artists, a job at Disney would be their ‘happily ever after’. For Tania Walker, it was just her ‘Once upon a time…’ After stints at animation studios – where she worked on a Coco Pops advert and the sequel to George of the Jungle – the Australian illustrator joined Walt Disney’s Sydney studio in the mid-noughties as an assistant animator, racking up credits on films such as The Lion King 3 andMickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers. Part of her role was to work as an ‘inbetweener’, the industry term for artists that produce the drawings that go between the key poses drawn by lead animators, giving the impression of movement and action. “The principles of what makes a good drawing are the same from job to job – everything else is different,” Walker says. “At Disney I worked in pencil on paper, colour wasn’t a factor and I had to meet a quota of roughly 60 drawings per week. In a studio environment like that, each person is like a single component in a much larger machine: you do one thing over and over again, and you do it extremely well. That applies to all animation jobs, but at Disney they had it down to a science.” Following her stint at Disney, Walker decided to focus on illustration and spent a decade working on everything from advertising to toy and novelty design. Eventually, she would come into contact
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Words by Matt Jarvis with local fledgling tabletop studio Jellybean Games. It was an opportunity she jumped at. “In my other jobs I definitely had the scope to use many other skills, including a lot of graphic design over the years, but I had less freedom and self-determination than I do now,” she says today, nearly two years after she first came on board as art director. “Working with a small tabletop company, I get to wear many hats: art direction, illustration, graphic design,writing and editing, using rendering software, and being part of discussionsaboutgame mechanics. I’m still constantly learning new skills, and every day I’m grateful for the sheer variety of art/design work I did over the decade before this – even the jobs that were pure drudgery – because almost all of it has come in handy here.”
VISUAL FEAST Walker’s artistic flair would be unleashed on Jellybean’s second project, snappy social deduction game Dracula’s Feast. Designed by Jellybean founder Peter C. Hayward as a friendlier alternative to games such as Werewolf, the card game featured striking reimaginings of figures from classic horror literature, including a zombie, Captain Bluebeard, Van Helsing and the titular bloodsucker himself. The art, too, was draped in
its gothic inspirations – a stark contrast to Walker’s previous work. “Dracula’s Feast drove me bonkers,” Walker admits. “Peter asked me to use the art of Edward Gorey as a touchstone for this project, as it’s rarely seen in tabletop games, and it suited the subject matter. Gorey was all about ghouls, monsters, and the possibility of being eaten by the aforementioned. His work is also very much traditional ink-on-paper, with extremely detailed textures, patterns and hatching.At one point I was seeing cross-hatching in my dreams. “It was time-consuming both to create that work, and to learn how to create it –I had to stretch artistically to nail down the vibe of his style digitally.The outcome really pops out on a games shelf, which was our hope. In hindsight it would have been safer and quicker to go with a more mainstream digital-painterly look, but I’m glad we took a risk on this style – as a nimble indie company, we’re in a great position to try something new, and with the growing size of the tabletop market it’s becoming increasingly important to make games that don’t just blend into every other digital-painterly offering on the shelves around them.” The style worked a treat, helping Dracula’s Feast to draw almost $90,000 from the veins of Kickstarter backers. After proving Walker worthy of
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a challenge beyond her comfort zone, Jellybean’s next project would return to the Disney alumna’s strengths, but she was far from complacent. “With every project our art goals are: it mustn’t be too similar to the current board game mainstream; it must be visually appealing; it must be clear. And of course the art must always serve the mechanics. You’d be amazed how much freedom those few rules allow,” Walker says. “I spend a week or more at the start of each new project thinking, sketching, looking at various art styles and gathering visual ‘touchstones’, and between those inspiration pieces and my own artistic foibles, strengths and limitations, something new emerges. After that, I develop one card through to completion and, if we’re all happy with it, the first card then becomes my touchstone for the rest. In Dracula’s Feast, it was the Dracula card – I went on to become much better at the style after that, so I wish I could go back and redo that one.”
CAT LADIES Hayward had recently read Frank R. Stockton’s The Lady, or the Tiger? after hearing a They Might Be Giants song based on the short story, and thought it would make for an easy theme to use in a prototype. When he mentioned the concept to Walker, she convinced him to stick with the idea of citizens accused by a semi-barbaric king choosing between two doors to decide their fate – behind one a lady whom the accused must marry, the other a hungry tiger not in the mood for matrimony. “Very occasionally, a project comes along that falls neatly into the centre of every Venn diagram I have as an illustrator,” Walker says. “This was one of those. Ordinarily I have to research and seek inspiration for a project but, historically, I’ve loved drawing cats of all stripes – ha! – and my other favourite subject matter is gorgeous ladies – because all ladies are gorgeous – so when Peter floated the initial theme of this project, I leaped on
the chance to draw commercially all the things I love drawing personally.” Despite the evocative theme, The Lady and the Tiger is more a system than a single game based on the story, although one of the five modes included, Doors, does indeed involve two players trying to find ladies behind doors. The other modes, ranging from single-player puzzles to bluffing games for bigger groups, make use of the set’s minimalist design, containing just red and blue cards with either a lady or tiger on each, plus two half-and-half special cards. “Being limited to a palette of red or blue made it a breeze to keep the card types distinct, and those divides – lady/tiger and red/blue – are the heart of the mechanics of the games included,” Walker says. “Having such straightforward dichotomies to work with made my job easy. On top of that, for this project I was able to work in my own ‘baseline’ style, insofar as I have one. It’s vaguely Disneyesque, a mainstream style that has been honed by better artists than me over decades for maximum clarity and appeal. So it was both highly effective, and smack in the middle of my comfort zone. “I’m also big on diversity – as a woman in the tabletop industry I’m quite the startling minority, by the numbers, and I think more representation
No amount of great mechanics matter a jot unless someone picks up that box.
STRAIGHT FROM THE ART Walker is yet to reveal what she will turn her pen to next (Jellybean’s latest project, Show & Tile, is an abstract puzzle game without illustrations), but it’s sure to gather another swell of interest. In a year and a half, her distinctive style and dazzling artwork has helped the small studio and its games stand apart from an increasingly busy crowd – and allow the former inbetweener to colour outside the lines. “What I love most about this job is that, far more than in animation or advertising, each individual illustration matters,” Walker says. “These are illustrations that will be seen again and again as people play the game, so they have to hold up to scrutiny. And for new players, each piece of art has to do everything possible to reinforce the function of the card in the player’s hand. All those pieces of art also have to work in conjunction with each other as sets, or suits, and as a whole as well. The box art is also vitally important; it’s what compels someone to take the game off the store’s shelf in the first place. No amount of great mechanics or clever copy matter a jot unless someone picks up that box. So I get to mentally zoom in and think about art on an intensely micro, piece-by-piece level, and also zoom out and think about it on a broadly conceptual level. It’s never boring.”
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of diverse people in games is one way we can work on drawing others into the hobby, people who might not have been the traditional target market in the past. In every game I make, and most freelance projects prior to my time in gaming, when I was able to get away with it, I’ve aimed for gender parity and diversity. So here in front of me was the opportunity, not just to achieve parity, but to illustrate an all-female group of characters. Brilliant! I set out to include women of all different backgrounds, ages and shapes. I only wish the game had required more of them, because I didn’t get a chance to touch on half the variety I’d have liked. Alas, for every woman in the game I had to draw a tiger, and I was scraping the bottom of the ‘tiger ideas’ barrel by the end. Sorry tigers. I’m not saying you all look alike, but...”
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resented by the South London Warlords, Salute 2018 is the biggest, independent, one-day wargaming and gaming event in the UK. Once again, we have a huge number of traders from the UK and around the world attending the show at ExCel London as well as plenty of demonstration and participation games to enjoy. We will also, of course, be running our renowned painting competition. Every year, we aim to provide a fantastic showcase, whether you are thinking of starting this great hobby or are already a ‘veteran’ wargamer/gamer.
Tickets
SALUTE is held at ExCel London, which is very easy to get to. Here is a simplified transport link map.
£10.00 via eticket or £20.00 (cash only) at the door. Under 16s FREE with a paying adult. Again this year there will be several ‘golden ticket’ prizes. Tickets are now on sale from our Facebook page and website:
www.salute.co.uk
NB: there is no bring and buy at Salute 2018.
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75 THE ONE RING RPG: OATHS OF THE RIDDERMARK
66 STAR WARS: LEGION 67 RISING SUN 68 STUFFED FABLES
76 MEEPLE CIRCUS | DREADBALL: SECOND EDITION
69 GKR: HEAVY HITTERS
77 PAPER TALES
70 THE PALACE OF MAD KING LUDWIG
78 A HANDFUL OF STARS
71 ANCESTREE 72 CIVILIZATION (2018 EDITION) 73 COSMOGENESIS 74 WELCOME TO CENTERVILLE
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STAR WARS: LEGION Adrenaline-pumping tactical battles in a galaxy far, far away Designer: Alex Davy | Artist: Various
90-120m
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ust when you thought Fantasy Flight couldn’t possibly squeeze any more blood out of its Star Wars licence, the company strikes back with another release set in a galaxy far, far away. Star Wars: Legion is a miniatures battle game pitting Rebel fighters against the forces of the Galactic Empire. While FFG’s existing wargames X-Wing and Star Wars: Armada have both focused on spaceship combat, this new addition aims to recreate the series’ adrenaline-fuelled ground battles, with players taking command of infantry squads, vehicles and iconic characters from the original films. It’s the publisher’s closest attempt yet at a competitor to Warhammer 40,000 – easily the dominant miniatures game in the industry – and at first glance the two share some similarities. You’ll need to assemble and paint your plastic troops, and you'll configure armies using a points-based system, with powerful units costing more than lowly grunts. But play a few turns, and
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WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
◗ 33 plastic miniatures ◗ Eight plastic barricades ◗ 15 dice ◗ Three movement tools ◗ Range ruler ◗ Eight unit cards ◗ 35 upgrade cards ◗ 14 command cards ◗ 12 battle cards ◗ Round counter ◗ 107 assorted tokens
2
£80
14+
Legion quickly proves to be quite a different proposition. As well as choosing squads to field, you’ll assemble a hand of command cards before you play. These have some dramatic effects on the game. They determine who gets the first chance to activate their army, but also the number of units you’re able to issue commands tokens to on every round. While you’re able to activate commanded units at a time of your choice, squads without a token act in a random order. It simulates the chaos of the battlefield, and means there are times where you’ll have to respond to a situation with the troops available to you rather than the ones you’d prefer to use. You’ll constantly have to ask yourself whether it’s more important to maintain control over your forces, or to claim the advantage of acting before your opponent.
Just as intriguingly, though, some cards come with additional effects, adding an almost CCG-like element to the game. Choosing command cards that mesh well with your troops and your strategies feels almost like crafting a well-honed deck in Magic: The Gathering and, as future expansions add more units and commanders, you can expect an ever-increasing range of options to experiment with. What really makes Legion shine, though, is its respect for its source material. It brilliantly translates the atmosphere of the movies to the tabletop, emphasising the main characters over anonymous troopers. While the likes of Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker might seem ridiculously overpowered, it means they’re involved in some of the most dramatic moments of the game, with Luke swatting aside laser blasts with his lightsaber and Vader stalking menacingly across the battlefield before laying waste to entire units in close quarters. That’s equally true for vehicles like nippy speeder bikes and giant walkers, which howl, screech and stomp their way across the battlefield, resulting in a wonderfully cinematic feel. While there’s plenty of scope for customisation and nitty-gritty tactical decisions, this is also a game that generates tension, drama and a constant succession of memorable moments. The result will appeal equally to casual players and hardcore tournament grinders. It might be bad news for your bank account but, if you’re looking to immerse yourself in the conflict between the Jedi and the Sith, this is the game you’re looking for. OWEN DUFFY
t e n . s g a
WE SAY
Star Wars: Legion mixes fast-flowing action with an engaging tactical challenge, and it’s a brilliantly faithful recreation of the movies’ battle scenes. Getting into it will sap your time and empty your wallet but, for fans of the franchise, it’s as close as you’ll ever get to scrapping it out on Hoth or Endor.
m ld
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… WARHAMMER 40,000
This is Fantasy Flight’s most direct stab at a Warhammer 40,000 competitor to date, and it’s a slick, accomplished and highly thematic alternative.
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RISING SUN
Is the follow-up to Blood Rage a worthy successor? Designer: Eric M. Lang | Artist: Adrian Smith
ED
IT
R
ising Sun is a game that will make you go ‘wow’. From its table-filling main map, illustrated with eye-watering beauty by artist Adrian Smith, and towering monster ‘miniatures’ that feel suitably awing to the straightforward yet limitlessly complex area-control gameplay at its centre and, yes, even the more than $4 million it gathered from tens of thousands of backers on Kickstarter last year, it’s hard not to be bowled over by just how impressive Eric Lang’s latest showpiece feels. That’s perhaps unsurprising given that Rising Sun is the offspring of the designer's equally epic (and revered) spiritual successor Blood Rage and gloriously brutal classic Diplomacy, pitting players against each other in a cut-throat battle to rule feudal Japan by deploying their troops across the lands and attracting the aid of legendary monsters and god-like kami. (This is by no means a game for those after historical realism or cultural accuracy.)
CE
90-120m
O R'S C H OI
Driving the action is a tight set of political mandates that are played one at a time each turn, granting a bonus to the active player (and their ally) and a lesser version of the same move to everyone else, à la games such as Twilight Imperium. The balance of having direct control over your limited selection while adapting to the other players’ decisions makes for a deep but easy to understand loop, as choosing when to move your units into a particular region or even betray an allied clan to gain extra power becomes vital. Ah, yes, betrayal. Forming partnerships is baked into Rising Sun, as each round kicks off with a tea ceremony where clans can offer gifts (or bribes) and pledge their friendship to another faction, slotting together two tiles to mark the bond. Having an ally can be extremely beneficial in order to gain extra bonuses during the political phase and avoid costly battles, but alliances are never permanent, ending at the close of each round. This natural fluidity of alliances means that turning on your former partner to gain an extra couple of troops never feels like something that could result in a flipped table, making it fun rather than infuriating. After kami have been worshipped, troops positioned and alliances broken, war breaks out in a random selection of territories, with the need to constantly keep troops on the move to claim the most points resulting in a
£100
WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
more dynamic competition than some area control setups prone to turtling. Battles are resolved with a hidden bidding system between players that makes each clash a showdown of bluffing and prediction as they assign coins to hire ronin, take hostages or even commit seppuku, which means an army faced with defeat can still grab victory points and honour – an ever-shifting ranking of the clans that crucially breaks ties – before they’re wiped out. A small but significant rule is that the winner of a fight must pay their invested coins to the losers, which helps with future conflicts and acts as a very tidy balancing system. This, combined with the ever-present chance to team up with another clan trailing in the points tally for mutual benefit, means that Rising Sun never develops a runaway leader problem or the feeling that all is lost, right up until the final scoring. Rising Sun may not have done its history homework, but it aces the overall exam with an intoxicating propensity for finely-tuned strategy and scheming that is never anything less than flat-out entertaining. It’s a beaut to look at, a delight to play and filled with moments that will have you playing ‘til the sun goes down – and then comes back up again. In short: wow. MATT JARVIS
◗ Five clan screens ◗ Game board ◗ Seven shrine tiles ◗ 10 political
mandate tiles
◗ 21 core season cards ◗ Five political/war tiles ◗ 24 war
province tokens
◗ 15 teapot
season cards
◗ 15 horseman
season cards
◗ 15 archway
season cards
◗ Five alliance tokens ◗ 20 stronghold tokens ◗ 20 ronin tokens ◗ Eight war
number tokens
◗ 65 plastic coins ◗ 10 clan markers ◗ 10 bonsai clan figures ◗ 10 koi clan figures ◗ 10 dragonfly
clan figures
◗ 10 lotus clan figures ◗ 10 turtle clan figures ◗ Eight monster figures ◗ Five huge
monster bases
◗ 15 large
monster bases
◗ 15 shinto bases ◗ Five daimyo bases
WE SAY Eric Lang has done it again with an impeccable area control game that is as stunning to play as it is to look at. The betrayals are entertaining rather than enraging, the strategy as rich as it is clear, and the fun non-stop. This Sun shines very bright indeed.
t e n . s g a
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… BATTLE FOR ROKUGAN
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13+
3-5
m ld
Avoiding the obvious Blood Rage nod, Rising Sun makes for a flashier – if less svelte – double feature with the fantastic Legend of the Five Rings spin-off.
tabletopgaming.co.uk
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P L AY E D WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
◗ Storybook ◗ Sideboard ◗ Six Stuffy figures ◗ 17 minion figures ◗ 35 dice ◗ Dice bag ◗ 15 buttons ◗ Six character cards ◗ 40 discovery cards ◗ 29 lost cards ◗ 10 sleep cards ◗ 47 item cards ◗ 12 minion cards ◗ Seven environment
cards
STUFFED FABLES
CE
ED
IT
◗ 34 status cards ◗ Four reference cards ◗ 32 stuffing tokens ◗ 16 heart tokens ◗ Four objective tokens ◗ Four lost tokens ◗ Bookmark token ◗ Red Wagon token ◗ Train token ◗ Door token
O R'S C H OI
Hard times for soft toys in a dungeoncrawler with a fluffy difference Designer: Jerry Hawthorne | Artist: Kristen Pauline, Regis Demy
A
fter just one play of Stuffed Fables, you’ll understand exactly how much an inspiration Pixar’s Inside Out was on designer Jerry Hawthorne. A movie in which a girl’s personified emotions struggling to guide their young charge, it echoes strongly in Hawthorne’s gamified, seven-chapter bedtime story about a squad of soft toys journeying through a junk-strewn dreamscape to protect their toddler owner from nightmares. But, as Theodora (think of a Care Bear who stabs things), Flops (a lapine Legolas), Lumpy (shy elephant with a huge mallet) and Stitch (wise old ragdoll thing) contend with a lost security blanket, or bedwet-inducing running taps, or a stolen milk-tooth, you’ll sense other influential connections. Neil Gaiman’s comic-book series The Sandman (specifically the story A Game of You) also took dreamanimated soft toys and placed them in a perilous situation. Then, interestingly, there’s Christopher Nolan’s Inception, in the way that a real-world stimulus (say, a flooding bathroom) will manifest in the subconscious environment (like a raging river).
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It all makes for engaging, imaginative and entertaining storytelling – with the caveat that the writing style can be cloying (it pitches young) with some grammatical lurches between past and present tenses and second- and third-person. It makes for a fabulous game experience, too, not least via an ingenious innovation by which the thick, ringbound storybook is the board, enabling you to move the appealingly rendered minis around the vivid illustrations as your characters are drawn through Hawthorne’s branching narratives. With each of the seven stories forming a larger arc, and coming with their own ‘discovery’ deck that adds equipment and foe cards to the main decks, there’s a gentle legacy feel to Stuffed Fables – though it is intended to be easily resettable and replayable. But this is far more than a dungeon crawl. As with Hawthorne’s Mice & Mystics, the story ensures variety with each page-turn, so you won’t just be moving and skirmishing, but attempting such other adventuresome tasks as racing for a train or dodging bowling balls in a vast canyon.
60-90m
2-4
7+
£65
Whatever you face, co-operation is paramount and the game is best enjoyed with all four characters whatever the player count. While the rules are simple, with no stats and only a few abilities per character, combat can be tough, so players need to be generous with their assets – be they health (represented by wads of stuffing), items (easily shareable) or action-determining dice. Ah yes, the dice. There are a lot of them. Hawthorne loves his little plastic cubes of randomness, so there is a fair chance that, no matter how conservatively or considerately you play, your story will come to an abrupt, frustrating halt thanks to a few low rolls. However, such frustration is thankfully mitigated by the sheer elegance of Hawthorne’s colour-coded dice system, whereby five are drawn blind from a bag at the start of each player’s turn, with each colour determining specific actions. It’s gameplay touches like this, as much as Hawthorne’s storytelling thrust, which will keep you – and any little ones you may find snooping around your games cupboard – coming back for more. DAN JOLIN
r o
WE SAY Under the cute, fluffy, family-friendly exterior beats the heart of a relatively challenging, elegantly designed co-op adventure.
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… MICE & MYSTICS
Same designer, same attention to narrative, same cutesy spin on the dungeon-bash, same emphasis on dicerolling… They are different games, but will be loved by the same people.
t e n . s g a
m ld
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GKR: HEAVY HITTERS Rowdy robots mech a good impression
Designer: Matt Hyra | Artist: Leri Greer, Christian Pearce, Paul Tobin
I
f you call your game ‘Giant Killer Robots’, you’d best deliver on that promise. Luckily, GKR: Heavy Hitters lands its blows like… well, like a giant killer robot. Heavy Hitters is the debut game from Weta Workshop, the Oscarwinning movie effects studio behind Lord of the Rings, Avatar, Blade Runner 2049 and various other visually stunning flicks – and it shows. The towering mech figures (which come ready-decorated) stomp between 3D skyscrapers, which can be brought crumbling down to plastic piles of debris when tagged with enough advertising boards to please each team’s sponsors – presumably demolition is a good PR move, as four such destructions wins the game. The ability cards pop with comic-book artwork, complete with WHOOSH and KABLAM ‘sound’ effects, and the vibrant faction colours stand out against the grey terrain, making the action easy to track at a glance. The production goes a long way to helping Heavy Hitters stand apart in the wearied arena-battle genre, but its gameplay holds up its end of the deal, too. Players load out with a custom selection of weapons (one primary, two secondary), manoeuvres, reactions and more that they select
WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
◗ Double-sided board ◗ 10 buildings (base,
building and cap)
◗ Double-sided
achievements board
◗ 12 upgrade tiles ◗ Four reference cards ◗ Four Heavy
Hitter dashboards
◗ Four energy
tracking tokens
◗ 12 hit point trackers ◗ 33 sponsor cards ◗ Glory Hound token ◗ Two black attack dice ◗ Eight white
defense dice
◗ 32 pilot cards ◗ 32 pilot tokens ◗ Four Heavy
1-2h
during setup, plus a pilot with unique talents. The light deckbuilding that fuels the gameplay provides enough diversity to feel you’re really customising your robot’s distinctive fighting style, without making the options feel overwhelming or eat up time before jumping into the action – Netrunner or Magic this ain’t. Players’ individual decks are then expanded during the fight with sponsor cards gained by tagging buildings, presenting the chance to hack (and counter-hack) opponents and generally cause havoc – and opening the floor for more nuanced paths to victory outside of the Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em school of last-robot-standing. Despite its stars’ clunky frames, Heavy Hitters’ action has a graceful flow. Players call in support units – smaller machines (though still classified as giant and killer) that provide the ability to repair, attack, provide line of sight for missiles to curve around buildings and lay down extra tags – before moving
figures (combat, repair, recon) ◗ 12 support unit cards ◗ 236 faction cards ◗ 80 holo-board tags
£150
their squad around and unleashing their firepower, dictated by the cards in their hand and available energy, which can be overcharged by willing taking damage for extra actions. Taking cover and popping off shots between buildings plays a big part in the strategy, but resolving attacks is mercifully fast and simple as an attack roll to hit is countered by a defence roll to reduce damage. As all players’ weapons are revealed simultaneously and resolved in order of speed, the exchanging of blows feels exciting and dynamic, with room to land fast strikes or bide your time for a heavier blow. Taking damage means losing cards from your deck or hand, a neat method of simulating the failing systems of a robot as well as being a satisfying way of seeing how much health your rivals have left as the piles on their player board shift. It also makes for some interesting tactical options, as the game ends after a single elimination regardless of player count, so keeping an opponent wounded but alive is often a better choice than turning their mech into a smoking pile of scrap. Heavy Hitters starts with a simple idea: big, awesome-looking mechs blasting the crap out of each other. It certainly has that in buckets, yet what’s so pleasantly surprising is how fleshed out and engaging its basic foundation becomes thanks to the ample layers of world-building, gameplay strategy and style on top. We may have a new champion of the arena. MATT JARVIS
t e n . s g a
WE SAY
It looks great, flows beautifully and has far more depth than you might expect from a game about mechs fighting it out in a ruined city. Giant Killer Robots, massively good time.
Hitter figures
◗ 12 support unit
m ld
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… GIGA-ROBO! If you like your mechs (or mecha) stylish and your strategy thinky but smooth, Heavy Hitters can more than hold its own in a crowded arena.
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12+
1-4
tabletopgaming.co.uk
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P L AY E D
WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
THE PALACE OF MAD KING LUDWIG
◗ Three-piece
garden board
◗ Four blueprints boards ◗ 160 player markers
(in four colours)
You’re gonna need a bigger moat… Designer: Ted Alspach | Artist: Stephanie Gustaffson
T
hat Ludwig II of Bavaria, eh? First, he goes and gets all his royal architects competitively building bizarre castles around his 19th-century kingdom. Now he’s got them all together and charged them with constructing one single, massive palace, even though they’re still scrabbling for his favour. No wonder he’s (a) stuck with opulent abodes where bedrooms strangely lead straight into broom closets and balconies, and (b) bankrupted the country. Mad. If you’re one of those gamers who’s already familiar with the crazy tilelaying fun of Ted Alspach’s Castles of Mad King Ludwig then the American designer’s latest Euro-style release will feel reassuringly familiar. But, despite what you may have heard, this is no reimplementation. While many elements are the same – room names, the point-scoring favours mechanic, room-completion bonuses and the bemusing fact that you can only build ground floors and basements – it’s very much a case of same theme, different game. Castles is a relatively gentle enginebuilder, with each player mostly absorbed in constructing their own little points-yielding structure, only really interacting across the table via the game’s bidding system. Palace,
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by contrast, is sleeker, faster-paced and more directly competitive, with greater potential for have-at-thee tactics; you can easily arrange a room placement to mess up an opponent’s completion bonus (achieved by linking all a room’s entrances with others) by slamming a brick wall down into a doorway, for instance. Not that it ever gets nasty. With each room entrance marked by a coloured swan (Ludwig loved swans), any colour-matching upon placement rewards both the new room’s owner and the owners of existing adjacent rooms with a token of that colour – useful to have, as sets of tokens reward points at the game’s end, and can be used as room, upgrade and favour-purchasing currency throughout the game. In this way, there’s often a benefit granted to ease the pain of any take-thatiness. There are other superb touches, too; the way you can nudge unplaced rooms into upgrade slots along your blueprints board’s serrated edge, for example. And, above all, the fact that, after the first of five room-tile stacks is depleted, the moat starts surging in around the play area’s edges (via tiles placed by the current, roomcompleting player), gaining speed as the game progresses, increasingly
◗ 300 swan tokens (in
five colours)
75m
2-4
13+
◗ 15 secret swan
£45
tokens (in five colours)
◗ 10 stair tiles ◗ 15 hallway tiles ◗ 15 activity room tiles ◗ 14 downstairs
limiting placement options and bringing about game-end when the two ends of the moat meet. Like the weirdo, tabletopsmothering edifice itself, there are a few small niggles. The non-tile components are small and fiddly – the player markers especially. One sneeze or errant sleeve-sweep could easily ruin play. Then there’s the scoring. Unlike in Castles it’s all saved up to the end, and is so complex and intense Alspach even suggests in the rulebook that someone “relatively good at addition” act as scorekeeper. It rather leeches a little drama out of the game’s climax, waiting around while someone fusses over the maths. But, like we say: small niggles. It is, by and large (with emphasis on the large) a magnificent game, and a must-play for all fans of tile-laying. And, if you really pushed us, we’d commit to saying it’s a better game than Castles. Even if that might sound like madness. DAN JOLIN
WE SAY
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… CASTLES OF MAD KING LUDWIG
Well, of course. What were you expecting? If you already have Castles on your shelf, it would be rude not to find space for Palace, too.
t e n . s g a
m ld
Less a reimplementation than a refined sequel to Castles of Mad King Ludwig, this is a gloriously fun, pleasantly competitive tile-laying beauty. If you come, you must build it.
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room tiles
◗ 12 food room tiles ◗ 16 living room tiles ◗ 12 sleeping room tiles ◗ 12 utility room tiles ◗ 32 favour tiles ◗ 94 moat tiles ◗ Scorepad
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14/03/2018 15:18
ANCESTREE
Discover your roots in this drafting game of long-lost ancestors Designer: Eric M. Lang | Artists: Larry Elmore, Adelheid Zimmerman
A
family-friendly tile-drafting game from prolific designer Eric Lang, Ancestree casts you and your opponents as researchers digging through historical archives to piece together your family trees. Over the course of three quick-playing rounds you’ll choose ancestors from random selections of tiles, slotting them into a growing web of parents, siblings and cousins in an effort to prove that your genealogy is more prestigious than your rivals’. That turns out to be trickier than you might think. Each tile has a set of possible links that allow it to connect with others. Some join together to form parent-child relationships, while others can combine to represent marriages. If you’re not careful, it’s possible to close down possible connections, leaving yourself with family members you’re not able to place and ending up at a serious disadvantage. Avoiding painting yourself into these kinds of genetic corners is a challenge, but it’s not the only one you’ll face. Each round sees you score points for establishing chains of descendents with a shared heritage - African, Asian, European, MiddleEastern or South-American. It means you’ll have to keep a close eye on your opponents, avoiding getting into competition over the same kinds of tiles and ruthlessly snatching the ones they need to maximise their scores. It makes Ancestree a game of two distinct halves – drafting and building – but they fit together seamlessly, and together offer a succession of interesting decisions compressed into a brisk 20-minute playing time. As an added bonus, it also keeps the complexity to a level that won’t scare off non-gamers. If you’re in the market for this kind of 'draft things and do something with them' game, though, you’re not short of alternatives. There’s 2017 Spiel des Jahres winner Kingdomino, which sees players drafting territory tiles and piecing them together to build thriving kingdoms. Or Azul, which challenges you to draft coloured tiles, then use
WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
◗ 110 ancestor tokens ◗ 96 dynasty tokens ◗ 110 gold tokens ◗ Six score boards
20m
them to create beautiful mosaics. The criminally underrated Kerala adds a spatial puzzle, with tiles laid down by wandering elephants. And 2015 city-builder Between Two Cities brings a co-operative twist, with players teaming up with neighbours to draft building tiles to add to their steadily growing towns. Considered solely on its own merits, Ancestree is fun, fast-paced and lightly thoughtful. It also scores points for its liberal view of relationships: it’s the only
£26
board game I can think of that’s ever let me build a bisexual, polyamorous triad. But mechanically, it occupies a similar space to a lot of other releases, and it doesn’t do anything radical that sets it clearly ahead of the pack. If you’ve already found a drafting game you love, you probably don’t need this one as well. If you’re looking for one to add to your collection, it’s worth considering, but it’s just one of several options which are at least as enticing. OWEN DUFFY
t e n . s g a
WE SAY
Ancestree is a fun, fast-playing drafting game, but those aren’t exactly in short supply, and it’s competing for space on your shelf with the likes of Kerala and Kingdomino. If you don’t already own something similar, though, it’s light, quick and easy to teach.
m ld
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… SUSHI GO!
If you enjoyed Sushi Go!’s fast-playing simplicity, but you’re ready for something with a touch more depth, Ancestree could be just what you’re looking for.
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8+
2-6
tabletopgaming.co.uk
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P L AY E D
CIVILIZATION (2018 EDITION) The original empire-builder returns, but is it stuck in an age gone by? Designer: Francis Tresham | Artist: Various
W
hether you’ve played Civilization before or your brain automatically adds ‘Sid Meier's’ before the word, the return of the original empire-building classic in a long-awaited new edition is a reason to celebrate. Despite its intimidating play length – the six to eight hours suggested can be shortened by simply playing to the end of an earlier epoch in the game’s central timeline, or using some of the simplified variants included in the manual – Civilization is beautifully pure as a design. The dozen or so different phases that make up each round seem excessive at first glance, but do an excellent job of keeping each step easy to handle, as they largely consist of a single action, many of which whizz by with little player input beyond shifting tokens around. Combat couldn’t be easier to understand – remove tokens one at a time until only one faction remains – and the minimalist set of components, where faction tokens double as population markers and currency depending on which side of the player mat they’re kept, leads to a straightforward yet brilliantly effective simulation of the cost of maintaining an empire. (Run out of population tokens due to taxation and your people will revolt, so managing your growth is crucial.) It may run long, but you’ll never mind yourself bogged down
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WHAT’S IN THE BOX? ◗ Game board ◗ 392 round
population tokens
◗ 84 square
city tokens
◗ 28 ship tokens ◗ 72 civilisation cards ◗ 74 trade and
calamity cards
◗ Seven player mats
6-8h
2-7
£40
12+
in admin – every moment leaves time to consider what your next tactical move will be, rather than how to actually do it. While expanding across the map and settling cities is important, the heart of the game is in its trading phases. Settlements gather resources, which can be exchanged between players, but also hidden in the decks are calamities, which inflict devastating disasters upon the empire holding them later in the round – making them vital to offload. The real fun of this arrives via a blind trading system that means players only declare one card in the offering of at least three and the total point value of the cards, so there’s plenty of room to bargain, lie and deceive to forge prosperous alliances or desperately try to save your civilisation from ruin. The real-world negotiation and social haggling is akin to fellow streamlined classic Diplomacy, but the daggers never sink quite as deep, even as your cities are levelled by an earthquake or civil war erupts. (Dodging a disaster by successfully fobbing it off on someone else, of course, is both hilarious and endlessly satisfying.) All of this builds to Civilization’s crowning feature: the tech tree that players must clamber up to progress
through the ages and win. Resources are traded for advancements in cultural knowledge, from agriculture to metalworking, which then unlock more abilities and the chance to more easily access other skills. Compared to its many modern successors, Civilization’s tech tree is pruned back and basic, but the strategic diversity and sense of progression it offers still remains first-rate almost four decades on. Despite the updated cover art, this is less a complete overhaul than a sprucing up. There’s no change to the rules beyond a slight streamlining of how they are explained (the preserved terse, succinct tone is amusing, although the untouched use of exclusively male pronouns is a shame), and the board and pieces retain their distinctive ‘80s garishness with clashing shades of green, orange and pink. The trade cards are slightly more picturesque than their plain block-colour originals, but it’s otherwise pretty much Civilization as it was then, now. In some ways, it’s nice to see such a classic preserved as a historical curiosity for first-timers and affordable reprint for genre fans, but at times you can’t help but wonder what a deeper visual reimagining might have produced. (Having the calamities’ effects summarised on the cards without needing to consult the rulebook and doing away with the plain backs of mats and cards would’ve been nice, for example.) Even as it is, though, Civilization hasn’t lost an ounce of the tight gameplay and knack for sparking conversation among friends that made it just as engaging to play in 1980 as today. It’s purely strategic, purely presented and purely fun. Considering that, you can see why they barely changed a thing. MATT JARVIS
WE SAY
t e n . s g a
There’s little effort to modernise the dated-in-parts look of Civilization in this new edition, yet there’s no need to fix what isn’t broken when it comes to its gameplay. The rules are tight, the strategy engrossing and the trading thoroughly entertaining. With the classic easy to pick up once again, there’s no excuse not to experience this truly excellent piece of history.
m ld
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… SID MEIER’S CIVILIZATION: THE BOARD GAME
r o
There's still plenty for fans of Civ's descendants to appreciate in the original.
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WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
◗ 55 terrestrial
bodies tokens
◗ 15 gas giant tokens ◗ 10 exotic
objects tokens
◗ 35 asteroid tokens ◗ 25 comet tokens ◗ 25 planetary
objectives
◗ 19 stellar objectives ◗ Central board ◗ Four personal boards ◗ Four expansion
modules
◗ 30 grey
circular counters
◗ 16 player tokens ◗ First player token ◗ Scorepad ◗ Cloth bag ◗ Player aids
COSMOGENESIS Creating a universe gets fiddly Designer: Yves Tourigny | Artist: Tim Barton
C
osmogenesis is a worker placement and drafting hybrid, where players create their own stellar systems by colliding asteroids and comets with gas giants and planets. Luckily, scienti�ic knowledge is not a pre-requirement for the game. It attempts, by its own account, to (semi-)faithfully re�lect the scienti�ic processes of the universe, without overtaxing players with complex physics and biology – and, to some extent, it succeeds in doing so. While it is incredibly thematic throughout and the creation of planets is absolutely Cosmogenesis’s signature mechanic, it also provides the biggest hindrance to the game. There are small rule changes depending on the type of collisions, which affect the outcome in very particular ways, making understanding them its own challenge. You can give gas giants rings, make planets bigger in size, create moons, atmosphere and even life in a single round, and all have different
60m
2-4
£41
10+
requirements and pre-requisites. There is a player aide that outlines the actions possible each turn but, while it shows the ‘dos’, it also ignores the ‘don’ts’, which, in reality, are more important. Add to that special ability tokens, a separate mechanic for evolving life and various point giving cards, with their own set of symbols and rules, and now you are truly lost in space. When you �inally get your head around the minutia, Cosmogenesis becomes really �luid and adaptable, and can ultimately be quite fun. Players begin by choosing one item from the space market to add to their system, and then can spend an optional action to change objects to better �it with their given objectives. Rinse and repeat, until you run out of tokens for six rounds. Cosmogenesis, as it turns out, is a very straightforward game, hiding under the layer of too many types of collisions and transformations. Throughout the game, players will earn the most points by completing sets
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A game with a great potential that unfortunately falls a little flat. Cosmogenesis' fascinating stellar creation mechanic gets lost under the weight of muddled options and pre-requisites.
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… PULSAR 2849
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of planetary and stellar objectives. The former affects the planets and the moons orbiting them, asking for a very specific set of conditions to be met. For example, planets have to be of the correct size, with or without an atmosphere, orbited by moons of equally specific dimensions. Satisfying the requirements of planetary objectives is the main drive of the game. They show players exactly what they need to build to earn points – otherwise they are, quite literally, creating objects in a vacuum. Stellar objectives offset this slightly by giving points for the whole the system, and they are more generic and easier to achieve. However, new objectives appear every round, making it hard to preplan for them, and it is all too easy to waste a turn doing something that won’t earn any points by the end of the game. This becomes especially prominent in the last round, where players have to pick up a planetary objective that might be impossible to complete in time for the game’s end. This means the last round usually becomes a scram for anything that will earn some last-minute points, leaving the game to finish on a unsatisfying low note. Despite all the explosive collisions, Cosmogenesis is missing a spark. It has such a fascinating planet creation mechanic, equally fitting with the theme, yet small missteps in the gameplay keep it from being a game that you immediately want to play again. It is entertaining and enjoyable, but it pales in comparison to too many other board games that in principle do the same thing but better – even if they can’t create life. ALEX SONECHKINA
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Cosmogenesis creates stars systems instead of pulsars, but does equally well at immersing players into the depths of the universe.
tabletopgaming.co.uk
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P L AY E D
WELCOME TO CENTERVILLE Building a small town, six dice at a time Designer: Chad Jensen | Artist: Chechu Nieto
I
had a hard time getting Welcome to Centerville to the table. Perhaps it was the fact I described it to my players as SimCity meets King of Tokyo, and then when my players were excited I had to explain it was the dice mechanic from King of Tokyo, not the monsters, and they lost interest. Perhaps it was the box. “Welcome to Centerville,” it declares, “is a relatively light dice-based game for 2-4 players. It abstractly models the growth and management of a small city – perhaps not unlike the one you’re in right now,” and if that doesn’t get your blood pumping then this may not be the game for you. Plus the main figure on the cover looks like Felicia Day, which may be a sales point but not necessarily for the people who’ll enjoy this game. Perhaps it was the board and the rulebook, neither of which are designed to aid clarity. After a friend and I each took two runs at trying to understand the mechanics, we finally realised that the player aids do a better job of explaining the flow of gameplay than the full rules. In most games the player reference is a single card, right?
In Welcome to Centerville it’s a full sheet of letter-sized card. Doublesided. “Relatively light”, my arse. It was tempting to write a relatively snide review, but we persevered and I’m glad we did. There’s a lot of meat on Centerville’s bones, and it’s tasty stuff, with plenty of clever systems, complex decisions and battles for areas and resources to get your teeth into. It is, as my gaming companion pointed out after we’d been whipped by the bot-player, basically a game of trying to maximise five or six different scoring tracks, some of which are interconnected. It is not light and it is not elegant – Chad Jensen is best known as a wargame designer – but its systems reward exploration. Each turn you’re spending the rolls of the six custom dice to get best advantage in building out four quarters of the city and a central park, recruit top graduates, control six political offices, build a green belt and gentrify. You’re also jockeying for status, and trying to score on wealth and prestige – and
20m(pp)
14+
2-4
£50
WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
your lowest of those two will be your final score. Time passes unpredictably, so you’re never quite sure when the game’s three scoring rounds will hit – or the disasters which lurk within the draw bag. Balancing all these factors every turn is a brainfilling exercise. However, this is a £50 game, containing a board, one sheet of counters, some wooden cubes, six dice and a bag. This is absolutely not fifty quid’s worth of components. But fifty quid’s worth of gameplay, that’s another matter. If your players are the sort who’d be up for abstractly modelling the growth and management of a small city, perhaps not unlike the one you’re in right now, then Centerville could keep them cheerful for months. JAMES WALLIS
◗ Board ◗ Four player aids ◗ 128 wood cubes ◗ Eight wood discs ◗ Cloth bag ◗ Sheet of die-cut tiles ◗ Sheet of stickers ◗ Wood cylinder
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… URBAN SPRAWL
Chad Jensen’s previous game of town planning has its ardent fans, and this is a natural companion to that, only with more dice.
WE SAY It's not for everyone, and not easy to understand at first, but for the right group this is town-planning catnip.
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THE ONE RING RPG: OATHS OF THE RIDDERMARK Life and death in the saddle Designer: Cubicle 7 team | Artist: Various
I
f you’ve read through or watched the Lord of the Rings, there are probably a few things you already associate with the Kingdom of Rohan; chiefly horses, excellent hair and huge piles of dead orcs. While there’s no shortage of any of those in Oaths of the Riddermark’s half-dozen adventures, you may be a little surprised at all the politics and courtly intrigue that need to be navigated in the lands of the horse-lords. The slim book is designed to work with Cubicle 7’s The One Ring Roleplaying Game, though the company says that a version for its Adventures in Middle-Earth sibling game is in the works, and falls somewhere between a simple series of themed adventures and a full-blown campaign. This puts it in a good spot for players and GMs that want to get their hands on something with a bit more substance than random questing, but can’t quite commit to a game that could take several long months or even years to reach its climax. Indeed, the individual adventures are distinct enough from one another that a gaming group could
£25
2+
easily dip in and out as they please, playing through one or two before moving on entirely. If you run right through all of them one after the other, however, you’ll find that the story smoothly builds up in scope and danger, starting with a hunt for a horse-eating monster and ending with a battle that could decide the fate of the kingdom. This is undoubtedly the best way to use the book, allowing the GM to weave recurring characters in and out as they please. Much of these characters will be based around the major thread running through the adventure, which sees the party working for King Thengal (the father of Theoden from The Lord of the Rings) as he attempts to bully two rival lords of Rohan into ending a vicious feud before the forces of darkness rise. The adventure in which this arc is introduced, Red Days Rising, is based around arranging a marriage between two childhood friends now divided between the families, and
WE SAY
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A series of well-crafted adventures with an emphasis on both brains and brawn.
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TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… A SONG OF ICE & FIRE ROLEPLAYING If you love classic low-magic fantasy with a focus on politics and intrigue, but are less keen on the nasty bits, Oaths could be your ideal campaign.
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acts as a great example of Oaths of the Riddermark’s major themes. While the heroes will get to hack up a few bandits on their way to securing the wedding, if they charge into every situation with the aim of battering it into submission they’re going to run into hot water pretty quickly. Actually succeeding on all their goals needs more than a little diplomacy and discussion, all of which opens up easy paths for roleplaying. All this talking and negotiating does mean that the GM needs to be on point and have a good grasp of the entire adventure before settling down for a session, but the writing is usually snappy enough that the information on hand isn’t too overwhelming. Keeping track of all the names can be a bit of a chore, but most hardcore Tolkien fans should already be pros when it comes to separating their Erkenbrands from their Éogars. While the story is well-plotted and has the potential to give successful parties some truly fantastic moments – without wishing to spoil anything, the climax definitely rewards them earlier good deeds – the framing device for virtually every adventure requires at least a bit of railroading. Though it’s entirely possible for the GM to allow the adventurers to explore Rohan in-between each major plot point, eventually they’re going to have to end up meeting with the king once more. The main plot is compelling enough that isn’t going to be a problem for most groups, but if the main appeal of the Lord of the Rings for your players were the bits where orcs got diced up by Viggo Mortensen, they’re probably going to struggle to enjoy Oaths of the Riddermark. If, however, you’re playing with the kind of group that loves careful diplomacy, courtly intrigue and thinking their way out of a problem when stabbing it won’t work, it might be the book to keep your sessions going for a couple of thoroughly enjoyable months. RICHARD JANSENPARKES
tabletopgaming.co.uk
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P L AY E D
MEEPLE CIRCUS Designer: Cédric Millet | Artist: Angelina Costamagna, Mathieu Leyssenne, Sabrina Tobal
45m
R
8+
£36
create their spectacle. (There's a selection to stop one tune driving you mad.) The final act steps things up in a way that might divide opinion, introducing meta challenges for extra points that must be performed one at a time as the rest of the players watch, from building your tower one-handed to drumming as you place the final piece (other tasks take the music into account). The points awarded for each task seem to be strangely distributed, rewarding easier objectives above much tougher tests, and the rigid nature of the public demands means that boring but efficient constructions can outscore adventurous arrangements, which can be a bit deflating, especially as the objectives change little over a single playthrough. It’s not one for people with wobbly tables (things are unstable as they are) or a hatred of circus music. If you’re just up for a laugh and don’t mind seeing your hard work come tumbling down, though, get yourself a ticket to one of the silliest spectacles in town. MATT JARVIS
believe it’s never been done like this before: each round, players stack a selection of performer meeples into particular arrangements, hoping to achieve a random selection of public demands to earn points on the clap-o-meter. There’s a small element of planning first, as players take it in turns to hire various performers – each of which has a unique way to score points that must also be taken into account, the best being the expert acrobats that score based on how high in the tower they can perch. In the second of three rounds, these turn into individual guest stars, each complete with a distinct meeple that comes with its own benefits and challenges, whether it’s the long shoes of the upside-down clown or the Bertie Bassett-like top hat of the headstand-fond ringleader. The already amusing task of getting diddly wooden pieces to balance on top of each other is given the right level of pressure and amusement by the required background music (from a web browser or mobile app), which gives a very precise two minutes and four seconds for all players to
oll up! Roll up! Witness one of the most stupendously entertaining uses of meeples you’ll ever see! WATCH as the miniscule acrobats assemble into a teetering tower of precarious placement and brilliant balance! GASP as wooden animals, planks, clowns and more come tumbling down at the last second! LAUGH as your friends desperately try to appease their audience with daring arrangements! Meeple Circus is a delightfully fun dexterity challenge with a lot of heart. It’s an idea so simple and brilliant we can’t
2-5
DREADBALL: SECOND EDITION Designer: Jake Thornton | Artist: Various
I
f Blood Bowl is the fantasy American football of miniatures sports games, DreadBall could be considered its scifi basketball – a shorter, faster-moving alternative with a distinctly different flow of play that will appeal to those after a particular type of tabletop experience. This, its second edition, can be a very fun game. But it’ll take you a bit of work to get there. The rules, though straightforward once you’ve decoded them, are initially confusing to learn (tip: skip the ironically unhelpful tutorial booklet and go straight to the main rulebook) and the rapid pace of play, one of DreadBall’s best elements, is often slowed by the miniatures representing each side’s strikers, jacks and guards, as unpainted they’re just not visually distinct enough to make things easy to identify – especially when areas of the pitch get crowded. The pitch itself may be a little bland
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90m
2+
14+
£60
Like any sport, DreadBall will reward those that put in the time with plenty of depth and hours of entertainment. Separately, its parts aren’t always as great as they could be; together, they can be brilliant. MATT JARVIS
– a Blockbusters grid of neon hexes on plain black – but it’s at least easy to read at a glance. Fortunately, when it all clicks, it does so with a bang. Turns are fast and furious as players slam enemies out of the way, grab the ball and go for a shot on goal, either sinking a safe yet low-scoring closer or going for a riskier long-distance attempt for extra glory and the chance to swing the match. Chaining together the specialisms of each unit type – fast, heavy and all-rounder – to get the ball across the pitch and into the goal in a turn or two is as fluid and rewarding as it should be, helped by a deck of event cards that present plenty of opportunities for oneoff abilities and memorable moments to spring up. The deck doubles as a way of moving around a referee, with a new foul system presenting more options to undermine and outplay your opponent.
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PAPER TALES Sheet Fighter
Designer: Masato Uesugi | Artist: Christine Alcouffe
I
f you ever found yourself taking a long, deep breath preparing to explain to new players how science cards work in 7 Wonders, you will find Paper Tales immediately appealing. It is 7 Wonders-lite, subtracting a good chunk of playtime, complicated point calculations and focusing on just one of its core ideas – fighting. Paper Tales still follows the familiar staples of card-drafting games; players begin with a hand of five unit cards, choose one and pass the rest along. The same strategic concerns are also present: a push and pull between taking the best card for yourself or denying your opponents a useful card, although it might not fit as well with your own layout. However, while in most games of this type and length the game swiftly proceeds to the next round after the cards are revealed, in Paper Tales there is still a lot to do. Drafting cards is just the tip of the iceberg, followed by fighting, collecting coins, building and aging units, each action filled with its own set of
WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
◗ Score track ◗ Wooden time token ◗ 40 gold tokens ◗ 30 age tokens ◗ Five player aides ◗ Five wooden
score tokens
◗ 81 unit cards ◗ 25 building cards
30m
2-5
£30
12+
decisions equally as important as the initial pick. Fighting in Paper Tales, while absolutely the core of the game, is surprisingly non-confrontational. Players gain points depending on the numbers of wars they win that round, but there are no penalties for losing. Therefore, it never feels aggressive or targeted, and there is no pressure in choosing units with predominantly attack-focused skills every round just to keep up. You can concentrate on drafting units that produce resources or victory points one round, knowing there will be no repercussions to the card engine itself and you can always catch up on the point track next turn. As with any game where cards have unique abilities, knowing roughly what is available in the deck is an advantage. There is a certain level of luck with each draw, as all the unit cards are shuffled together and drawn
WE SAY
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Elegantly simple, Paper Tales is still strategic and competitive, and, for a game about fighting, you won’t be aggrieved by anyone around the table.
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TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… 7 WONDERS
While comparisons to 7 Wonders are obvious, Paper Tales has its own distinct character, which gets more noticeable as the game progresses.
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randomly, which makes creating an engine a little bit of a gamble. In general, there is a good overlap of powers, so it is quite easy to make one unit’s ability chain off another for added bonuses. Paper Tales has an interesting mechanic of aging cards, making them viable generally for a maximum of two rounds before they have to be replaced. This encourages players to switch and adapt to new strategies and also prevents one player staying overpowered. Money is a very precious resource in Paper Tales. Some units cost nothing to deploy, but better, more powerful cards are expensive. Players can also play building cards that provide permanent resources and bonuses; while the first does not require payment in coins, future ones get progressively more expensive. As Paper Tales lasts only four rounds, building later in the game becomes almost counter-productive, as the permanent effects do not provide enough of a return and the coin could be better spent on more powerful units. The land of kings, knights, manticores and krakens takes on a beautiful, modernised look on the Paper Tales box and is equally stunning on the cards, retaining the fantastical feel, while not looking dated. The theme is more window dressing than an integral part of the game, but still fits comfortably within the palette of character abilities and the mechanics of the game. For a game with a relatively small playtime, Paper Tales manages to subtly fit a good depth of strategy behind streamlined, simple mechanics. It brings in just enough complexity to keep matches tense and interesting, but its rules and scoring mechanics never feel convoluted or overtaxing. ALEX SONECHKINA
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P L AY E D Andari
1
1
1
1 Rapid Reaction Force
1
1
1
1
Arcturi
Advanced Cybernetics
1
Aggroloids Rapid Reaction Force Super Dreadnoughts Star Bomb
Combat
Uninhabitable
Free action
Aggroloids
Cost:
Add four to your Combat Strength, then draw a card.
Draw two cards from your deck.
1
Habitable
A HANDFUL OF STARS A thrilling but flawed crescendo to a distinguished deckbuilding trilogy Designer: Martin Wallace | Artist: Odysseas Stamoglou
T
he final instalment in a series of deckbuilding wargames by designer Martin Wallace, A Handful of Stars caps off a trilogy that includes the historical A Few Acres of Snow and fantasy-themed Mythotopia. This latest release takes the series to a new and grander scale, casting players as the leaders of alien civilisations vying to colonise worlds and brutalise their opponents in savage space battles. That premise is par-for-the-course for science-fiction empire-builders, and it’s not the only similarity the game shares with others in the genre. You’ll play as one of a selection of factions, each with its own strengths. But while this is all well-trodden ground for space games, the real appeal of A Handful of Stars is its deckbuilding mechanical core. You’ll start the game with a deck of cards representing different resources, which you’ll spend to build spacecraft, dispatch them to distant worlds or colonise new planets. As you play you’ll add new cards to your deck, gaining one for each new world you conquer. Expansionism has drawbacks, though. Some of the cards you’ll gain by colonising planets aren’t particularly useful, serving only to clog up your deck and stop you drawing more powerful or versatile
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WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
◗ Game board ◗ Four player boards ◗ 84 fleet markers ◗ 24 star base counters ◗ 48 colony discs ◗ Four home
world counters
◗ 64 outpost cubes ◗ 12 starting cards ◗ 38 system tokens ◗ 18 alien counters ◗ 18 development
counters
◗ Four wormhole
counters
◗ Three game markers ◗ 16 black hole discs ◗ 36 system cards ◗ Seven race
identity cards
◗ 21 race ability cards ◗ 41 technology cards
90-120m
2-4
£55
13+
ones. It seems counterintuitive – surely claiming new territory is always good? – but it actually fits nicely into the game’s theme. Like the Roman Empire, a faction that swells its borders can become bloated and tricky to rule. As an added bonus, it also makes it hard for one player to break out as a runaway leader. There’s plenty more to like about A Handful of Stars: the way its scattered black holes block routes between worlds, forcing players into one another’s paths; the ongoing analysis of threats, watching where your opponents are shoring up their defences or building strong fleets; the simple but tense card-based combat system that ensures even the strongest attacks are never free of risk; and the array of strategies offered by technology cards, which can fundamentally transform your tactics. (In one game I managed to turn the Culturemoogs, a race of mueslieating spacefaring arts graduates, into unstoppable combat monsters.) In some respects, though, the game falls short. With three or four players, there’s plenty of scope for conflict, with opponents forming temporary alliances, ganging up on one another and stabbing each other in the back.
With two, this political, psychological layer evaporates, and it can lead to a Cold War scenario, with two superpowers locked in a stalemate that runs out of interesting decisions about two-thirds of the way through the game. Then there’s the production quality. While there’s some wonderfully evocative artwork, other aspects of the game’s presentation are decidedly lacklustre. In particular, the tokens representing your ships and star bases have a disappointingly generic clipart look. Mechanically and strategically, though, there’s a lot here to chew on. Encouragingly, Wallace has licensed his deckbuilding system to Fantasy Flight, known for its high production values. Can we hope for a future version set in the Star Wars or Twilight Imperium universes? If so, let’s hope it’s packed with gorgeous plastic spaceships. OWEN DUFFY
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It comes with some disappointing cardboard components, and it loses some of its shine in two-player games, but with three or more players A Handful of Stars is a great strategic challenge – a fitting conclusion to Wallace’s deckbuilding trilogy.
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TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… A FEW ACRES OF SNOW
With more players, more factions and more variety in its setup, A Handful of Stars blasts its predecessor’s deckbuilding core into orbit.
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MY LITTLE PONY: TAILS OF EQUESTRIA: THE OFFICIAL MOVIE SOURCEBOOK A roleplaying expansion worth ponying up for Designer: River Horse team | Artist: Various
T
here are many things in this weird and wonderful world of ours that simply don’t make any sense, like dark matter, classic D&D grappling rules and the fact they cast Sean Connery as a Spaniard in Highlander, despite much of the film taking place in Scotland. To this list we can now add the fact that an RPG supplement tied in to a My Little Pony film is actually pretty darn good. If we’re being fair, though, once the sheer weirdness of that statement has washed over us, it really shouldn’t be particularly surprising. After all, River Horse’s base Tails of Equestria proved itself a nifty little RPG when last we looked at it, providing a sleek framework that was simple enough for children to grasp alongside solid mechanics that adults could have unironic fun with it too. The Official Movie Sourcebook takes the game and expands it in about every way possible, with the film’s own journey beyond that safe borders
of Equestria serving as an excuse for adding on a whole raft of options for both GMs and players alike. While you may not feel the need to use it all depending on how your own adventures pan out, the amount of new content on hand is impressive when you consider that the whole thing clocks in at less than 100 pages. Within that, you get everything from simple faction and reputation mechanics to rules for playing as a smooth-talking cat or a buccaneering parrot. If this was a different RPG aimed at a different audience the lack of in-depth character customisation could come across as shallow, but in the context of Tails of Equestria it feels simple and user-friendly instead. A handful of the new player options might be confusing to children or even older RPG novices – such as the ‘rogue’ talent, which involves downgrading or upgrading dice in return for future benefits – but they aren’t likely to create any problems
1+
that can’t be solved with the help of a patient GM. Indeed, the book throws out just enough information that you could easily run a game that uses elements of My Little Pony: The Movie without actually having watched it (or, alternatively, for those who napped through most of it while taking children to the cinema). Honestly the only part of the book that falls flat in places is the introductory adventure, The Beasts of Black Skull Island. That has much more to do with the layout rather than the actual writing, however, with the long, unbroken sections of text making it hard to keep track of what’s happening as you run players through it at the table. That’s a minor complaint though, and pales in comparison to the rest of the book; though this might just be the bright colours and gentle fonts speaking, The Official Movie Sourcebook is packed with an air of real joy that’s hard to ignore. From cover to cover, it gives the distinct impression that it knows full well how silly it’s being, and just doesn’t care. It’s playing Snap and giggling with its friends while the more serious RPG books exchange barbs across the poker table. If you can read through almost 100 pages of pirate airships, feline smugglers and a cartoony version of the classic mimic monster without feeling a foolish grin worming its way onto your face, this probably isn’t for you – but, then again, neither is Tails of Equestria as a whole. If you’re planning to run a game for either some My Little Pony-obsessed children or a handful of adults with a willingness to get silly, however, The Official Move Sourcebook provides a whole heap of fun new ways to play. RICHARD JANSENPARKES
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£20
WE SAY If you’re already enjoying your time in Equestria and are looking for room to expand, you owe it to yourself to pick up The Official Movie Sourcebook.
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… XANATHAR’S GUIDE TO EVERYTHING
If you liked the D&D expansion but thought it would be improved if it was about ponies conquering evil through the power of friendship, you’re in luck.
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P L AY E D
FARLIGHT Designer: Nicky Sibicky | Artists: Dann May, Zheng Fang
45m
F
arlight is a Kickstarted piece of science-fiction shipbuilding, set on the eponymous station on the edge of explored space. In high-concept terms it’s somewhere between Terraforming Mars and Galaxy Trucker Trucker, only much lighter than the former and less funny than the latter. It’s played in three-stage turns: all players blind-bid for ship pieces, resources and actions, then build their new bits onto their ships, and finally try to complete missions for big victory points. The blind bidding is a clever mechanic with opportunities for bluff and strategy. It lies at the heart of the game, but largely because the other two stages aren’t as interesting as they ought to be. Your ship is both an exploration vessel for completing missions and a simple engine for generating more resources each turn, in a way that
2-5
14+
£28
reminded me of Splendor by way of Pipe Mania. Nothing bad will happen to it, beyond realising you’ve built a gravity generator where you should have left space for a primary core. You complete missions by having enough resources (including crew, who are worryingly expendable), until one of the climactic (highestvalue) missions is completed or the game runs out of parts. The missions ought to drive the game but they’re dry and don’t link to create a sense of purpose. In Terraforming Mars you feel like you’re affecting a planet. In Farlight you’re just collecting victory points. This is a bright, shiny, goodlooking version of the future with interesting mechanics, but without enough scarcity, tension or danger to make it a real challenge. It’d be a tidy sci-fi ship-builder if Galaxy Trucker didn’t exist. JAMES WALLIS
THE WHITE BOX Designer: Jeremy Holcomb
T
he White Box is, according to its lid, a ‘game design workshop in a box’. It’s a boxful of assorted bits that you can use to make games, and a book, The White Box Essays, that will instruct you in the mysteries of designing, testing and even selling your first game. Inside you’ll find 36 meeples, 150 small and six large cubes in various colours, 12 dice, 110 tokens and three sheets of card counters, some blank and some pre-printed. It’s a useful mix but not diverse, and missing some key components. In the many game design workshops I’ve run over the last decade almost nobody ever uses large cubes, but we get through hundreds of blank cards each session. There are no cards in the box. The White Box Essays is wellwritten, and Jeremy Holcomb has chops as a designer with three pages
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∞
1
of credits on BoardGameGeek, but there’s a big hole in its middle. It’ll tell you how to crowdfund a game, how to pitch to publishers, how to design a box, and there’s a whole chapter on networking at conventions, but there’s no breakdown of the actual process of concepting, designing and refining a game. It dances around the subject but never gets to grips with it. Fundamentally the best way to learn how to make games is by making games. The White Box is a good toolkit for novice game designers, but it’s not a good instruction manual. JAMES WALLIS
10+
£25
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Full disclosure: Atlas Games publishes Once Upon a Time, which this review's author James Wallis co-designed.
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COWBOY BEBOP CCG: SPIKE VS VICIOUS Anime card battles with added corgis Designer: Jasco Games | Artist: Jasco Games, Toshihiro Kawamoto
B
efore Firefly, there was Cowboy
Bebop, an anime series of space cowboys, bounty hunters, hackers and genetically-engineered Pembroke Welsh Corgis. Due to its popularity, the late '90s show was then developed into manga, a video game, a film and now a collectible card game based on UFS (Universal Fighting System). For those unfamiliar with UFS, it already unites several themed decks, including Street Fighter and Mega Man, encouraging its players to settle the eternal question: which one of the famous fighters would win in a fight? As in any collectible game, hunting for rare cards and building your own decks is a significant part of the game’s appeal. Tournaments also play a big part in UFS and, as with similar systems of Magic: The Gathering and Dice Masters, competitors play at a different level than casual fans. This is a game of high skill where knowing all the cards intricately, understanding how abilities feed off each other to create more powerful attacks and being able to assemble decks targeted to a certain type of play is directly related to increasing your chances of winning.
WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
◗ 84 cards ◗ Two playing mats
30m
2
£24
17+
Consequently, UFS is not particularly newcomer-friendly. While the general motions you take through a round are not complex, there are a lot of minute terminologies and card effects that feel overwhelming. What helps the game is that its logic of play can be explained through a very basic understanding of how one would behave in a physical fight. For example, moves get progressively harder to perform each round because the more punching and kicking you do, the more tired you get. Blocking attacks comes with its own set of incremental rules that, once again, can be easily imagined. For example, an attack aimed to the middle can be only partially blocked at high level – imagine covering your upper torso and head with your hands, while someone is aiming in the middle of your body with a kick. You could probably move fast enough to shield some of the damage but not all of it. Cowboy Bebop CCG: Spike vs. Vicious is a great starting point for those wanting to try out the system, especially if you have minimal knowledge of fighting games.
WE SAY
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Despite the Ultimate Fighting System not having any dice, these two systems have plenty in common when it comes to gameplay and complexity.
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Spike and Vicious were respectively the main protagonist and antagonist in the series and the decks reflect that, making them well-matched sparring partners. There are a lot of little nods to the anime in card abilities that fans will definitely appreciate, like Spike’s ‘Habitual Smoker’ card, that through its effects humorously scolds the main hero’s bad habit. Spike is a master of martial arts and always aware of his surroundings, using anything that can give him an advantage. The deck reflects that by having a good variety of cards with abilities that can adapt to any situation. Vicious' deck, on the other hand, relies on his significant starting health advantage to deal more powerful blows. Sacrificing a bit of his own health, he is able to hit the opponent for a bigger number of damage points. Therefore, players who enjoy more brutal, tank-like play will fit well with Vicious’ deck, while those who like sneaky, rogue-like gameplay will agree more with Spike. While the Cowboy Bebop CCG set is a new box, it is also an addition to an already existing fighting system and has to confine to an already established set of mechanical parameters and game rules. Unless you are a serious competitive player, the small incremental changes to the card powers and types will mean very little. Essentially, whether it is worth learning UFS depends on the appeal of the theme and, luckily, the way the decks play and especially how they look, using beautiful stills from an already extremely goodlooking anime, is very reflective of the Bebop universe. Once you slog your way through the rules, UFS can offer highly strategic and intriguing gameplay, even if you never intend to play it at the competitive level. ALEX SONECHKINA
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S TA R T R E K A D V E N T U R E S
PAINTS & TECHNIQUES Abaddon Black Agrax Earthshade Alaitoc Blue Altdorf Guard Blue Averland Sunset Baneblade Brown Blue Horror Bugman’s Glow Cadian Fleshtone Celestra Grey
Liberator Gold Lugganath Orange Martian Ironearth Mephiston Red Pallid Wych Flesh Reikland Fleshshade Rhinox Hide Runefang Steel Screaming Skull Squig Orange
Slaanesh Grey Sotek Green Steel Legion Drab Temple Guard Blue Warplock Bronze Wild Rider Red Zamesi Desert
UNDERSHIRT
STAGES
Since there is a large amount of variety in the crew of the Enterprise, combined with matching uniforms, this guide is split into general sections covering the uniforms and tech, but splitting the skin, hair and other details into different sections. This will allow us to cover every element of each crew member, giving you a guide for the full boxset contents.
BODYSUIT
STAGE 2 Apply a highlight of Dawnstone, focusing on the hard edges and folds.
STAGE 1 Apply a basecoat of Steel Legion Drab.
STAGE 3 Apply a line highlight of Celestra Grey, focusing on the hard edges and raised folds.
MEDICAL JACKET
UNIFORMS
COMMAND AND HELM
STAGE 1 Apply a basecoat of Altdorf Guard Blue.
STAGE 1 Apply a basecoat of Khorne Red.
STAGE 2 Apply a layer of Mephiston Red, leaving the recesses the basecoat colour.
STAGE 3 Add a line highlight of Wild Rider Red, focusing on the hard edges.
STAGE 2 Apply a layer of Alaitoc Blue, leaving the recesses the base colour.
STAGE 3 Apply a fine highlight of Blue Horror to the edges and raised folds.
DARK SKIN
SKIN
STAGE 4 Apply a dot highlight of Lugganath Orange, focusing on the corners.
LIGHT SKIN
ENGINEERING, SECURITY AND OPERATIONS
STAGE 1 Apply a basecoat of Rhinox Hide.
STAGE 1 Add a highlight of Dark Reaper across the hard edges, corners and raised folds of the bodysuit.
STAGE 1 Apply a basecoat of Averland Sunset.
STAGE 2 Apply a wash of Reikland Fleshshade.
STAGE 3 Apply a layer of Averland Sunset, leaving the recesses the original colour.
STAGE 1 Apply a basecoat of Bugman’s Glow.
STAGE 4 Apply a line highlight of Krieg Khaki.
STAGE 2 Add a dot highlight of Slaanesh Grey, focusing on the corners and the top of the raised folds.
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STAGE 1 Apply a basecoat of Sotek Green.
STAGE 2 Apply a highlight of Temple Guard Blue, focusing on the hard edges and folds.
STAGE 1 Apply a basecoat of Zamesi Desert.
STAGE 3 Apply a line highlight of Blue Horror, focusing on the corners and raised folds.
t e n . s g a STAGE 3 Apply a glaze of Zamesi Desert over all the skin.
February 2018
STAGE 4 Apply a final fine highlight of Dorn Yellow, only adding small lines and dots over the previous coat.
STAGE 3 Apply a final fine highlight of Krieg Khaki.
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BATTLE FOR ROKUGAN
Legend of the Five Rings expands with an excellent area control spin-off. Or are we just bluffing? Designer: Molly Glover, Tom Jolly |
Artist: Mathias Kollros, Francesca
Baerald, Nele Diel, ShenFei
IT
ot on the heels of its recent living card game revival, Legend of the Five Rings’ next major franchise instalment is Battle for Rokugan – a taut area control board game that stands alone as a truly fantastic experience. If you’re already a fan of Legend of the Five Rings, you’ll find rough sketches of the seven competing clans’ broad strategies in their slightly asymmetrical special abilities and pools of combat tokens used for wresting control of the map’s various provinces – and the victory-sealing honour that comes with them. It’s just enough to root the conflict in a wider world that feels more believable and vibrant, without throwing off the careful gameplay balance or leaving total newcomers feeling lost. Learning the ropes is easy, with combat largely coming down to a straight battle of numbers – attack with more strength than your opponent has defence, and you’ll claim that province. Each type of combat token has slightly different rules – armies must attack over land, naval tokens operate only along coasts, the rarer shinobi can strike anywhere and so on – and is placed facedown to signify its intent, before all players’ tokens are revealed and resolved simultaneously. This is where Battle for Rokugan’s real joy comes into play, as where – and,
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Prices displayed are all direct debit deals – UK only. Ends 31 December 2018. *Promo and cover gifts only available with print copies.
STAGE 4 Apply a final fine highlight of Pallid Wych Flesh, only adding small lines and dots over the previous coat. STAGE 2 Apply a highlight of Doombull Brown, focusing on the top edges of the features.
STAGE 2 Apply a layer of Screaming Skull, leaving the recesses the base colour.
H
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STAGE 3 Apply a highlight of Kislev Flesh, focusing down the centre and top of the head.
STAGE 2 Apply a layer of Cadian Fleshtone, leaving the recesses the base colour.
ANDROID SKIN
SCIENCE AND MEDICAL
ED
W O R L D - B E ATI N G I N T E RV I E W S WITH T O P D ES I G N E R S AB O U T TH E B I G G ES T U P C O M I N G GA M ES , W I T H U N PA R A L L E L E D B E H I N D -T H E - S C E N ES AC C ES S
£14.99
Ceramite White Dark Reaper Dawnstone Doombull Brown Dorn Yellow Drakenhof Nightshade Khorne Red Kislev Flesh Krieg Khaki Leadbelcher
February 2018
WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
◗ Game board ◗ 22 territory cards ◗ 10 initiative cards ◗ Seven daimyō screens ◗ 12 secret
objective cards
◗ First player card ◗ 189 combat tokens ◗ Five shugenja cards ◗ 10 scout cards ◗ 210 control tokens ◗ Four honour
bonus tokens
◗ Four defence
bonus tokens
◗ Shrine token ◗ Harbour token ◗ Battlefield token ◗ 15 peace tokens ◗ 15 scorched
earth tokens
◗ Round track token
O R'
CE
PAINTS USED
I S CHO
90m
2-5
14+
£40
safeguarding it from future attacks but potentially sacrificing a tactical advantage during future battles. Taking over an entire territory can grant a huge advantage, as each collection of lands unlocks a single-use power for the controlling player to use. The abilities feel fittingly formidable and satisfying to execute, but are only held onto as long as that player has total control – meaning waiting to use them to their full advantage can be very risky. Each player also starts with a very limited supply of scouts and shugenja that let them spy on some of their opponents’ tokens, plus a secret objective that’s revealed during endgame scoring for a potential last twist in the final standings. Funnily enough for a spin-off to a living card game, the cardplay is kept to a bare minimum, leaving the focus on the placement of tokens, but the small number, restricted use and great power of the cards means that every one lands with a huge impact. The combination of straightforward basics, the chance for deceptive mind games, and just a smidge of luck and asymmetry works an absolute charm: Battle for Rokugan is 90 or so minutes of exhilarating Oh My God!-ness, air-punching triumph and head-inhands regret (with laughter) as traps Games are sprung, plans go astray and bigaren’t just fun – they can also you moments pop off in every help round. boost your brainpower. Professors That’s no bluff. and students tell us about the cranium-cra MATT JARVIS mming
crucially, when – you put your tokens down becomes a tense standoff and clash of wits between players. Could the token attacking your province be a powerful army needing to be fought off with ample defence? Or could it simply be a distraction to draw your forces away from a surprise attack elsewhere during the final placement? You’ll need to constantly guess and second-guess your rivals, especially as every player always has a blank bluffing token hidden with the rest of their ‘hand’ behind their screen, presenting a constant opportunity to mislead and deceive. It’s a tight, thrilling experience that keeps up the pressure throughout its very reasonable running time and gets especially explosive during the fifth benefits of Darwinian delight and final round, as players unleash Evolution WE SAY Words by Anna Blackwell a last-ditch effort to take over entire There’s no need to already be a Legend territories or block their rivals’ control. of the Five Rings fan to enjoy Battle Particularly brutal are the rare raid for Rokugan as a brilliant game of tokens, which completely decimate planning, deception and strategy. The easy-to-grasp gameplay means the an area for the rest of the game riveting showdowns between players and remove all combat and control get to shine, while the tight play time tokens, while the equally uncommon and differences between the clans and diplomacy tokens permanently forbid territory powers leave plenty of reasons all combat in – or out – of a region, to come back time and time again.
LEARN EVOLVEING D
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… GAME OF THRONES: THE BOARD GAME
Want a game that lets you conquer the world as you trick and outwit your friends? Battle for Rokugan lets you do it all in under a couple of hours.
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MANSIONS OF MADNESS The dark world of the Lovecraftian adventure game becomes even more terrifying with a splash of colour. From the horrifying Deep Ones to the even weirder denizens of the Arkham Horror universe, follow our tips to ensure your monsters look magnificent
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his month we’re taking a trip to the Arkham Horror Files universe, home of Arkham Horror, Eldritch Horror and Mansions of Madness. Based upon the works of H. P. Lovecraft, Mansions of Madness features a great selection of Cthulhu-esque gribblies and investigators trying to uncover the dark truth of various stories and mysteries. While the models’ quality leaves a lot to be desired, being of lesser quality than more recent games, their designs
do justice to the source material and can look great with a lick of paint. Luckily we’ll be focusing on doing just that with all the monsters out of the core second edition box. For this guide I wanted to approach the models in a slightly different fashion in order to enhance the gothic, spooky element integral to the game’s setting – the majority of the models are kept fairly dark and muted in tone, with only the true monsters coming to life with a touch more vibrancy in their colour.
Words and photographs by Andy Leighton
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MANSIONS OF MADNESS
PAINTS & TECHNIQUES PAINTS USED Abaddon Black Baneblade Brown Biel-Tan Green Blue Horror Ceramite White Dark Reaper Dawnstone Death World Forest Dechala Lilac Drakenhof Nightshade Druchii Violet Evil Sunz Scarlet Incubi Darkness Kabalite Green Karak Stone Khorne Red Krieg Khaki Moot Green
Mournfang Brown Nuln Oil Nurgling Green Pallid Wych Flesh Rakarth Flesh Rhinox Hide Screamer Pink Slaanesh Grey Sotek Green Squig Orange Sybarite Green Sycorax Bronze Tau Light Ochre Thunderhawk Blue Ulthuan Grey Wazdakka Red Yriel Yellow
STAGES
ZENITHAL HIGHLIGHTING
Each creature is split up into four stages, each with a list of colours and the corresponding paint that was used for it. Each stage uses a different technique to achieve a similar effect on each element but with different colours.
Zenithal highlighting at its core is a much more complicated process than what I am going to show you in this guide. I will show a basic version that helps apply a simplified version of highlighting. This begins at the basecoating stage, whilst preparing the model for the later stages.
Stage 1 is base colours. Base colours are applied using a mix of glazes and flat colours. On some monsters this stage asks you to apply a thinned-down coat – this is achieved with a mix of one part paint to three parts water. Stage 2 is applying shading and layering. In this stage we use various washes and glazes to add an element of shading to the models, but where this is not required we add layers over the previous paint, only leaving the recesses showing the original colour. Stage 3 is highlighting. This stage involves applying a line of colour along the hard edges and ridges of the area. I would recommend using a fine brush and adding a tiny dash of water to your paints. If you find yourself unsure of where to apply the highlights or spot highlights, look over the images alongside the guide and compare that stage to the last.
Begin by basecoating the miniature black. This is easiest with a black spray paint.
Once the black is dry, apply a light spray of white from the top around the model. This will create a light element of highlighting and shading straight off the bat that will either provide shading and highlighting in later stages or a guide as to where they should be applied.
STAR SPAWN BASE COLOURS
Kabalite Green: Apply a thinned-down coat over the entire model. Around three parts water to one part paint. Drakenhof Nightshade: Apply to the underside of the limbs, body, face and wings to add some shading. Squig Orange: Apply a layer over the eyes.
SHADING & LAYERING
Nuln Oil: Apply a wash to the recesses and undersides previously coated with Naggaroth Night in the last stage. Tau Light Ochre: Add a layer over the eyes. Nurgling Green: Add a thin layer to the face tentacles, starting at the tips to about halfway in towards the face.
BASE COLOURS
Sotek Green: Apply a thinned-down coat over the entire model. Screamer Pink: Apply a thin coat to the webs between the fingers, spines of the fins and down the chest and neck. Khorne Red: Apply a basecoat over the eyes.
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HIGHLIGHTING
Sybarite Green: Apply an edge highlight to the flesh, focusing on the topmost parts of the model and hard edges. Yriel Yellow: Apply a layer to the centre of the eyes.
SHADING & LAYERING
Drakenhof Nightshade: Apply a wash to the recesses and undersides of the limbs and tail, but not the body. Wazdakka Red: Apply a layer over the fins, webs and eyes. Karak Stone: Apply a layer to the teeth and claws. Ulthuan Grey: Add a light drybrush to the chest.
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HUNTING HORROR BASE COLOURS
Naggaroth Night: Apply a thinned-down coat over the entire model. Drakenhof Nightshade: Apply a wash over the entire model. Khorne Red: Apply a basecoat over the eyes. Screamer Pink: Apply a coat over the tongue. Baneblade Brown: Apply a coat over the teeth.
SHADING & LAYERING Nuln Oil: Apply a wash to the underside of the body and wings. Wazdakka Red: Add a layer to the eyes.
HIGHLIGHTING
Slaanesh Grey: Apply a light drybrush to the upper parts of the body and wings. Pallid Wych Flesh: Apply a highlight to the teeth. Evil Sunz Scarlet: Add a small dot to the centre of the eyes.
DEEP ONE
SHADING & LAYERING
Ulthuan Grey: Add a highlight across the whole miniature. Focus this towards the top of the model.
BASE COLOURS
Biel-Tan Green: Apply a light wash over the entire model. Drakenhof Nightshade: Once the previous colour is dry, apply a further wash, focusing on the shadows and darker areas of the model.
HIGHLIGHTING
Slaanesh Grey: Apply a line highlight to the skin. Dechala Lilac: Apply an edge highlight to the webs and spines. Pallid Wych Flesh: Apply a spot highlight to the tips of the teeth and claws. Evil Suns Scarlet: Add a small dot to the centre of the eyes.
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HIGHLIGHTING
Ceramite White: Add a final spot highlight above the previous highlights. Ceramite White & Druchii Violet: Apply a layer of white over the eyes, extending out a little where they meet the face. Then apply a heavy wash of Druchii.
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MANSIONS OF MADNESS
CULTIST BASE COLOURS
Incubi Darkness: Apply a thin coat to the robes. Rakarth Flesh: Apply a thin coat to the skin. Sycorax Bronze: Apply a coat to the staff, pendant and hood horns. Mournfang Brown: Apply a coat to the pendant string. Rhinox Hide: Apply a coat to the hair.
SHADING & LAYERING Nuln Oil: Apply a wash to the undersides and lower half of the robes. Biel-tan Green: Apply a wash to the staff. Drakenhof Nightshade: Apply a wash over the bottom half of the face and arms.
HIGHLIGHTING
Pallid Wych Flesh: Add a highlight to the skin. Ceramite White & Abaddon Black: Paint the eyes first with a base of Abaddon Black in an oval shape. This is followed by a very slightly smaller oval of Ceramite White and finished with a dot of Abaddon Black towards the top centre. Thunderhawk Blue: Apply a light drybrush to the top of each section of the robes. Karak Stone: Apply a highlight to the pendant string and the hair. Moot Green: Apply a layer to the centre of the staff.
RIOT BASE COLOURS
Rhinox Hide: Apply a thinned coat to trousers, shoes, hats and handles. Dark Reaper: Apply a thin coat over shirts and trousers. Karak Stone: Apply a thin coat to the shirts. Incubi Darkness: Apply a thin coat to the weapon heads, shoes and hats. Rakarth Flesh: Apply a thin coat to the skin.
SHADING & LAYERING
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Skull White & Biel-tan Green: Apply an oval of white over the eyes, then apply a wash of Biel-tan. Pallid Wych Flesh: Add a highlight to the skin. Also add a line highlight to the uppermost parts of the shirts. Blue Horror: Add a line highlight to the upper parts of the blue trousers and shirts. Karak Stone: Apply a line highlight to the brown trousers and hats, as well as the weapon handles. Dawnstone: Apply a layer to the weapon head.
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Nuln Oil: Apply a wash to the undersides and lower half of the clothes, weapons and hair. Drakenhof Nightshade: Apply a wash over the skin.
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CHILD OF DAGON BASE COLOURS
HIGHLIGHTING
Thunderhawk Blue: Apply a thin coat to the skin. Rhinox Hide: Add a thin coat to the handle. Baneblade Brown: Apply a thin coat to the clothing. Dark Reaper: Apply a thin coat to the weapon head.
Pallid Wych Flesh: Add a highlight to the skin and the upper parts of the robe. Blue Horror: Apply and edge highlight of the mantle and hat. Ceramite White & Abaddon Black: Paint the eyes first with a base of Abaddon Black in an oval shape. This is followed by a very slightly smaller oval of Ceramite White and finished with a dot of Abaddon Black towards the top centre. Karak Stone: Apply a light highlight to the top of the staff.
SHADING & LAYERING
Nuln Oil: Apply a wash to the undersides and lower half of the clothes. Biel-tan Green: Apply a wash to the undersides and recesses of the skin.
SHADING & LAYERING
Nuln Oil: Apply a wash to the undersides and lower half of the robes, hat and mantle. Drakenhof Nightshade: Apply a wash over the bottom half of the face and arms.
BASE COLOURS
Rhinox Hide: Apply a thinned coat to the staff. Karak Stone: Apply a thin coat over the robes. Incubi Darkness: Apply a thin coat to the mantle and the hat. Rakarth Flesh: Apply a thin coat to the skin. Sycorax Bronze: Apply a coat to the head of the staff and front of the hat.
PRIEST OF DAGON DEEP ONE HYBRID HIGHLIGHTING
Ceramite White & Abaddon Black: Paint the eyes first with a base of Abaddon Black in an oval shape. This is followed by a very slightly smaller oval of Ceramite White and finished with a dot of Abaddon Black towards the top centre. Karak Stone: Apply a thin coat to the clothes and the weapon handle. Ulthuan Grey: Apply a thin coat to highlight the skin. Also add some small dots in the darker areas to create a fish-scale pattern. Dawnstone: Apply a layer to the weapon head.
BASE COLOURS
Rhinox Hide: Apply a thinned coat to trousers, shoes, hat and club. Dark Reaper: Apply a thin coat over the jumper. Death World Forest: Apply a thin coat over the skin.
SHADING & LAYERING
Nuln Oil: Apply a wash to the recesses and lower half of the jumper, trousers, hat and club. Karak Stone: Apply a layer over the skin.
HIGHLIGHTING
Pallid Wych Flesh: Add a highlight to the skin. Ceramite White & Abaddon Black: Paint the eyes first with a base of Abaddon Black in an oval shape. This is followed by a very slightly smaller oval of Ceramite White and finished with a dot of Abaddon Black towards the top centre. Karak Stone: Apply a line highlight to the trousers, hat and club. Blue Horror: Apply a light drybrush to the upper areas of the jumper.
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T H E D U N G E O N M A S T E R ’ S G U I D E T O R O L E P L AY I N G
ON THE SHOULDERS et OF GIANTS ags.n Don’t be afraid of embracing the cliché – borrowing from your favourite books, films and games can be an easy way of creating a fun character that you can then put your own personal spin on
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You can overcome cliché by crossing over genres – why not insert a The Godfatherstyle gangster into a horror or sci-fi setting?
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et me tell you a little bit about Johnny ‘Three Shoes’ Mazetti. He’s what you would get if you took every mafia cliché out there, all the way from the singalong speakeasies of Bugsy Malone to the shallow graves of The Sopranos, and melted them down into a single fedora-wearing, tommygun-toting wiseguy. Sure, his work may have recently shifted from bootlegging hooch to ridding Brooklyn of eldritch horrors beyond the realm of understanding but, while that does add a bit of a twist to the old formula, it doesn’t change the fact that there really isn’t an original bone in his six-foot, dark-haired, strong-jawed, thoroughly generic body. He’s a trope that walks like a man; a bucket of stereotypes and references blended into a fine paste and poured into a mid-range pinstripe suit. And that’s why he works so damn well. Because I got dozens of talented writers and actors to do all the hard parts of creating a character for me.
BORROWING BRILLIANCE On the subject of clichés, there’s an old one that goes “good artists copy; great artists steal,” and this applies just as much to GMs and roleplayers as much as it did to Picasso. After all, the vast majority of RPGs out there are set within fairly well-defined genres – fantasy, sci-fi, horror, etc. – all of which contain vast amounts of existing work. You could easily spend a lifetime exploring the worlds sketched out in tens of thousands of novels, games, comic books and movies, most of which are filled to the brim with ideas just waiting for you to pluck out and use for your own needs. You could certainly argue that this makes it tough to come up with a truly unique spin, but I prefer to simply embrace the possibilities it presents. Such as Johnny. For example, one piece of advice I always give to new players who are struggling to get into their character, regardless of which game we’re planning to try out, is to throw their concerns about originality out of the nearest window and borrow cool ideas from anywhere they can. That’s not to say that there can be a lot of creative joy and incredible storytelling that comes from playing a nuanced, realistic hero with a complex web of motivations and fears, of course, but personal experience has taught me that you can also have great fun as an arrogant, willowy elf or a gruff dwarf with a little too much fondness for ale and gold (in that order). Neither character is going to be particularly original, but there’s a good reason why the old tropes have been so successful – they’re entertaining and provide an easy slab of character traits for people to weave their creativity around. This isn’t just something that should be limited to newer roleplayers either. I’ve been playing for years and will happily admit to embracing the cliché and shamelessly ripping off pop culture whenever I can. In fact, if you look at the settings I’ve put together for my own campaigns you can practically see indicators of my tastes and current obsessions running right through the middle, like tree rings of questionable creativity. The floating islands were definitely cribbed from Laputa, the lightning-powered sky-pirates are probably ripped straight out of Stardust, while the tiny mushroom sidekick is a horrifying mash-up between Guardians of the Galaxy’s Groot and Super Mario’s Toad. This kind of thing doesn’t just come into play when you’re creating entire worlds or stories from scratch, of course. Any time you’re running a game you’re being creative; adding your own twist to what’s written in the module if nothing
DO THE TWIST AGAIN To drag things back to Johnny, the major points that keep him from being a simple copy are twofold. First of all, he’s not a direct rip of any character in particular; there’s a little Al Pacino in there, sure, but there’s also a smidge of Ray Liotta and a whole load of bit-part characters from a dozen crime dramas. Just as important as that, perhaps, is the fact that his inspiration doesn’t quite match up with the setting. Johnny’s rough approximation of the “make him an offer he can’t refuse” speech from The Godfather would feel more than a little derivative if the group was playing a straight game of cops and robbers, but when he’s spouting gangster clichés to betentacled Deep Ones in Trail of Cthulhu he stands out just as surely as a wannabe-superhero would in a fantasy world, or a samurai aboard a starship. There are dozens of ways to add a personal flourish, as both a GM and as a player, to the characters, locations and events you pilfer. For example, if you did decide to create that grumpy, boozy dwarf, you can add an easy little quirk by making them afraid of the dark, unable to grow a beard or any one of a dozen other little factors that subvert your players’ expectations. In many ways, this is what lies at the heart of most really memorable stories – at least when you’re operating within existing genres – and once you learn to embrace it entire realms of wonderful ideas open up before you. You want a cool, intimidating villain? Try starting with Darth Vader and then add a few flourishes (like enough levels in wizard to put force lightning to shame). Need an interesting antagonist that may well end up allying with the party? Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride was pretty good at that, but rather than a sword-wielding Spaniard he could be an expert star-pilot. And if you’re desperate for a useful NPC to mess with your Lovecraftian investigators in 1920s New York? Well, you could always give Johnny ‘Three Shoes’ a call...
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else. Even when you’re describing a simple fight scene, few things convey someone’s character quite as well as taking a page out of a certain blonde elf’s playbook and surfing a shield down a flight of stairs mid-battle. It’s worth noting, however, that the difference between ‘copy’ and ‘steal’ isn’t just there for the sake of an easy joke. As it suggests, while there’s nothing particularly wrong with transplanting people, places and ideas from existing media over to your game, you can truly make them your own. And one of the best ways to do that is to simply add a little twist to what’s already there.
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UPCOMING EVENTS STABCON SOUTH
Friday March 30th to Sunday April 1st Jury’s Inn, Southampton
With its longest runtime yet – a massive 60 hours – this well-stocked southern show is welcoming to those who arrive empty-handed but looking for something to play. stabconsouth.com
DEVACON II
Saturday April 7th Crowne Plaza, Chester
EVENT REPORT
CHILLCON
Steve Snow reveals what makes the Sheffield show the North’s easiest-going meet-up and plans for a second convention in Derby later this year
Featuring a day of roleplaying games, from Dungeons & Dragons and Call of Cthulhu to Pathfinder and Chivalry & Sorcery, but with plenty of space for board games too, Chester’s convention returns for a second year. Doors open at 10am and close at 11pm. facebook.com/groups/DevaCon
CONPULSION
Friday April 13th to Sunday 15th Teviot Row House Student Union, Edinburgh Scotland’s premier games convention returns to the student union at the Teviot halls for another weekend featuring all sorts of tabletop experiences. With a strong social element, the convention has a small trade hall and a good games schedule with a strong LARP element to it. conpulsion.org
Interview by Matt Jarvis What’s new for ChillCon 2018? We have more traders than last year, which isagood start. We’ve also made a conscious effort to give visitors more to do other than just browse and shop. We’ve sourced more and better quality participation and demo games, and we have aboard gamelibrary and plenty of free tables on which people can play. We’ve also got a fantasticSmiffy’sSmoke Shackand a medieval tavern, so people can enjoy some hot food and a cool drink whilst they chill out and play some games. You claim to be “the North’s most chilled out convention” . Why is this the case? We’ve made a real effort to give visitors more to play and do – and the room to do it all in – so we’re expecting guests to stay longer, chill out with a few games and a beer, and really take their time to enjoy the show and the demo games. There’ll be no need to rush around the stands, spend your budget and then leave straight away. Other than games, what else is going on? Asit’sEaster weekend we’re doing a Easter hunt for any children that our attendees may bring, with some really nice baskets of treats and chocolate hidden around the show. We have some competitions, and our new Gamer Card. It’s little like a loyalty card; we give one to every visitor, and they receive a silver sticker on their card for every demo and participation game they play, and a gold sticker for every £10 they spend on a stand. Gold stickers give the
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visitor entry to a cash prize draw, and silver stickers gain the visitor tickets for the raffle. What’s the local tabletop scene like around you? It’s pretty strong in Yorkshire. There’s areally goodKings of War scene with the likes of Beers of War andKing of the North. There are loads of really goodFLGSas well, with places like Patriot Games and TravellingMan holding weekly tabletop evenings and tournaments for the likes ofWarhammer: Age of Sigmar, X-Wing andWarmachine. Not only that, but all the major cities have decent clubs; Leeds alone has two really good ones!
UNCON
Saturday April 21st to Sunday 22nd St George’s School, Broadstairs
The third Unconventional Convention is a friendly show hosted by a team willing to help newcomers learn games without the need to read a rulebook. There are plenty of British designers and studios in attendance, too. facebook.com/events/172571260006899
CON-TROLL
Saturday April 28th Dorchester Corn Exchange, Dorchester
You’re launching an event in Derby this September. How will it compare to the SheffieldChillCon, and why did you decide to host a second show there? We’re using the same approach and format to the Derby show asthe ChillCon Sheffield showas it’s one we feel comfortable with. As for why we decided to do a second show, well, it was pretty spur of the moment.We looked at what was available in the Derby area andwedecided it was lacking a local – and credible – show. What’s the plan for next year – and beyond? Next year we are looking to solidify the Sheffield and Derby shows andrefine them as necessary; our entire team is pretty new to this running shows lark, and we’re learning as we go along. Beyond that, we have plans for at least one more show,but need to see how Derby pans out beforewe rush ahead with those.
A single-day convention devoted to roleplaying at the Dorchester Corn Exchange, with regular favourites such as Dungeons & Dragons, Call of Cthulhu and World of Darkness sure to make an appearance. There’s no trade hall available, but there is a Friday night social event for those in the area. Tickets are £12, with a discount for kids. havedice.org.uk/controll
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NORTH STAR
Saturday April 28th to Sunday 29th Garrison Hotel, Sheffield
The latest of the conventions at the everpopular Garrison Hotel, North Star is a science-fiction-themed convention that runs the entire weekend. With a small trade contingent and deliveries available from local store Patriot Games, as well as five gaming slots, it promises to be an excellent addition to the Garrison weekends. northstarcon.org.uk
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CLUB DIRECTORY ABERDEENSHIRE
ABERDEEN WARGAMES CLUB Aberdeen, AB15 4YQ OLDMELDRUM WARGAMES GROUP Inverurie, AB51 0AA
WEDNESDAY NIGHT GAMING Redruth, TR15 3QY
THE CHATTERIS WARLORDS GAMES CLUB Chatteris, PE16 6NA
OMAGH WARGAMES CLUB Omagh, BT78 1HL
ANGUS
THE GAMES TABLE Cambridge, CB24 4RP
AYRSHIRE
CARMARTHEN OLD GUARD Carmarthen, SA31 3AD
KIRRIEMUIR WARGAMES CLUB Kirriemuir, DD8 4HN NORTH AYRSHIRE WARGAMES CLUB Irvine, KA12 0BA
BEDFORDSHIRE
BASEMENT GAMING CLUB Luton, LU3 3AN BEDFORD BOARD GAMING Bedford, MK40 2SX BOARD GAMES IN BEDFORD Bedford, MK41 0TU LEIGHTON BUZZARD GAMING CLUB Leighton Buzzard, LU7 1ES SAXON GAMES & CRAFTS Bedford, MK40 4FU
CARMARTHENSHIRE
TOWY VALLEY TYRANTS (TVT) Carmarthen, SA31 2JE
CHESHIRE
ALTRINCHAM WARGAMING CLUB Altrincham, WA14 4PG CHESHIRE GAMERS Crewe, CW1 2DF CONGLETON AND DISTRICT LIGHT BOARD GAMES GROUP Congleton, CW12 1AH ELEMENT GAMES NORTH WEST GAMING CENTRE Stockport, SK2 6PT
BERKSHIRE
GUARDIANS OF THE GAMES (TABLETOP GROUP) Macclesfield, SK11 6UB
NEWBURY & READING WARGAMES ASSOCIATION Newbury, RG14 2RA
MUG AND GAME Congleton, CW12 1PG
BROAD STREET GAMERS Wokingham, RG40 3AQ
NEWBURY & READING WARGAMES ASSOCIATION Newbury, RG1 4PS WARFIELD BOARD GAMERS Bracknell, RG42 2DD WARGAMES ASSOCIATION OF READING Wokingham, RG41 5DU
BIRMINGHAM
BIRMINGHAM WARGAMES AND BOARDGAMES CLUB AKA DRAGOON’S DEN Birmingham, B13 9EA
BRISTOL
POYNTON BOARD GAME DAY Stockport, SK12 1RB VARIABLE MAGERS Stockport, SK4 3BS WARRINGTON BOARD GAMES CLUB Warrington, WA1 2SX WINSFORD WARHAWKS WARGAMING CLUB Winsford, CW7 4AT
CAITHNESS
NORTHERN KNIGHTS WARGAMES Thurso, KW14 8HN
CAMBRIDGESHIRE
CO CORK
BRETHREN WARGAMING CLUB West Cork, T23 F577
CO DURHAM
DARLINGTON’S DOGS OF WAR Darlington, DL3 7LX DURHAM RAIDERS Croxdale, DH6 5HJ
ESSEX WARRIORS Chelmsford, CM1 3DU
DARK WORLDS GAMING SOCIETY Fareham, PO15 6TL
GBCON QUARTERLY GAMING DAY Loughton, IG10 4LF
FIRESTORM CARDS OPEN GAMING NIGHT Basingstoke, RG24 8FB
LOUGHTON STRIKE FORCE Loughton, IG10 1LH
FORDINGBRIDGE GAMING CLUB Fordingbridge, SP6 1AS
SOUTHEND-ON-SEA ROLEPLAYING SOCIETY Southend-on-Sea, SS1 1BD
GARY DONALDSON Waterlooville, PO8 8RG
CULLOMPTON BOARD GAMES GROUP Cullompton, EX15 1JX DARK STAR GAMING Plymouth, PL4 0AL EAST DEVON TABLETOP & RPG GROUP Honiton, EX14 1HR EXMOUTH IMPERIAL WARGAMES CLUB Exmouth, EX8 4SW GAME NIGHT @ CARPE Plymouth, PL4 8EU NEO TIVERTON GAMING CLUB Tiverton, EX16 5JJ PLYMOUTH ASSOCIATION OF WARGAMERS Plymouth, PL3 5TB TORQUAY BOARD GAME CLUB Torquay, TQ2 7AD
DORSET
WORLDS AWAY Bournemouth, BH2 5RQ
DUMFRIESSHIRE
ANNAN GAMING CLUB Annan, DG12 6EF
THE FIVE ARCHES GAMING CLUB Dumfries, DG1 3JR
DUNBARTONSHIRE
DUMBARTON WARGAMES CLUB Dumbarton, G82 1QQ
DURHAM
EASTBOURNE ELEMENTAL Eastbourne, BN21 3XQ
THOR’S HAMMER GAMING CLUB Borehamwood, WD6 5PR TRING WARGAMES CLUB Tring, HP23 6BA WARLORDS WARGAMING ST. ALBANS St. Albans, AL3 4DJ WATFORD WARGAMES CLUB Watford, WD17 4PN WELWYN WARGAMERS Welwyn Garden City, AL8 6PS
PORTSMOUTH ON BOARD Portsmouth, PO1 1PT
ISLE OF MAN
KB TABLETOP GAMING - ISLE OF MAN Isle of Man, IM4 4LA
RINGWOOD ASSOCIATION OF WARGAMERS Ringwood, BH24 1DW
KENT
SOLENT WARGAMERS CLUB Portsmouth, PO1 1PT
THE PHOENIX GAMES CLUB London, E13 0AD
FIFE
DUNFERMLINE WARGAMING AND ROLEPLAYING FELLOWSHIP Dunfermline, KY12 7DS EAST NEUK TABLETOP GAMES Anstruther, KY10 3DJ
SOUTHAMPTON SLUGGAZ Southampton, SO17 2JZ
ALL AROUND THE BOARD Westgate-on-Sea, CT8 8RE ASHFORD (KENT) BOARDGAMES CLUB Ashford, TN24 9AJ
THE SOUTHAMPTON GUILD OF ROLEPLAYERS Southampton, SO14 0LH
BEXLEY REAPERS WARGAMING CLUB Bexley, DA5 1AA
THE THIRD COALITION WARGAMES CLUB New Milton, BH25 5BT
KIRKCALDY MEEPLE CLUB Kirkcaldy, KY2 6LF
CANTERBURY CRUSADERS Canterbury, CT1 1RT
WATERLOO TABLE TOP GAMERS Waterlooville, PO8 8RG
FLINTSHIRE
DEESIDE DEFENDERS Chester, CH4 0DR
GRAVESHAM WARGAMING AND TABLETOP GAMING CLUB Gravesend, DA11 9EU
WESSEX WARGAMES WINCHESTER Winchester, SO22 4QB
FGC FLINTSHIRE GAMING CLUB Mold, CH7 6SZ
GREENWICH & BLACKHEATH BOARD GAMES AND BEER CLUB London, SE3 7JQ
WESSEX WYVERNS GAMING CLUB Ringwood, BH24 2NP
GLASGOW
ANTONINE BOARD GAMERS Glasgow, G64 4EN
MAIDSTONE WARGAMES SOCIETY Maidstone, ME17 4AW
HEREFORDSHIRE
GLASGOW GAMES ROOM Glasgow, G20 7QE UNPLUGGED GAMES CLUB Glasgow, G41 3AB
DICE AND DECKS Ross-on-Wye, HR9 5HR
MEDWAY AREA BOARDGAMERS Maidstone, ME14 1ED
HEREFORDSHIRE BOARDGAMERS Hereford, HR4 9EA
MERRYCHEST CAFE GAMING CLUB Dartford, DA2 8AH
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HERTFORDSHIRE
GLOUCESTERSHIRE
BISHOP’S STORTFORD TABLETOP Bishop’s Stortford, CM23 3BQ
GLOUCESTERSHIRE GAMES BUNKER Cheltenham, GL51 4XA
PORK CHOP GAMING Cheltenham, GL50 3HA
1066 WARGAMING CLUB St. Leonards-on-Sea, TN38 8BL
ST. ALBANS BOARD GAME CLUB St. Albans, AL3 5PE
CHINEHAM BOARD GAMERS Basingstoke, RG24 8LT
THE OVERLORDS Dagenham RM8 2HQ
EAST SUSSEX
CORNWALL
WELSH WEYR GAMING GROUP Ammanford, SA18 1DX
POTTERS BAR GAMES CLUB Potters Bar, EN6 5BT
BLACK HOLE WARGAMERS Petersfield, GU32 3HS
THE HORNCHURCH WARGAMES CLUB Romford, RM3 9LB
LINCOMBE BARN WARGAMES SOCIETY Bristol, BS16 2RW
THE DICE AND DAGGER GAMING CLUB Bude, EX23 9BL
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DEVON
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PETERBOROUGH WARGAMES CLUB Peterborough, PE1 1NA
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COLCHESTER WARGAMES ASSOCIATION Colchester, CO3 5RH
CO LONDONDERRY
SMIPHEES GAMES CLUB Callington, PL17 7AN
NORTH LONDON WARGAMES CLUB Waltham Cross, EN8 9AJ
SUNDAY NIGHT BOARD GAMING AT THE OLD KINGS HEAD BELPER Belper, DE56 1NP
IWARPUK Gloucester, GL2 9EB
NEWMARKET KNIGHTS GAMES CLUB Ely, CB7 5HS
HAMPSHIRE
ARBBL Andover, SP10 1DQ
ESSEX
DWG Durham, DH1 1QG
THE SIEGE BUNKER Londonderry, BT48 7JL
NORTH HERTFORDSHIRE WARGAMES CLUB Hitchin, SG5 1XL
CONWY WARGAMES CLUB Llandudno, LL30 3LB
EAST YORKSHIRE
GAMERS@HART Hartlepool, TS26 9DE
2D6 LODGE Cambridge, CB1 8NN
GWYNEDD
BASILDON WARBOYZ Basildon, SS16 4NW
CO ANTRIM
QUB DRAGONSLAYERS Belfast, BT7 1NN
UCKFIELD TABLETOP GAMERS Uckfield, TN22 5DT
DERBY ON BOARD GAMES Derby, DE1 1QH
BARNSTAPLE SLAYERS GAMING CLUB Barnstaple, EX32 8LS
HITCHIN HERETICS Hitchin, SG5 1XL
GWENT REAVERS TABLETOP GAMING CLUB Abertillery, NP13 3DJ
WOLDS WARGAMERS Driffield, YO25 6SS
WESSEX WYVERNS WARGAMES CLUB Ferndown, BH22 9AN
BUCKINGHAMSHIRE
WYCOMBE WARBAND Beaconsfield, HP9 1LG
DERBYSHIRE
GWENT
FAMOUS COLLECTABLES Bexhill-on-Sea, TN40 1DU
CONSORTIUM GAMES CLUB @GHQ Chesterfield, S40 1JW
CLEVELAND
REDCAR IRONBEARDS Redcar, TS10 1RH DRAGONSLAYERS Belfast, BT7 1NN
NEWPORT PAGNELL BOARD GAMES CLUB Newport Pagnell, MK16 8AN
COUNTY TYRONE
SOUTHBOURNE TABLETOP & BOARDGAMERS Bournemouth, BH6 3AA
HALL OF HEROES GAMING CLUB Bristol, BS16 1NU MILTON KEYNES WARGAMES SOCIETY Milton Keynes, MK11 1JQ
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ROLL WITH IT! Huntingdon, PE29 3TF
BLACK WOLF WARGAMES CLUB Hitchin, SG5 1XL CALAMITY COMICS HATFIELD Hatfield, AL10 0JJ FINCHLEY GAMES CLUB London, N12 7JE
GREATER MANCHESTER
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HEMEL HEMPSTEAD WARGAMING CLUB Hemel Hempstead, HP1 1LD HERTFORD BEER & BOARDGAMES Hertford, SG14 1HH
MILTON HUNDRED WARGAMES CLUB Sittingbourne, ME10 4BX SEVENOAKS & TONBRIDGE ASSOCIATION OF GAMERS (STAG) Sevenoaks, TN15 9HA
TUNBRIDGE WELLS WARGAMES SOCIETY Tunbridge Wells, TN3 0PR WHITSTABLETOP Whitstable, CT5 1DA
LANARKSHIRE
LANARKSHIRE GAMERS Motherwell, ML1 1BS
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ML2 GAMERS Hamilton, ML3 6BU
LANCASHIRE
BLACK TOWER WARGAMING Blackpool, FY4 4ND BURNLEY BOARD GAMERS Burnley, BB10 3LF BURNLEY WARGAMES CLUB Burnley, BB10 3EU DECKS & DICE Manchester, M25 1AY DICED TEA Oldham, OL1 2DB DUNGEONS & FLAGONS Manchester, M1 7HL ELWA: EAST LANCASHIRE WARGAMES ASSOCIATION Blackburn, BB6 7DD FAN BOY THREE BOARDGAME NIGHT Manchester, M1 1EL HARLEQUINS BLACKPOOL Blackpool, FY1 3QA HOUSE LANCASTER GAMING GROUP Lancaster, LA1 1EE PRESTON’S GAMERS GUILD Preston, PR1 7DP
LOUTH STRATEGY GAMES CLUB Louth, LN11 8DB
LONDON
CROSS GAMING CLUB London, SE1 1DX SELWG London, SE6 2TS TANELORN WAR GAMING CLUB London, E11 3DB
PHOENIX GAMING CLUB Rushden, NN10 9YE
WSM BOARD GAMING CLUB Weston-super-Mare, BS22 8PD
SWIGGERS London, SE1 2TF
THE BRACKLEY & DISTRICT GAMERS Brackley, NN13 6LF
BROTHERHOOD OF THE DICE Barnsley, S75 1JR
SOUTH YORKSHIRE
THE SOUTH LONDON WARLORDS London, SE21 7BT
THE PIT GAMING CLUB Wellingborough, NN9 5TU
STEEL CITY WARGAMING Sheffield, S13 7LL
NOTTINGHAMSHIRE
ZONE OUT GAMES CLUB Doncaster, DN1 2PX
K.I.A GAMES CLUB Nottingham, NG17 8LA
THE WOKING WEIRD BOYZ Woking, GU22 7TA TOLWORTH 1ST FOUNDING Chessington, KT9 1PF
WARWICKSHIRE
WEDNESDAY KNIGHT GAMERS Salisbury, SP1 3TA
STAFFORDSHIRE WARGAMING GUILD Stone, ST15 8TG
BOARD GAME CAFE SUMMERFIELD Birmingham, B16 0EZ
BROMSGROVE BOARD GAMERS Bromsgrove, B60 2DZ
WILDSIDE GAMING Newark, NG24 1ER
TAMWORTH GAMES CLUB Tamworth, B79 7DJ
BRAVO ONE GAMING Birmingham, B1 1QP
ABINGDON WARGAMES CLUB Abingdon, OX14 5AG
OXFORDSHIRE
TAMWORTH LIBERATORS GAMING CLUB Tamworth, B77 3AE
DREAMDEALERS GAMING CLUB Coventry, CV6 4FE
AMBROSDEN GAMING CLUB Bicester, OX25 2LZ
THE VINE INN GAMERS Rugeley, WS15 2AT
GRANGE LIVE GAMING Birmingham, B1 1QP
BICESTER BOARD GAMERS Bicester, OX26 3HA
TRITEX GAMES Stafford, ST16 1BG
NUNEATON ALTERNATIVE GAMES ASSOCIATION Nuneaton, CV10 8LJ
LICHFIELD GAMERS AND RPG Lichfield, WS13 6EB
AFTERNOON PLAY Birmingham, B15 1AY
WAR & PEACE GAMES CLUB Nottingham, NG10 5BD
FORGEMASTERS GAMING CLUB Wirral, CH63 6HD LIVERPOOL LION BOARDGAMERS Liverpool, L3 9NS
MERSEYSIDE
SOUTHPORT BOARD GAMES GROUP Southport, PR8 1NH ST. HELENS BOARDGAMES, ROLEPLAYING GAMES (B.O.R.G.) St. Helens, WA10 5BF
MID GLAMORGAN
NOTTINGHAM BOARD & WARGAMES CLUB Nottingham, NG2 1NB THE CLUB WITH NO NAME Nottingham, NG2 1NB
NORTH OXFORDSHIRE WARGAMING CLUB Banbury, OX16 9AF
SALFORD AND MANCHESTER GAMING HAVEN Salford, M8 0TW
CASTLE GAMERS BRIDGEND Bridgend, CF35 6AU
THE HUNGRY DRAGON GAMES NIGHT Manchester, M21 0AE
BATTLEUX WARGAMES CLUB Uxbridge, UB10 0RY
OXFORD ON BOARD Oxford, OX4 1EA
DICE CLUB Uxbridge, UB10 0RY
OXFORD OUTRIDERS Oxford, OX1 4AG
HESTON AND EALING WARGAMERS London, W13 9SS
MIDDLESEX
OXFORD GAMING CLUB Oxford, OX2 7DP
CHASE WARGAMES CLUB Burntwood, WS7 0JL
STIRLINGSHIRE
FALKIRK DISTRICT WARGAMES CLUB Grangemouth, FK3 8QR
OCTOBER WARGAMES ASSOCIATION Birmingham, B16 8SY
SUFFOLK
SCIMITAR WARGAMES GROUP Coventry, CV3 5GT
BURY ST. EDMUNDS BOARD GAMING GROUP Bury St. Edmunds, IP30 9LH
WEST MIDLANDS
HAVERHILL AREA BOARD GAME GROUP Haverhill, CB9 8AU
BIRMINGHAM WARGAMES AND BOARDGAMES CLUB AKA DRAGOON’S DEN Birmingham, B13 9EA
BIG ORBIT GAMES SHREWSBURY Shrewsbury, SY1 1PH
HAVERHILL WAR GAMES CLUB Haverhill, CB9 9JE
PLAY MORE GAMES! Solihull, B90 3GG
TABLETOP TUESDAYS London, N16 8BX
E-COLLECTICA GAMES Shrewsbury, SY1 2DT
IPSWICH BOARD GAMERS Ipswich, IP3 0FS
WEST SUSSEX
CHARNWOOD ROLE PLAYERS GAMING CLUB Loughborough, LE12 8DT
THE GAMES CLUB London, NW1 2JU
GAMES @THE BIRD Shrewsbury, SY1 2DT
LEICESTER ALL SCARS Leicester, LE1 3JR
MIDLOTHIAN
EDINBURGH LEAGUE OF GAMERS Edinburgh, EH7 5EA
STAGS TELFORD WARGAMING SOCIETY Telford, TF1 1LU
IPSWICH COUNTY LIBRARY BOARD GAMES LIBRARY Ipswich, IP1 3DE
THE LIVERPOOL WARGAMES ASSOCIATION (LWA) Liverpool, L1 6HB THURSDAY SCYTHE BOARD GAMERS Liverpool, L3 8HE
LEICESTERSHIRE
LEICESTER PHAT KATZ Leicester, LE3 0QY SECTION 31 Leicester, LE1 1PA SONS OF SIMON DE MONTFORT Loughborough, LE12 8TX THE LEICESTER WARGAMES AND FANTASY GROUP Leicester, LE3 0QU
LINCOLNSHIRE
BOSTON TABLETOP GAMERS Boston, PE21 6QQ GRANTHAM FRIENDLY GAMERS Grantham, NG31 6LJ
SOUTH EAST SCOTLAND WARGAMES CLUB Edinburgh, EH7 4EW
NORFOLK
AFTERMATH GAMING CLUB Norwich, NR3 4HX KINGS LYNN RPG & WARGAMES CLUB King’s Lynn, PE30 4DN NORWICH BOARD GAMERS Norwich, NR2 4AL TAS GAMING CLUB King’s Lynn, PE34 4SJ
NORTH YORKSHIRE
GRIMSBY WARGAMES SOCIETY Grimsby, DN32 9HT
YORK GARRISON WARGAMING CLUB York, YO32 4AQ
LINCOLN BOARD GAME GROUP Lincoln, LN1 3BJ
BATTLEFIELD HOBBIES Daventry, NN11 8RB
NORTHAMPTONSHIRE
SHROPSHIRE
TELFORD BOARDGAMERS CLUB Telford, TF1 2BW
SOMERSET
BATH GAMING GROUP Bath, BA2 6AA MID SOMERSET WARGAMES CLUB Wells, BA5 2PU PIGMAR WARGAMING CLUB Bath, BA1 6AB THE FROME BOARD GAMES CLUB Frome, BA11 1PU TRINITY WARGAMING CLUB Taunton, TA1 3JG WARGAMING @ RADSTOCK Radstock, BA3 4BD WESTON WARGAMERS CLUB Weston-super-Mare, BS23 1NF
BOGNOR REGIS GAMING ASSOCIATION Bognor Regis, PO21 5EU BOGNOR REGIS MILITARY MODELLING AND WARGAMING SOCIETY Bognor Regis, PO21 5SB
MID SUFFOLK GAMING CLUB Stowmarket, IP14 4SH WHITE EAGLES WARGAMES CLUB Ipswich, IP2 0RG
CRAWLEY GAMING CLUB Crawley, RH10 5DF
SURREY
DUNGEON CRAWL-EY GAMES CLUB Crawley, RH11 7QG
EAGLE GAMING CLUB London, SW18 2PT
MEEPLES Burgess Hill, RH15 8DX
HAMPTON COURT GAMES CLUB East Molesey, KT8 0BT
SOUTH DOWNS SIEGEBREAKERS Pulborough, RH20 4DR
CROYDON BOARD GAMERS Croydon, CR0 1DP
MID SUSSEX
WEST YORKSHIRE
REIGATE WARGAMES GROUP Reigate, RH2 0NA STAINES WARGAMES ASSOCIATION Egham, TW20 0QT
BOARD IN THE VILLAGE Bradford, BD14 6RE
STAY ON TARGET Woking, GU21 5BG
GAMING CLUB BRADFORD Bradford, BD1 2DX
WORCESTERSHIRE
PERSHORE GAMING Pershore, WR10 1EQ POSTAL ORDER GEEK MEET Worcester, WR1 1DN REDDITCH WARGAMING SOCIETY Redditch, B97 5YE WORCESTER BOARD GAMERS (WOBOG) Worcester, WR1 2DP WYRE FOREST GAMERS Kidderminster, DY10 1RP
YORKSHIRE
AIREBOROUGH COMMUNITY GAMERS Leeds, LS19 6AS BEYOND MONOPOLY York, YO24 1AQ HEADINGLEY GAMES CLUB Leeds, LS6 3HN HOLMFIRTH GAMING CENTRE Holmfirth, HD9 7HP HULL’S ANGELS Hull, HU1 3HG LEEDS GAMING Leeds, LS1 3DL LEEDS NIGHT OWLS Leeds, LS6 1LJ SHEFFIELD AND ROTHERHAM WARGAMES CLUB Sheffield, S2 2TP SHEFFIELD BOARD GAMES Sheffield, S3 7HG SHEFFIELD WARGAMES SOCIETY Sheffield, S8 0PS
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LIST YOUR CLUB FOR FREE AND SEE FULL CLUB DETAILS ONLINE tabletopgaming.co AT
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HALIFAX BOARD GAMERS Halifax, HX1 1SJ
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SURREY GIRL GAMERS Woking, GU21 4AL
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CHIPPENHAM BOARD GAMES CLUB Chippenham, SN15 3WL DEVIZES & DISTRICT WARGAMES GROUP Devizes, SN10 5AD
BRIGHTON WARLORDS Brighton, BN1 1UB
THE ROLE PLAY HAVEN (LEWISHAM) London, SE13 6LH
WILTSHIRE
BOSCOMBE DOWN & AMESBURY WARGAMES CLUB Salisbury, SP4 7LN
SUSSEX
STAFFORDSHIRE
THE ROLE PLAY HAVEN (STRATFORD) London, E15 2HU
OTLEY BOARD GAMERS Otley, LS21 2AU
.uk/clubs
KEIGHLEY TABLETOP COMBAT Keighley, BD20 6EB
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Take your positions at the iconic Alexandra Palace LESS THAN SIX MONTHS TO GO! TURN TO PAGE 6 FOR A CHANCE TO WIN TICKETS
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SHOP SPOTLIGHT
STRONGHOLD GAMES Ray Reaney reveals how his childhood friendship (and rivalry) with David Bradburn led them to open the Hull store Interview by Matt Jarvis You only opened in late 2016. How’s your first year and a bit been? Well, honestly, it’s been fantastic.I must admit at first we were a little concerned about how many people would be interested in our store, in fact we imagined a very difficult situation where we would have to struggle for four or five years to build a bigger gaming community, and to gain those loyal and regular customers that a games shop needs to survive. However I’m happy to report that on our opening day the store was totally packed with gamers wanting to check out their new games store, and from there we have only grown in popularity! I’d say one of the keys to our success was quickly reaching out to the local gaming clubs that were already established in the local area, many of which we now call friends. In some respects it might be hard to open a gaming store in a new city, but if you reach out to the gamers and clubs that are already there and show them you are willing to help and support their clubs then you quickly become part of the community. Why did you decide to open a gaming store? Me and my business partner met over 25 years ago in Games Workshop Sheffield and, aged around 11 years old at the time, it’s fair to say we hated each
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other. On many occasions as children we would face each other over the battlefield playing games such as Warhammer 40,000, Blood Bowl and Space Hulk, and most of the time he would win seeing me nickname him ‘Clown Shoes’ due to his massive oversized feet and ego. However, over the many years of gaming we became the best of friends until 20 years later I was the best man at his wedding. Then a few years later I was sat in my living room watching a film when a knock came to my front door and in stepped my friend, the same friend I had met 25 years before in Games Workshop, and looking me in the eyes he simply said “Do you want to open a games shop?” You could say the rest is history seeing us embark on yet another great adventure. What sort of gaming events do you hold? We run a wide range of regular gaming events and, in today’s environment, it’s vital that a games store provides a place for people to play games. I have been in some games shops that are basically just filled with stock and have no space for gaming which obviously makes building a store community much more difficult. Generally we run a variety of events for games such as Magic: The Gathering, X-Wing, Warhammer 40,000, Guild Ball and Malifaux, and even have regular board games nights and other dedicated events. I’d also say having a separate room for roleplaying games has really helped the community, in fact as it stands we have five or six different groups who use our room on a regular basis, roleplaying groups that probably would have never met without our store offering that service. What is the local gaming scene like in Hull? I have to admit we were shocked to find the gaming scene in Hull is really good, that for a fairly
small city Hull has a variety of gaming stores, comic book shops, and even a board games café. Perhaps more exciting is our own charitable efforts which we have decided to call the ‘School Gaming Clubs’, as each year Stronghold has decided to help one local school to set up a gaming club. In early 2018 Stronghold Games donated £3,374 worth of gaming equipment to the Boulevard Academy in Hull, meaning hundreds of children aged around 12 to 16 years old now have one of the best school gaming clubs in the city. Hopefully if Stronghold can help create more school gaming clubs over the coming years then it will secure the future of gaming in Hull for many years to come. Who knows: in another 25 years it might be the children we help today opening their own games store or designing new British games. What are your plans for the next year? We have a lot planned. Firstly, we would like to extend our store onto the first floor, which will open up an entire new floor of gaming space for our customers and allow us to run bigger events. Plus, the space we save downstairs means we can stock even more goodies and increase our product range by a substantial amount. Secondly, we would like to work more with the Hull’s Angels gaming club and gather even bigger donations and prizes towards their yearly charity events. It’s fair to say the folks at Hull’s Angels have worked really hard to support local charities and the gaming community of Hull, so the least we can do is offer them our friendship and support wherever possible. Finally, we would love to continue our programme of creating school gaming clubs which we believe is a fantastic cause that not only helps provide a great hobby for young people, but that will also help to secure the gaming hobby for years to come. Taking into account that gaming is such a fun and creative hobby that promotes core skills such as reading, writing, maths, socialisation, timekeeping, teamwork and various other skills, it always surprises us that more schools don’t have gaming clubs.
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SHOP DIRECTORY
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an ideal accessory for a DM
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CAMPAIGN
here was a great boom in the production and playing of board games in the 1960s and ‘70s. Electronic gaming hadn’t quite taken hold yet and board gamers had plenty of choice. Waddingtons produced a vast number of games for the casual family games market but it also produced a few more strategic titles. Campaign was a game that stands out as a mainstream strategy-based wargame. Campaign offered a game for two to four players with campaigns based, quite tentatively, on the Napoleonic Wars. The game included a booklet on the history of Napoleon, which was both educational and possibly an attempt to help theme the game as there was little else to connect it. The game was almost entirely strategy-based, with just a hint of luck provided by rolling two six-sided dice to determine movement. The movement didn’t make that much difference if you had your strategy carefully planned, though. As a wargame, Campaign was easy to learn but with no line of sight or terrain rules it left you wanting more. Today it would probably include a set of advanced rules and expansion packs to keep players interested for longer. The board does have some terrain markers including water, rivers, trees and mountains, indicating that advanced or at least house rules may have been intended. This is a good idea as the default rules were just movement and capture-type rules meaning that the game played a little too much like chess rather than a wargame. There were updated versions released but the rules remained the same. The main change seems to be a rather unnecessary update to the game’s artwork. The original box art simply showed three military drums but each drum was decorated with a battle scene, making for fairly striking box art that later versions didn’t achieve. The board’s artwork was also nicer in the original version: a grid system with a few features, such as the unused terrain, picked out which made it look more exciting than it was. The board was split into six areas representing different countries: France, Spain, Italy, Prussia, Russia and Austria. Italy was always neutral and up for grabs by any player, while Prussia was
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only used if there were three players. The divisions on the original board are subtle but very bold on the updated version. Campaign stands up as a great, fun to play strategy game that can be appreciated as a family board game or a very early introductory wargame. Serious gamers would want more but it is a product of its time and served as an accessible introduction to wargaming – albeit being a bit too formulaic. That doesn’t stop it being fun to play or stop you from using some creative strategy. It was mass-produced and isn’t particularly rare but, as with all games of that age, it can be difficult to find one in mint condition as the game was engaging enough to warrant extensive play.
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Words Phil Robinson Phil Robinson is a game
historian and the founder of the Museum of Gaming, an organisation that explores and documents the history of gaming through its collections, exhibitions and research.
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I N M AY ’ S I S S U E
ON S AL E AP RIL 30 T H
A SONG OF ICE & FIRE TA B L E T O P M I N I AT U R E S G A M E
The world of Game of Thrones goes to war! Prepare to see Westeros as you’ve never done before in the action-packed adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s sprawling fantasy series
ECLIPSE: SECOND DAWN FOR THE GALAXY
The sci-fi masterpiece returns bigger and better than ever. Creator Touko Tahkokallio reveals what’s new for the universe
FORBIDDEN LANDS
The team behind Tales from the Loop are reimagining classic fantasy with their next unmissable RPG – we’ve got an early look!
THE RISE OF QUEENSDALE
STAR WARS: LEGION PAINTING TIPS
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Our multi-part guide kicks off with advice on making your Imperial army incredible
Inside the ambitious legacy Eurogame
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