Tabletop Gaming #014 (Jan 2018) - PDFCOFFEE.COM (2024)

10

RPGs YOU MUST PLAY IN 2018! PLUS OUR RE V IE W OF DUNGEONS & DR AGONS’ NE W E XPANSION January 2018

tabletopgaming.co.uk

BOGUS BOARD GAMES Do you own a fake?

FALLOUT Wasteland warfare

£5.25

STUFFED FABLES | CIVILIZATION: A NEW DAWN | VENGEANCE | AZUL THE MAKING OF DOMINION | PHOTOSYNTHESIS | MASSIVE DARKNESS STAR SAGA PAINTING TIPS | HNEFATAFL: THE VIKING BOARD GAME HUNT FOR THE RING | TABLETOP LIVESTEAMERS | RAXXON | AND MORE

Display until 29/1/18

Nuclear PHWOAR! We go behind the scenes of the action-packed post-apocalyptic minis game

C O M I N G F E B R U A R Y 2018 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.

PLAYERS

20-40

MINUTES PLAY TIME

2-6

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.

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. TIPS FROM CREATOR REINER KNIZIA

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EDITORIAL EDITOR Matt Jarvis 01778 392 400 [emailprotected] CONTRIBUTORS John Dodd, Owen Duffy, Holly Gramazio, Sam Illingworth, David Jagneaux, Richard Jansen-Parkes, Dan Jolin, Andy Leighton, Lucy Orr, Phil Robinson, Alex Sonechkina, Paul Wake, James Wallis HEAD OF DESIGN & PRODUCTION Lynn Wright

Welcome H

DESIGNER Richard Hallam COVER IMAGE FROM FALLOUT: WASTELAND WARFARE ADVERTISING TO ADVERTISE PLEASE CALL GROUP ADVERTISING MANAGER Claire Ingram 01778 391 179 [emailprotected] GROUP TELESALES EXECUTIVE Ben Jackson 01778 391 129 [emailprotected] ADVERTISING DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Nicola Lock 01778 392 420 [emailprotected]

Now Playing... Civilization: A New Dawn

Get in touch

MARKETING MARKETING BRAND MANAGER Nicola Lumb

tabletopgaming.co.uk

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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tabletopmag

tabletop_gaming_magazine

appy New Year! The start of a new year always means lots more exciting upcoming releases headed to the tabletop, but 2018 is set to be even more exciting than most if you’re a fan of Tabletop Gaming. It’s our first year as a monthly magazine, meaning for the first time you’ll be able to know exactly what you should be picking up and playing every single month. If you’re not already a subscriber, we’ve made it easier than ever before to get the world’s best coverage of gaming through your letterbox with quarterly and half-yearly options – plus you’ll save a bunch of money compared to buying it in the shops. We’ve got loads of exclusive previews, features and promo gifts in the works, so you won’t want to miss out! Check out page 53 to find out more. That’s not all! We’re also busy beavering away on the plans for the first Tabletop Gaming Live convention, which will take place this September in London’s gorgeous Alexandra Palace. Tickets for the show are on sale right now – make sure you’re at the most exciting show of the year by booking yours today. Get the full details on page 6. Once you’ve done all that, strap in as we venture into the irradiated post-apocalypse of Fallout: Wasteland Warfare, explore the nightmarish dreamscape of Stuffed Fables, reveal the dark world of tabletop forgeries and even take a trip back in time to game with the Vikings...

Matt Matt Jarvis Editor

[emailprotected] | @liquidmatt

Q U I C K S TA R T

It’s another level above the normal wargame. Maybe it’s more of an adventure game.

I want my games to be more like the books that have an indelible impact on your soul.

We can only guess at the harm end users are exposing themselves to from counterfeits.

Why Fallout: Wasteland Warfare is SPECIAL, p18

Jerry Hawthorne has high hopes for Stuffed Fables, p26

We reveal the dangers of fake board games, p44

tabletopgaming.co.uk

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In this issue 06 AT A GLANCE

A 30-second guide to the latest in gaming

09 FIRST TURN

Scythe creator Jamey Stegmaier on the winey delights of Viticulture

10 10 OF THE BEST

Your map to some of the most exciting worlds found in roleplaying games

13 ROLE CALL

The upcoming RPGs to keep your eye on

14 ALL THE JAHRES

Looking back at the questionable themes of 1989’s Café International

17 MY FAVOURITE GAME

Mangaka designer Jason Thompson expresses his love for Cosmic Encounter

ON THE COVER

18 FALLOUT: WASTELAND WARFARE

Suit up in your power armour as we explore the rad post-apocalyptic miniatures game

26 STUFFED FABLES

Why the tale from the man behind Mice & Mystics will leave you sleeping soundly

Find out about the wave of counterfeits creeping into players’ collections

48 THE VIKING GAME

Forget Blood Rage – here’s what the ancient Norse warriors really played

52 PLAY IT SMART

Our doctors break down the symptoms and search for a cure to gamer rage

54 VENGEANCE

Gaming’s answer to revenge films Kill Bill and John Wick is a bloody good time

58 STREAMING AHEAD Playing games live on the internet has never been bigger – we meet its stars

61 PLAYED

Reviews of the latest and greatest games you should be playing

83 PAINTING GUIDE

Adding a splash of colour to the bosses of sci-fi dungeon crawler Star Saga

88 DUNGEON MASTER’S GUIDE TO ROLEPLAYING

Introducing new players to your campaign

34 HAVE YOU PLAYED?

91 EVENT REPORT

37 KICKSTARTING FROM SCRATCH

92 CLUB DIRECTORY 95 SHOP SPOTLIGHT

Finding your place in Terra Mystica

Art Deck continues on its journey from concept to crowdfunding

38 HOW WE MADE

Donald X. Vaccarino reveals the secret of the original deckbuilder: Dominion

4

44 FAKE BOARD GAMES

At Uncon: the unconventional convention

Rochester Games, Models & Railways

98 TABLETOP TIME MACHINE

Let’s Do Lunch! On the menu: you!

January 2018

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THE GAMES 7 Wonders

44

Aristeia!

78

Art Deck

37

Asset Drop

80

Azul

62

Betrayal at Baldur’s Gate

72

Betrayal at House on the Hill

53

Café International

14

Civilization: A New Dawn

64

Clank! In! Space!

68

Cosmic Encounter Dominion

81

Dragon Castle

26 44

38

54

Dungeons & Dragons

17

38, 44 10, 88

D&D: Xanathar’s Guide to Everything

65

Elite Encounters

79

Ex Libris

73

Fallout: Wasteland Warfare

18

Gaia Project

34

Hnefatafl

48

Hunt for the Ring

74

InBetween

80

Indian Summer

67

Let’s Do Lunch!

96

Massive Darkness

71

Monopoly

52

Star Saga

83

Photosynthesis

77

Pulsar 2849

63

Queendomino

69

Raxxon

70

Sidereal Confluence

75

Stuffed Fables

26

Terra Mystica

34

Ticket to Ride

44

Vengeance

54

Viticulture

09

tabletopgaming.co.uk

5

AT A GLANCE

TABLETOP GAMING LIVE TICKETS GO ON SALE! Day and weekend passes available for London show taking place in Alexandra Palace this September You can now get your ticket to the most exciting gaming convention of 2018: Tabletop Gaming Live! Together with our sister magazine Miniature Wargames we’re hosting a celebration of all things tabletop – from board and card games to RPGs and wargames – at London’s beautiful Alexandra Palace on Saturday, September 29th and Sunday 30th 2018. We’ll have some of the hottest new releases from Gen Con in August, as well as a preview of

some of the games making their way to Essen in October – making this your first chance to play some of 2018’s biggest games in the UK. There’s plenty more planned for the two days, from tournaments to talks from designers revealing how they made some of your favourite gaming experiences. We’re offering a special discount if you pre-book your tickets before the show, with adults able to pick up a day pass for just £15 or attend the whole weekend for £25.

Weekend passes will only be available ahead of time, so make sure you don’t miss out by waiting. Tickets for young adults between the ages of 11 and 15 only cost £10 for one day or £15 for both, while kids under 10 get in absolutely free. If you’re a family of two adults and two young adults, you can get a special group pass at £40 for a single day or £65 for the weekend – saving £15! Head over to theticketfactory.com and search for “Tabletop Gaming Live” to get your tickets today. We can’t wait to see you there!

TS ADVANCE TICKAELE

S O: N W O N factory.com icket thet today save Book and

14 You only have 14 hours left to save the Earth in the upcoming Flash Gordon RPG for the Savage Worlds system

1949

KNOW YOUR NUMBERS Cluedo has been inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame. The murder-mystery classic was invented at the end of the war and published a few years later

7

After years of waiting, 7 Wonders has finally come out on iOS and Android

31

Infection at Outpost 31 studio Mondo has revealed its next movie-based games will be Jurassic Park and Fight Club

50%

More than half of new D&D: Fifth Edition players watched someone play the RPG online first

3

Wings of Glory spin-off Tripods & Triplanes will cross the historical dogfighting minis game with The War of the Worlds

REASONS TO SUBSCRIBE

6

• SAVE UP TO 10% PER YEAR • GUARANTEE YOUR FREE GIFT EVERY MONTH • DON’T MISS OUT IF THE SHOPS SELL OUT January 2018

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13/12/2017 14:19

We asked…

What games and conventions are you looking forward to in 2018?

You said…

BACK TO THE HOUSE ON THE HILL

Betrayal Legacy! Jennifer Kaufer

Pandemic Legacy and Risk Legacy designer Rob Daviau returns with Betrayal Legacy

The man who pioneered the legacy genre with Risk Legacy and Pandemic Legacy has revealed his plans to transform another tabletop favourite. Betrayal Legacy is Rob Daviau’s upcoming take on Betrayal at House on the Hill, the 2004 horror adventure game known for its various haunt scenarios and traitor mechanics. Betrayal Legacy will again feature 50 haunts, but each playthrough will be connected in a series of 13 chapters that tells a story over several decades and multiple generations of the same families. That means you might play as one character, only to control their descendant in a later scenario (if they survive, that is). Items found in the spooky manor can also be passed down, gaining extra significance and becoming family heirlooms. Although you can expect the game to feature the same permanent modification and destruction of the

Star Wars: Legion is the obvious one, but Betrayal Legacy has the potential to be an all-time great horror-themed game. Daniel Williams

board, cards and whatnot as other legacy games, Betrayal Legacy is said to be fully replayable after the story is finished, allowing you to experience the haunts you might’ve missed. The game marks a return to Betrayal at House on the Hill for Daviau, more than a decade after he worked on the 2004 game while at Hasbro – the same role that later led him to create Risk Legacy, his first title based on the innovative format. Betrayal Legacy is planned for release toward the end of 2018.

MASTERS OF MAGIC

The latest Magic: The Gathering World Cup has crowned its international victors Japan has bested Poland to take home the latest World Magic Cup from the annual tournament. 2017’s competition saw 73 teams of three from around the globe battle it out in the collectible card game, with China, Italy, Poland, Wales, Slovakia and Germany filling out the top eight rankings. The home nations performed well, with all but Northern Ireland making it through to the second day of the competition. Scotland made history by becoming the only team to always make it to the second day and walked away with a Spirit Award for its display of its national pride with Braveheart-style face paint and kilts. The highest-placed UK team was Wales, which lost to Poland in the day three quarterfinals, placing it fifth overall. The team also picked up a Spirit Award. Next year’s World Magic Cup will be held from December 14th to 16th in Barcelona, Spain.

Fallout: Wasteland Warfare is the game I’m most looking forward to. Also intrigued by Star Wars: Legion. As for shows, always look forward to Salute! Mark Sheppard UK Games Expo gets bigger and better every year, so can’t wait for even more! Also interested to see how Tabletop Gaming Live will be in September before heading to Essen Spiel for only the second time in October. Sam Freeman Forbidden Lands by Fria Ligan. Also the BattleTech game on PC. Dave Thompson PAW 2018 in Feb in Plymouth, Devon. Plus more new Necromunda. Ian Henderson Village Attacks, which looks like being a hoot and has some lovely miniatures. Really hoping the gameplay is as good. Jeff Stokes Shadows of Brimstone: Forbidden Fortress, Time of Legends: Joan of Arc (especially historical mode). Kevin Thomas

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For the latest news from the world of gaming visit tabletopgaming.co.uk/news

S TA R S A G A

PAINTS & TECHNIQUES PAINTS USED

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Lothern Blue Lugganath Orange Macragge Blue Mechanicus Standard Grey Mephiston Red Moot Green Nuln Oil Pallid Wych Flesh Rakarth Flesh Reikland Fleshshade Russ Grey Screamer Pink Squig Orange Steel Legion Drab Sybarite Green Temple Guard Blue Troll Slayer Orange Ulthuan Grey Warpstone Glow Wazdakka Red Xereus Purple Yriel Yellow

ZENITHAL HIGHLIGHTING

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. 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.

1 BASE COLOURS

STAGES

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. Stage 1 is base colours. Base colours are applied using a mix of glazes and flat colours. Stage 2 is applying shading. In this stage we use various washes and glazes to add an element of shading to the models. Stage 3 is highlighting. This stage involves applying a line of your 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. Stage 4 is final highlight. This involves adding a small dot or dash of a colour, generally in the same area as the previous highlight, but focusing on corners or where folds in cloth meet. For hair or fur it involves adding a dot to the tip of each strand. 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. Stage 5 is the final details. This stage involves cleaning up and adding a few spot highlights. This stage also includes painting the base of the model.

3 HIGHLIGHTING

4 FINAL HIGHLIGHT

Blue Horror: Add a highlight to the arm and gun, focusing on the corners and hard edges towards the top of the model. Flayed One Flesh: Apply a line highlight to the face. Fenrisian Blue: Add a fine highlight to the fatigues and cap. Sybarite Green: Apply a coat to the eye lens. Lothern Blue: Mix with one part water and apply on and around the wrist screen and the chest are opposite.

1 BASE COLOURS

Mechanicus Standard Grey: Paint the majority of the armour using this grey. Macragge Blue: Pick out sections of the armour and apply one to two coats until you have an even colour. Khorne Red: Paint the visor, lights and pipes. Steel Legion Drab: Apply a coat over the gun.

3 HIGHLIGHTING

Blue Horror: Apply a light highlight to the screen and the hard edges around it. Ceramite White: Add a spot highlight to the arm and gun. Pallid Wych Flesh: Add a spot highlight to the face. Gauss Blaster Green: Add an edge highlight to the bottom right of the eye lens. Ceramite White & Abaddon Black: With a tiny amount on the tip of your brush, carefully paint the eye. Once dry add a dot of black to the top, centre.

GRAVES

1 BASE COLOURS

2 SHADING

Drakenhof Nightshade: Apply a coat to all the areas previously coated with Dawnstone. Celestra Grey: Apply a layer over the fatigues, leaving only the recesses the base colour. Yriel Yellow: Apply a layer over the gloves and knee pads, leaving the recesses and bottom edges the base colour. Dark Reaper: Apply a line highlight to the cabling and boots. Squig Orange, Xereus Purple & Sybarite Green: Apply orange over the lights on the arms, joints and chest piece and apply the purple and green to the vials found across the model.

5 FINAL DETAILS

Blue Horror: Add a spot highlight to the edges and the lines of both the blue and grey sections of the armour. Lugganath Orange: Apply a spot highlight to the visor and the centre of the lights. Ceramite White: Mix with three parts water and apply a light wash to the wrist generator.

5 FINAL DETAILS

3 HIGHLIGHTING

Fenrisian Grey: Add a line highlight to the mechanical arms, armour and wrist guards, focusing on corners and hard edges. Ulthuan Grey: Apply a layer over the fatigues, leaving a little more of the base and the previous layer showing through. Dorn Yellow: Apply a line highlight to the gloves and knee pads. Russ Grey: Apply a spot highlight to the cabling and boots. Trollslayer Orange & Moot Green: Apply a layer over the lights and vials.

4 FINAL HIGHLIGHT

Celestra Grey: Apply as an edge highlight to all of the grey armour sections. Also apply a spot highlight to the lines added in the previous stage. Russ Grey: Apply as an edge highlight to all of the blue armour sections. Also apply a spot highlight to the lines added in the previous stage. Squig Orange: Add a fine highlight to the visor, focusing towards the corner created by the last stage. Also add a spot highlight to the lights, and a line just in front of each light. Lothern Blue: Make a mx with two parts water and add a very fine line around the centre disc of the generator. Screaming Skull: Add an edge highlight to the gun.

4 FINAL HIGHLIGHT

MONARCH

Blue Horror: Apply a final highlight to the mechanical arms, armour and wrist guards, focusing on the corners. Flayed One Flesh: Apply a line highlight to the face. Ceramite White: Apply a line highlight to the hard edges of the fatigues. Mephiston Red: Apply a coat over the wires on Dr. Koyner’s head. Lothern Blue: Mix with one part water and apply a coat over the eye lenses. Fire Dragon Bright & Gauss Blaster Green: Apply a spot highlight to the lights and the vials.

Pallid Wych Flesh: Apply a spot highlight to the face. Ceramite White: Apply a spot highlight to the mechanical arms, armour and wrist guards. Ceramite White & Abaddon Black: With a tiny amount on the tip of your brush, carefully paint the eye. Once dry, add a dot of black to the top, centre. Blue Horror: Apply a spot highlight to the eye lenses. Lugganath Orange: Apply a spot highlight to the lights.

the

DR. KOYNER

January 2018

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5 FINAL DETAILS

Dawnstone: Apply a basecoat to the mechanical arms, armour and wrist guards. Cadian Fleshtone: Apply a basecoat to the face. Fenrisian Grey: Apply a basecoat to the fatigues. Abaddon Black: Apply a coat to the boots and cabling. Jokearo Orange: Apply a basecoat to the gloves and knee pads.

2 SHADING

Nuln Oil: Apply over the entirety of the model in one even coat. Warpstone Glow: Once the wash is dry make a mix with two parts water and apply to the wrist generator..

Dawnstone: Apply a line highlight to all of the grey armour sections. Also, with very little paint on the brush, apply small dashes across the armour surface. Alaitoc Blue: Apply a line highlight to all of the blue armour sections. Again, with very little paint on the brush, apply small dashes across the armour surface. Wazdakka Red: Apply a highlight to the top and hard edges of the visor, over the lights and along the piping. Baneblade Brown: Apply a line highlight to the gun. Temple Guard Blue: Mix with two parts water and lightly apply within the centre ring of the wrist generator.

Kislev Flesh: Add a layer to the face, leaving the recesses dark. Ulthuan Grey: Apply a spot highlight to the armour, focusing on corners and where the lines from the previous stage meet the edge of the armour. Russ Grey: Apply a line highlight to the fatigues and cap. Fenrisian Grey: Apply a layer over the arm and gun, focusing towards one corner on each section and the edges.

Cadian Fleshtone: Apply one to two light coats to the face until you have an even colour. Abaddon Black: Mix with two parts water and apply a good coat over all of the armour and fatigues. Dawnstone: Apply a basecoat to the arm and gun.

2 SHADING

Drakenhof Nightshade: Apply across the arm, gun and face. Dark Reaper: Apply a highlight to the folds and hard edges of the fatigues and the cap. Dawnstone: Apply a line highlight to the armour sections. Also, with very little paint on the brush, apply small dashes across the armour surface.

ED

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Abaddon Black Agrax Earthshade Alaitoc Blue Baneblade Brown Blood for the Blood God Bloodletter Blue Horror Bugmans Glow Cadian Fleshtone Celestra Grey Ceramite White Dark Reaper Dawnstone Dorn Yellow Drakenhof Nightshade Fenrisian Grey Flayed One Flesh Gauss Blaster Green Genestealer Purple Jokearo Orange Khorne Red Kislev Flesh

I S CHO

AZUL

More fun than tiling your bathroom! Designer: Michael Kiesling | Artist:

I

t was only a matter of time before someone took term ‘tile-laying’ literally and designed a game about – you guessed it – laying down tiles. Azul embraces this prosaic premise and takes it to a wonderfully colourful place, delivering ambitious gameplay on its way. ‘Azul’ – Spanish and Portuguese for 'blue' – comes from the word ‘azulejos’, decorative tiles used by Portuguese monarch Manuel I. This sets up the game, giving players some background information to justify tiling walls – beyond this, though, the theme is entirely window dressing. This is fairly insignificant as, at its heart, Azul is a quick abstract game with beautifully-made tiles. At a first glance, it might seem that there are a lot of luck elements within the game. After the initial random drawing of tiles out of a bag, however, the game becomes pure strategy. Players can collect tiles of the same colour from one of the plates, moving remaining tiles to the centre. Alternatively, they can also pick from the centre, once at least one tile has been moved there. Once taken by

62

Chris Quilliams

WHAT’S IN THE BOX?

◗ 100 resin tiles ◗ Four player boards ◗ Nine factory displays ◗ First player marker ◗ Linen bag

30-45m

2-4

8+

£40

players a single point. Put tiles adjacent to each other instead and you'll score one point for each tile in a horizontal and vertical row attached to the newly-placed tile. This means that points can rack up quite fast with thoughtful sequence of placements. It also eliminates a possibility of a runaway winner, because one cleverly added tile to the wall can bring in enough points to catch up, even in the last round. Winning in Azul depends entirely on the player and the set of decisions they make during the game. This is not to say that Azul lacks player interaction and opponents cannot influence each other’s moves. In the drafting stage of the game it is quite easy to steal tiles form under an opponent’s nose or, alternatively, leave them with tiles they do not want. This confrontation is most pronounced in a two-player game, where Azul turns into a tense chesslike game of push-and-pull between the players. Despite the simplicity of its mechanics, Azul’s ’s rules can feel fiddly and confusing, especially with its scoring. Azul is the type of game that will ‘click’ after playing it once, and the second time going players will make more strategic and betterinformed decisions. Luckily, one game of Azul,, even with four people, lasts about half an hour, so it is very easy to play just one more.Taking its cues from Azul is everything one would violent revenge movies want from an abstract game; it lookslike Kill Bill and Oldboy, instantly beautiful on the Vengeance puts players table in the and its gameplay is challenging blood-soake d boots of characters and addictive. The game is hunting really good at rewarding players for their down those that have done them wrong thoughtful moves and placements, in order to set them right. For and, despite one minor luck karmic justice. element, there is a real breadth And victory of points, natch choice and decisions to be made throughout the game. Words by Matt Jarvis ALEX SONECHKINA

the player, the tiles are moved to the ‘pattern lines’. Already, this simple action of picking up tiles and placing them on the player mat has a myriad of possible tactical decisions. Players might take a risk and discard several tiles to the middle, in the hope that enough tiles of the same colour will accumulate by the time the turn returns to them, allowing them to pick up a lot of them at the same time – but there's always the chance their opponents might get those tiles ahead of them. The order in which the tiles are transferred to the ‘pattern lines’ is important, too. Which colour is best to build first? Which colours are other players going for? Which combinations need to be picked up to avoid excess tiles WE SAY going to the ‘floor line’ and hence Breathtakingly beautiful and tactically earning a player minus points? exciting, Azul will be a great addition The scoring part of Azul is equally to any board game shelf. While its tactical. Transferring one tile from premise is seemingly mundane, this the pattern line to the ‘wall’ earns is a game unlike any other.

A DISH SERVEDBEST ROLLED

TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… SAGRADA

Azul has fewer moving parts than Sagrada, , but its drafting and tile-laying mechanics are just as strong and the visuals are equally gorgeous.

January 2018

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06/12/2017 09:11

FIRST TURN

JAMEY STEGMAIER The man behind strategy hit Scythe and last year’s Charterstone mulls over the game that started it all: 2013’s winemaking, worker-placing Viticulture Interview by Dan Jolin

BACKGROUND “I have been designing games as a fun hobby since I was a little kid. But it wasn’t until I was midway through my second career – as a director of operations at an oncampus facility – that I started on Viticulture. Kickstarter was a big inspiration; when I started to see board game projects on it, it clicked that maybe I could make something that people would want.”

COMPONENTS “When I’m designing a game and I play another game for the first time, it will often influence me. If I recall correctly, at the time I started designing Viticulture I got Fresco for Christmas. So that had an immediate impact, in that it has a ‘wake up’ track very similar to Viticulture’s. I also played Stone Age around that time, too, and that’s when I thought, ‘Oh, I really love the worker-placement thing. Let me see if that’s a good fit for Viticulture’. Before that, it was more of a card game.”

OBJECT “I wanted to design a game I thought would appeal to gamers, and also appeal to non-gamers who just happen to love wine. Though that didn’t end up being the case. It ended up much more appealing to gamers… and gamers who like wine. Winemaking just came to mind as one of these things we tend to romanticise. Like farming. It’s kind of odd that we romanticise that, because I think very few people actually want to go out and work on a farm. But it somehow works as a romanticised idea in board games. And wine, I thought, elevated that idea a little bit.”

SETUP “The game was much more spreadsheety early on. I was trying to simulate too many things. I had weather factoring into the value of the grapes. I had soil types that would impact on how good the grapes were. And in your cellar, where right now you just age wine sequentially, every type

of wine had a different numerical system; so some wine might get much more valuable the longer it ages, while other wine might de-value as it ages. And it wasn’t fun. So over time I simplified those things and focused more on fun and function.”

HOW TO PLAY “In Viticulture you are one of potentially up to six players who are running a vineyard. You build buildings to expand your vineyard, you plant vines, you accept wine orders and you’re trying to fulfil those wine orders. Vineyard tours, and tasting, are a big part of the industry, so I wanted to capture that element, too. Not that I’m a ‘wine person’. I’m more of a beer drinker, myself. But I did a lot of research!”

I’m more of a beer drinker, myself. But I did a lot of research!

END OF THE GAME “I never really knew what would come out of Viticulture. I hoped that people would play it. What I didn’t imagine was that it would become an evergreen game for Stonemaier. We go through three or four printings a year, especially since the Essential Edition came out. A very special moment was when Uwe Rosenberg emailed me and said he enjoyed playing it. And then for me to actually work with him, on designing the Moor Visitors expansion, was incredible.”

STRATEGY TIPS “I severely underestimated the value of blind playtesting. That’s when the designer or publisher sends files of the game to people to playtest when they’re not there. So the designer doesn’t help teach the game, or answer questions. And you usually get some incredible feedback by doing this. With Viticulture, most of the blind playtesting came during the Kickstarter campaign, which is much later than it needs to be done. So that was a big takeaway for me, and a big thing I advocate to other designers.”

Hosting visitors at your vineyard opens up strategic paths during the game

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DUNGEONS & DRAGONS

Let’s get this one out the way first, shall we? Dungeons & Dragons is the obvious choice, but it’s the obvious choice for a reason. Flexible, simple to get to grips with and backed up by more than four decades of supplements and adventures, the world’s biggest RPG has never been better or easier to get into for newcomers thanks to its fantastic fifth edition and a slew of new digital tools to help first-time heroes jump straight in. Play if you like: Fantasy, magic, never being short of new quests, Satan (just kidding)

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CYBERPUNK

First released in the late ‘80s at the height of the gritty sci-fi sub-genre rooted in sex, drugs and (virtual) rock ‘n’ roll, Cyberpunk was a shot of adrenaline wired directly into players’ nerves. Among the diverse characters players can create are hackers and mercenaries able to augment themselves with advanced tech – although the blurring of lines between human and machine often plays into the drama, especially as the combat sticks to a realistic approach that means characters remain vulnerable to a single bullet. The original game was set in 2013, but later editions advanced the setting to 2020 and then 2030 as life caught up with art. As rich and rewarding as a Philip K. Dick story, Cyberpunk might well be the coolest game on this list – or indeed on the tabletop. Play if you like: Leather jackets, Blade Runner, William Gibson novels

OF THE BEST

ROLEPLAYING GAMES

Whether your alter-ego is a hapless bank robber, doomed investigator of the paranormal or tech-obsessed hacker, there’s an RPG out there for you. Here are ten titles you shouldn’t pass up the chance to play Picked by Matt Jarvis

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FIASCO

In every roleplaying campaign, things inevitably go awry. There are few games, however, where accidents and mishaps aren’t just part of the action – they are the action. Fiasco is inspired by tales about hapless criminals, capturing the black comedy and drama of films like Fargo in about the same amount of time as a movie without the need for a GM. There’s no preparation needed and the action is dictated by little more than imagination and six-sided dice, making it a great way for those looking for a first taste of roleplaying to have fun. Play if you like: Screwing up without worrying about it, not having a GM, the Coen brothers

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ADVENTURES IN MIDDLE-EARTH

Although you’ll need Dungeons & Dragons’ fifth edition to use this Lord of the Rings-inspired set of books (earlier RPG The One Ring is a standalone option), there’s probably no better choice if you’re a diehard fan of Tolkien’s momentous fantasy series. Set just after The Hobbit, Adventures in Middle-earth’s Player’s Guide provides all the rules needed to create characters rooted in the lore of the world, while the various supplements bring even more races, creatures and locations to your campaign. There are several other changes to D&D’s formula too, swapping alignment for corruption (all players are good) and introducing extra tips for journeys and advice on forming your own fellowship, but combat and much of the D&D foundation remains the same, making it just as easy to get started. Play if you like: Tolkien, D&D, being a goodie, hairy feet, the precioussss

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CALL OF CTHULHU

The ultimate horror RPG, Call of Cthulhu is a stone-cold classic of the tabletop. Set in the world of terrifying cosmic monsters and murderous occultists created by H.P. Lovecraft, Call of Cthulhu differs from so many roleplaying games by making players’ investigators physically and psychologically fragile as they delve into the forbidden knowledge of the unknown. Characters don’t have classes; instead, they’re just like regular humans with occupations and particular skills trying (often in vain) to stop the world’s destruction. Often this means that players spend hours attempting to solve a mystery only to end up dead, insane or worse, but Call of Cthulhu makes failure so fun it’s easy to see why it continues to be so popular more than 30 years after it debuted. The most recent seventh edition fixes many of the issues of older versions, particularly surrounding combat, and there’s plenty of spin-offs and supplements available for fans, from the comic book-like Pulp Cthulhu to the Arkham Horror board games inspired by the original RPG. Play if you like: Scary movies, Lovecraft, mysteries, going insane (it’s more fun than it sounds)

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GURPS

The Generic Universal RolePlaying System is one of the most versatile RPGs around, offering a flexible set of rules that can be used to roleplay in pretty much any setting or genre you can think of. Characters are defined with a set of basic traits and then a set of advantages and disadvantages that help to give them realism and balance – for instance, a particularly clever character might also have a drinking problem. GURPS might require a little more effort to get going than some of the other entries on this list because of the scope and complexity of its one-size-fits-all approach, but if you’re looking for a single game that could be used for everything from a gunslinging cowboy adventure to a planet-hopping space opera, it’s got you covered. Play if you like: Thinking of ideas that others don’t have, playing exactly the way you want to, literally anything

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SHADOWRUN

Combining the advanced tech of sci-fi with the magical wonder of fantasy, Shadowrun takes place in a world that has been inhabited by mythological creatures, leading to humans giving birth to beings such as elves, dwarves and more or transforming into orks and trolls. There’s often a cyberpunk edge to the action, with underground hackers working together to break into megacorporations – although sometimes they’re simply working for a rival company. Shadowrun’s incredible setting has been the source of endless inspiration for players and creators alike, spawning dozens of novels, other games and more – so if you’re hooked, there’s no shortage of ways to dive even deeper into the world. Play if you like: Fantasy and sci-fi together, Android: Netrunner, cyberpunk

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NUMENERA

Set on our Earth, but in a far-flung future approximately a billion years from now (so, a while), Monte Cook’s scifi creation boasts a captivating setting and refined d20-powered gameplay that has quickly made it a modern smash hit. Players’ characters are created using a simple system that uses a single sentence to outline their personality, background and skills before heading out into the Ninth World and discovering its mixture of fantasy tropes filtered through imaginative science-fiction. After inspiring everything from a video game and short film to a series of novels and other board games, a sequel to the game is planned for release later this year, but it’s still well worth revisiting the original. Play if you like: Exploring strange but familiar worlds, Clarke’s Third Law, unconventional fantasy

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PATHFINDER

Based on the third edition rules of Dungeons & Dragons (and therefore backwards compatible with many of its supplements), Pathfinder was originally designed as a successor to the roleplaying favourite but quickly forged its own path with a unique approach to character creation, class progression and combat that saw it gather a massive following itself. The game has an essentially active community thanks to the Pathfinder Society and Adventure Path, a series of campaigns released as six monthly episodes. Pathfinder was followed up with a sci-fi sequel, Starfinder, last year, which takes place in the same expansive universe and adds in rules for spaceship dogfights and more. Play if you like: D&D (but not quite), episodic storytelling, sticking with one character for a long time

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VAMPIRE

Flipping the typical RPG setup, in Vampire players are the monsters, embodying the undead personalities of blood-sucking kindred in the moody, atmospheric World of Darkness that would go on to serve as the backdrop to RPGs based on other classic horror creatures such as Werewolf, Mummy, Demon and Wraith. Vampire moves away from many of the clichés of vampire stories, exploring the idea of a civilisation of clashing vampire clans hidden in modern-day cities. Both a ‘classic’ game – The Masquerade – and updated sequel The Requiem are still available, with a fifth edition of The Masquerade due out early this year and introducing a focus on ‘you are what you eat’ mechanics. Play if you like: Nosferatu, darkness, The Cure

tabletopgaming.co.uk

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Role Call The start of a new year means a beginning for both new games and fresh takes on older roleplaying classics

Words by John Dodd

GENESYS CORE RULEBOOK

Genesys is Fantasy Flight’s new foray into roleplaying games. It’s not a single large setting, but five smaller ones and, while the rules require a specialist set of dice, the mechanics promise to allow a greater degree of freedom to work within the worlds provided. In the manner of Steve Jackson’s GURPS before it, the core book is a single ruleset to set you on the path, with no doubt with many expansions to follow. Fantasy Flight | £35

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WORLD WAR CTHULHU: OUR AMERICAN COUSINS

The 1970s were a decade of revolution, both on home soil and abroad, and it is into the colonies that World War Cthulhu: Cold War now ventures. This book details intelligence agencies and coverups, and contains a full guide on how to create American investigators for WWC. It also contains a complete adventure designed for characters made with the book and a series of NPCs to use. Cubicle 7 | £17

UNMASKED

From the ‘70s to the ‘80s, and a world very dissimilar from the recent Tales from the Loop RPG set in the decade. Unmasked is the latest offering using the Cypher system first seen in Numenera and features a world where the players are teens who don masks in the evening to fight as their superpowered alteregos. With a full setting and all-new abilities to add to your other Cypher games, it promises to be a very dark future. Monte Cook | £35

CONAN THE MERCENARY

The latest offering from Modiphius covers the times when Conan was a sellsword. Players are given the chance to work as a part of the mercenary companies, as well as knowing where to find work as a mercenary, the countries that have the most need for them and the enemies that they are often hired to fight. The book also includes rules for mass battles and the tactics of mercenaries. Modiphius | £10

CAPHARNAÜM The upcoming English translation of the French game Capharnaüm: The Tales of the DragonMarked. A world not unlike the original Arabian Nights, but with more in common with the Exalted universe, players live vicariously as paragons of the gods in the unending sun of a land in chaos. Due in the first quarter of 2018, and with a series of adventures already planned, this will be one to watch.

Mindjammer Press | £30

tabletopgaming.co.uk

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All the

Jahres Replaying the winners of the Spiel des Jahres so you don’t have to Words and pictures by James Wallis

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CAFÉ INTERNATIONAL

hen was the last time you saw someone smoking on the cover of a board game? How about two people smoking? How about on the cover of a game published by Mattel, the home of Barbie and Fisher-Price? Café International is that game. In the late 1980s Mattel Germany had made a big push into the booming board game market, working with premier-league designers to produce a range of familyfriendly titles. ‘Family-friendly’ is a relative term; Mattel’s offerings included Till Eulenspiegel, Eulenspiegel a game based on a series of folktales about a character who mostly does enormous shits, and Suppenkasper, Suppenkasper a trick-forcing game about building meals and making other players eat them, which includes a laxatives card – more shitting – and which you win by being closest to the ideal weight when another player dies of anorexia or explodes from overeating. I’m not trying to explain or justify these games, I’m just noting that they exist and were published by Mattel. You may never look at a Barbie the same way again.

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Year of win: 1989 Designer: Rudi Hoffmann Number of players: 2-4 Playing time: 45-60 minutes Worthy winner? As a game, sure. As a cultural artefact, not so much Worth playing now? Dated but still fun Availability: Still in print in Germany, from Amigo Price: £25

And then Café International won the Spiel des Jahres. Café International is an altogether more tasteful affair, or so you might think. A tile-placing game of seating diners at a cosmopolitan restaurant, it was the brainchild of veteran designer Rudi Hoffman, who had been producing games since the 1960s, and was a forerunner of a style of tile-based mechanics that 11 years later would evolve into Carcassonne Carcassonne. There’s a restaurant with 24 tables and a bar in the middle. For reasons that are unclear each table may only be occupied by people of a certain nationality, and if you were wondering at what point in the 20th century Germany got over the stigma of the racial segregation imposed by the Nazis, evidently by 1989 they were just fine with it. What’s more, each table can only be occupied by mixed couples or groups – no singletons or single-sex gatherings here – and a table of four must be two men and two women. Your job is to use the five tiles in your hand to fill as much of the restaurant as possible, two tiles at a time. You score for each tile, with scores that increase the more

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If a game was released with these kind of images today social media would have a meltdown. people there are at a table, and double if they’re all of the same nationality. Because, you see, some of the tables have chairs that overlap with other tables: the English (it says ‘England’ not ‘Britain’ or ‘UK’) must share their space with Africans, Chinese, Spaniards and Italians. It’s not a roleplaying game, but roleplaying some of the conversations that might ensue between people forced onto the same tables does give the game an interesting new dimension. Theoretically it’s possible to fill the board completely, but in practice some tiles soon become unplayable, and that’s where the bar in the middle comes in. It has 20 seats. Putting otherwise unplayable tiles on the first five will actually earn you points, but the numbers get increasingly negative after that. Add an interesting twist that reduces your hand size by one every time you complete a table of four diners from the same country, and some clever stuff with jokers, and you’ve got an interesting, engaging and pleasantly unpredictable game. There are two problems with Café International. The first is one that I’ve mentioned before: the Spiel des Jahres is an

award for family games, and therefore some of its winners lack the tactical depth that an older, more hobbyist crowd would expect. Café International is one of those titles. The small hand size makes it hard to think tactically more than a turn ahead, and the fact that each player is supposed to keep their tiles face-up removes any element of mystery from the gameplay. It’s fun to play, and an enjoyable mental workout, but it feels more like a competitive puzzle than a regular game. In 1989 this was groundbreaking stuff, but it’s not aged well. The other problem is the tiles that represent the diners of the 12 nations. Here we learn a lot about the way Germans stereotyped the world in 1989, and if the gameplay feels dated then hold onto your hair – we’re only getting started. The tiles show pictures of the diners, male and female. A lot of them are what you might expect: Americans have big hats or big hair; the English have a bowler and a pipe, or a Lady Di haircut and an overbite. Generally the white European people come out of it okay. However, those who are African (thick lips, wide grins) or Chinese (slit-eyed and bucktoothed) are less fortunate.

It’s not screamingly offensive, and certainly wasn’t intended to be. But it is offensive, and if a game was released with these kind of images today then your social media platform of choice would have a meltdown. Café International is an artefact of its time in more ways than just its game design, and that time was early 1989. The Soviet bloc still existed, Berlin would still be divided by a wall for another few months and national attitudes were all about us-and-them. All the same, I’m pretty sure that if I’d been writing this review in 1989, I’d still have called out this art for its casual racism. It’s a shame. There’s a lot to like in Café International. It’s not great with two players, but it’s a clever melding of puzzle and theme, not quite like anything else. The gameplay is about how we should be able to find ways to share the same space despite our differences. But its graphic design anchors it firmly at the end of a strange, troubled decade, and perhaps it should have stayed there. Next month: We look at Klaus Teuber’s Adel Verpflichtet, the least pronounceable and most underrated Spiel des Jahres winner

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THE SCI-FI ADVENTURE BOARD GAME FOR 1-5 PLAYERS

Featuring strong story-telling elements and immersive game scenarios, Star Saga: The Eiras Contract will see players guide a team of mercenaries on a mission to retrieve stolen technology from a highly guarded research facility deep beneath the surface of the planet Eiras.

www.manticgames.com

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my favourite game

JASON THOMPSON

The quick-draw creator of Mangaka and Cartooner explains why Cosmic Encounter is out of this world

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osmic Encounter, the world’s greatest science-fiction board game, is now more than 40 years old, but it doesn’t look it. For a game that was conceived in 1972 and published in 1977, when tactical wargames and their Gygaxian spawn ruled geek culture, Cosmic Encounter feels like an ancient alien, a visitor from some advanced civilisation bearing gaming insights that wouldn’t become commonplace for 30 years. It’s the execution, not some high concept, that makes Cosmic Encounter so great. “Alien races compete for territory by taking over each other’s planets” could have been the pitch for any 1970s wargame. Even as late as 1988 Avalon Hill was still making crusty sci-fi games like Merchant of Venus, with preset maps, dice-based subsystems and hundreds of unique tokens; in contrast, Cosmic Encounter is a triumph of abstraction and minimalism. Each player’s starting territory consists of an identical star system with five identical planets. The territories slot together in a modular way, gathered around the central repository for dead tokens: the warp. Each planet starts with four identical tokens, which represent your troops, and the cone (a pointer) that represents where your troops are headed in any given round. Combat is basic. Each player has a hand of numbered cards and, when you fight, each side plays a card facedown. Flip them over: the player with the higher number, plus the number of tokens in combat, wins. (Here comes the diplomatic element: you can send foreign troops/tokens to assist your friends.) It’s a bluffing game, like poker: should you commit your best card to the battle, or will you end up wasting a 40 while your opponent throws the fight with a -5? Of course, if they’ve got allies when they play that -5, sending their trusting friends screaming to their deaths, grudges will be held. Win five fights, conquer five planets and you win. What makes this simple foundation work is that Cosmic (as we called it when I played it in school) is one of the first examples of an exceptions-based rules system. Weird cards tweak the gameplay in countless ways, from compromise cards (you lose the battle, even against a -5, but can draw consolation cards from your opponent’s hand) to multiplier cards and special cards which initiate a non-violent deal between players or have other strange effects. The real twist is alien races. At the start of the game each player chooses or randomly draws an alien card, which gives you a unique special power for the entire game. For example, the sorcerer can choose to switch attack cards with their opponent, after they’re chosen but before they’re flipped face-up. The Warpish adds the

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total number of dead tokens – everyone’s dead tokens – to all its attacks. To fight the Warpish, you really need an ally like the healer, who brings tokens back from the dead. Or the zombie, who never dies; its defeated tokens just shamble to other planets and regroup. The trader can trade hands with an opponent, the plant can copy and accumulate other players’ powers, the terrorist booby-traps planets so they explode… The base set of Fantasy Flight’s 2008 Cosmic Encounter (the most recent edition) has 50 alien powers; there’s nearly 200 if you add all the expansions, and each combination of dueling aliens is a unique game. Like your class in Dungeons & Dragons Dragons, your alien race in Cosmic determines your strategy and even your personality if you choose to roleplay. Like characters in a good fighting game, the aliens are asymmetrical, varying in complexity and strength, from the awesome virus (multiply your tokens by the value of your attack card, instead of adding it) to the questionable worm (move your tokens around between your planets, like they’re burrowing – I think? I still don’t understand it). While there’s no blatantly useless prank aliens, the designers of Cosmic understand that a lot of fun is worth sacrificing a little balance. In northern California coffee shops in the 1990s, my friends and I house-ruled it and played games with two or three alien powers each, just to see what amazing combos we could pull off. Cosmic’s sense of escalating chaos inspired the design of my own games, Mangaka and Cartooner Cartooner, in the sense that strange, unexpected card interactions are a fun thing to be desired. From its simple, clean, primary-colored components and tokens, to its delightfully goofy, bug-eyed aliens, Cosmic Encounter is a delight to look at. Much more importantly, it’s a delight to play. The modularity of the rules makes it easy to simplify it or make it more complex by taking out certain aliens and classes of cards. Each time I play it I marvel at how the designers knew what to put in and what to leave out, what to leave to player choice and what to randomise. (How much playtesting did it take for the designers to decide that players shouldn’t be able to choose who they fight each round, so people can’t gang up on the weakest player and wipe them out of the game?) The first edition of Cosmic is subtitled ““A A Science Fiction Game for Everyone”. It really is. Some life forms, like some games, are so perfect they don’t need to evolve.

The designers understand that a lot of fun is worth sacrificing a little balance.

tabletopgaming.co.uk

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NUCLEAR WINNER The irradiated America and mutated inhabitants of Fallout come to life in Wasteland Warfare, a miniatures game that embraces the roleplaying core of the series with its story-focused take on wargaming. Chris Birch leads us on a tour of the post-apocalypse Words and photographs by Matt Jarvis

tabletopgaming.co.uk

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“War. War never changes.”

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hese evocative four words have served as the opening for all four of the main instalments in the Fallout series, starting with the 1997 debut of the postapocalyptic roleplaying video game. When it comes to Fallout itself, however, things have changed drastically since its days of 2D turn-based strategy on the PC, with 2008’s Fallout 3 turning the game into a real-time first-person roleplaying shooter. Fallout 3 went on to sell more than 12 million copies across consoles and PC – the same number of copies shipped in the first 24 hours of its successor, 2015’s Fallout 4. The series’ latest transformation may be its biggest in a decade, as it swaps pixels for plastic. Fallout: Wasteland Warfare finally brings the setting of an America decimated by nuclear war to the tabletop in the form of a miniatures wargame. While its heavilyarmoured Brotherhood of Steel knights may recall space marines and its super mutants have a similar green hue and bulky brute force to orks, Wasteland Warfare is far more than just simple fan service or another two-apenny sci-fi miniatures effort, paying ample homage to

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Fallout’s roleplaying and strategy origins. The result is a wargame with a tale to tell that doesn’t shy away from layering in aspects of roleplaying and storytelling over its dice-driven combat. “I’m sure a lot of people will just buy it for the minis to collect, but we’re not just trying to make a dumbeddown game, which would be very tempting,” explains Chris Birch, founder of UK studio and Wasteland Warfare publisher Modiphius. “I believe in making really great experiences.” Fallout’s arrival on the tabletop could be considered a return of sorts. The original PC game was initially designed based on Steve Jackson’s flexible pen-andpaper roleplaying system GURPS but was eventually forced to drop the framework for reasons that remain disputed to this day. In the place of GURPS, developer Interplay created the SPECIAL system, which based characters’ combat proficiency, conversational tact and more on seven attributes: strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility and luck. Just as it has done for all of the video games to date, SPECIAL lies at the foundation of Wasteland Warfare, influencing the stats of each unit as they do battle in the irradiated ruins of cities or abandoned tunnels of underground nuclear bunkers – the series’ iconic

ABOVE A Brotherhood of Steel knight and two initiates prepare for battle RIGHT One of the knights clad in the iconic T-60 power armour

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FA L L O U T: WA S T E L A N D WA R FA R E

vaults. The system’s all-encompassing dilution of each character’s mental and physical abilities means that, in some ways, skirmishes become more like dungeons in an RPG. One turn, a character might be engaged in a gun battle; another could find them bartering for information, searching for items or taking control of a remote turret or robot. “Every character has SPECIAL stats, so it means you’ve got a lot more flexibility with stuff you can do with scenarios,” Birch says. “You might have to interact with someone using your charisma, you

might have to use your strength to break open a door, you might have to hack a piece of equipment. It’s another level above the normal wargame. Maybe it’s more of an adventure game.” If the similarities with an RPG weren’t strong enough, Wasteland Warfare employs a dice pool that strays away from the familiar six-sided cubes so often used in wargames, including a d20 and five pairs of colour-coded d12s – “Weird dice,” Birch jokingly calls them. As well as traditional number checks for accuracy and armour, the custom dice include symbols for bonus damage, armour penetration and the activation of special abilities with results showing the series’ Nuka-Cola drink bottles. The dice tie into each unit’s distinctive SPECIAL stats in a unique way that reflects their differing skills – a human might have their overall hit points dictated by their ability to dodge with agility, while a tougher muscled mutant might shake off attacks using endurance instead. The scores affect characters’ effectiveness with different types of weapon, too, making mutants formidable up close while Brotherhood of Steel soldiers excel at longer range. “Super mutants can’t hack doors because of their big hands,” Birch laughs. Adding to the streamlined wargame mechanics is a set of similarly colour-coded movement and range rulers (both the dice and the rulers feature symbology for use by colourblind players). Particular weapons gain bonus damage dice and other effects at different ranges, neatly decoded by weapon cards attached to each character’s main reference sheet. These cards bring into the fold a reimagining of VATS, the slow-motion targeting system introduced in Fallout 3 that allowed players of the video game to effectively pause the action and target specific areas of an opponent’s body to incapacitate limbs or deal critical damage. In Wasteland Warfare, certain weapons can cause ongoing negative effects to enemies when triggered by the right roll. The rolls go beyond combat, too, heightening the feeling of exploration and survival in the nuclear wilderness. “There can be pools of radiation that might give you radiation damage,” explains Birch. “You might search a container and find out that it’s radioactive when you open it, which will give you a radioactive attack. There are traps; you might find a trapped box or Nuka-Cola machine. There’s different things to search like consoles and vending machines – all the classic stuff from Fallout. We’ve even got the little terrible radiation shelters; the really mad radiation shelters that really weren’t very good and you keep finding skeletons inside them.”

WRITTEN BY THE WINNERS The narrative focus of the missions is reflected by an extensive campaign mode inspired – at least to begin with – by the stories of the last two numbered entries

tabletopgaming.co.uk

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in the series (2010’s non-direct sequel Fallout: New Vegas is seemingly skipped over). These scenarios can be tackled with two players taking control of either side of the encounter, or in a single-player mode that uses AI cards to control the moves of the enemies and ensure they’re engaging with the varying objectives on the map. As well as the five scripted narrative missions in the core box, there are also five solo-centric scenarios, plus five tutorial chapters. “You can play solo; a lot of wargamers don’t get round to see all their friends,” Birch confirms. “It’s got a really fun solo play side to it, you can just go and explore the wasteland. You and your dog.” In classic roleplaying fashion, Wasteland Warfare’s story opens with the player’s ‘sole survivor’ emerging from their vault to find a dog caught in a trap. It turns out to be a trap laid by super mutants, who return to check their catch and decide that the human would make for a better snack. Winning the skirmish unlocks canine companion Dogmeat for the survivor, in the first of several branching moments in the campaign that lead to different endings and rewards – in another example mentioned by Birch, the player seeks revenge for a character’s murdered brother, interrogating an enemy leader to potentially discover the real killer, with the speech check’s outcome revealing different cards and plot beats. Making your way through the rest of the story presents the chance to acquire further teammates and improved items and equipment, gradually building up from the survivor and a pistol to a roving band of allies that persist between matches. This includes events such as mercenaries, who could be hired using caps and added to the deck of wasteland event cards revealed during each round, appearing later to take a shot at an enemy. Other cards drawn from a quest deck between scenarios can affect the potential incidents that occur during the following scenario, triggering dangers such as a radroach infestion or radiation storm. “The game is kind of, if you like Mordheim or Necromunda,, it’s more that kind of grow a little crew and develop them, but you can have a big game as well,” Birch says. “It plays up to, like, 30 figures. There’s a lot more narrative to it, a lot of storylines in the

missions. You can just play a normal battle, but it’s very much– I’ve been a big wargamer since I was a kid, so I really wanted to make sure there was a lot more deep storylines to the games, as well.” The sense of storytelling in the Fallout world will extend to the game’s presence at tournaments and other organised play events, with Birch revealing that both standard and narrative-focused competitions will be an option. For those wanting to keep up with the game’s plot, Modiphius plans to release free monthly missions online, punctuated by bigger organised play narrative packs every three to four months. For more generalised battles outside of the story progression, such as one-off skirmishes, the core game includes five more setups that involve less specific objectives. “Where possible we’re using storylines from the game that already exist instead of creating new content,” Birch says. “There’s so many quests and stories for us to work from. Or we can be quite generic, where you’re looking through the ruins of an old atomic power planet for a synth head that contains some secrets. But there’s a storyline that we’re working loosely based around the main quest lines in Fallout 4 and 3.” With such a strong focus on narrative gameplay and character progression, and the rich world and inhabitants of Fallout already established over the course of decades, some players may find themselves wondering why Fallout studio Bethesda passed up the opportunity to produce a full-blown roleplaying game based on the setting.

It’s another level above the normal wargame. Maybe it’s more of an adventure game.

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“They didn’t really want to do a roleplaying game because they know, of anyone, how much work is involved in approving a roleplaying game,” Birch responds. “Luckily, we’ve got a fantastic world to delve into so we don’t have to create anything really. We’re going to be enlarging upon some of the references to other battles and missions to create lots of scenarios. In a sense, if you just take three or four characters onto the battlefield versus a bunch of creatures, you’re almost playing an adventure there. It’s very flexible.”

SETTLE FOR MORE In place of the customisable player-created characters that served as the heroes in the Fallout video games, Wasteland Warfare takes the step of canonising two vault dwellers as the default protagonists of its campaign: female hero Nora and male lead Nate. “Obviously they’re from Fallout 44,” Birch says. “We’re going to do a set of vault dwellers, generic ones. We’re going to work our way through, from Fallout 4, Fallout 3, backwards.” To stop the survivors stealing the spotlight, other characters can be made heroic, unlocking additional abilities to use during an encounter, such as the chance for extra actions, environmental interactions and critical hits. These heroic individuals can subsequently be promoted to leaders, introducing area-of-effect skills that boost allies around them – including characters from previously hostile factions. “You’ll be able to build your force with different allies and mix-and-match,” Birch confirms. “Or if you want, you can just go, ‘I really want a Brotherhood of Steel guy in power armour, I really like that super mutant with a big hammer,

I want to have a survivors and Dogmeat with armour’ – you can just build your own thing, because it’s your world, it’s your game.” Speaking of the fan-favourite hound, there’ll be no shortage of customisation options for those wanting to roam the wasteland with their poochy pal. “It’s probably the single most popular character in the game,” Birch laughs. “There’s various versions of Dogmeat, so you get to play vanilla Dogmeat, or Dogmeat with his goggles and bandana, armoured Dogmeat, that kind of thing.” The character progression is most pronounced in the game’s settlement mode, which sees players improving their individual home base in-between scenarios using caps collected by winning games and searching containers. Building structures and upgrading utilities allows players to keep more and better gear found during missions, which are otherwise potentially

TOP Turrets and other tech, such as robots, found in each environment can be hacked and controlled by players ABOVE There’ll be plenty of scenery sets based on the universe, including Nuka-Cola machines OPPOSITE It’s not easy being green: one of Wasteland Warfare’s super mutants takes aim

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A meeting of metal as a Brotherhood of Steel knight and super mutant clash up close

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discarded as they ‘wear out’. Some of the buildings allow players to choose specific weapons and armour to take into their next battle, while others require the drawing of random cards to represent scavenging the wastes for whatever will do – a better headquarters means more control over your loadout. “You’ll be able to upgrade your settlement in the background, so you’ll be able to buy an armour workbench to give you access to more T-60 armour suits,” Birch explains. “You might get a weapon workbench to get access to better upgrades for your weapons.” While player settlements are tracked on paper by default, it’s not hard to imagine committed fans taking the opportunity to build their own scenery or use some of the pre-built structures being released for the game to render their base in 3D. Whether it exists on paper or in plastic, players can bring their post-apocalyptic home to life by engaging in head-to-head modes that make use of the customisability, including a setup where one player attacks the other’s base. “When you come to build your settlement, if we say, ‘Look, let’s do a 500-cap battle, I’ll attack your settlement,’ you think: ‘Ah, maybe I’ll buy more turrets this time because Chris is always buying loads of mutant hounds which come racing in.’ It’s a bit like doing a tower defence game, where you can try different strategies each time. So you’re not fixed on that one base, you can rebuild your base with your caps.” Players can also work together against the game’s AI, controlling separate factions or the same group of survivors depending on the scale of the encounter.

“You can even play co-op, so you and me could defend our base against the game, which will attack us with a larger force,” Birch summarises. While Wasteland Warfare will feature a narrative focus in both casual matches and tournaments, the option to simply build a force using traditional points will be there, too – so if you want to set out into the wasteland with just two fully kitted-out soldiers or a dozen nimble survivors in little more than their radioactive undies, you can do so. In a break from convention, how much each character, piece of equipment and ability will cost doesn’t come written on the cards. In fact, the space has been left deliberately blank so the inevitable shifting values can be easily adjusted as a result of feedback from the game’s community and tournament scene, with Modiphius planning to update them each month so players can choose whether to write them in or use sleeves to avoid having to correct their components. “They always change,” Birch admits. “We’re just being honest.”

ROOM FOR WAR Wasteland Warfare’s stories recreate the desperate fight for survival in the wilderness between scattered groups of survivors. Introduce more miniatures, though, and the scale of the game can be taken from smaller encounters between a handful of figures to sweeping clashes between dozens of units, with players’ control changing from moving individual models to ordering collected squads around the battlefield. Birch says that the game’s flexible scale was partially inspired by viral YouTube videos featuring mods for

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Fallout’s PC versions, where players are able to spawn in dozens of computer-controlled characters and enemies and watch them duke it out to the death. “Lots of people always do all these videos with, ‘Let’s have 50 deathclaws versus 100 Brotherhood of Steel and see what happens,’” he explains “So people are kind of putting their own little wargames together. I want to be able to do that in real life with the miniatures.” Fallout’s in-universe history is comprised of countless fights between the world’s various factions, so there’s no shortage of opposing forces ready to players to assume control of – and battles from the extensive lore of the universe ready to be recreated. “The obvious factions we’ve got are the raiders, Brotherhood of Steel, The Institute, the super mutants,” Birch says. “We’ve got this kind of generic faction called the ‘survivors’, which is Mama Murphy, Ronnie, Sturges, some Minutemen, Preston Garvey. There will be a Minutemen faction later on. So you could play back in time when the Minutemen were forced [to abandon their Fort Independence base]. There’ll be the Enclave, later on, as well. Then we’re going to work our way through other stuff. There’s lots of little, mini factions. For example, Riley’s Rangers, who are on the good side. So the survivors would have them as an ally. So there’s lots of allied units. There’s lots of neutral units. People like Children of the Atom and stuff like that. “I think a lot of people remember what the video game is like and think, ‘Well, I want to be able to play the battles that you hear about in the game. Like the Battle of Hoover Dam or something,’” he says. “You often hear about battles and go, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to play that and have more troops around you?’ “What we’re trying to do is look at all the behindthe-scenes stories. So, you hear about a battle that took place – we’ll play that battle out. We’re going to have a different branching story that’s still within the universe.” The first three sides in the game will be relatively straightforward – Brotherhood of Steel, super mutants and the survivors – but there are already plans to take Wasteland Warfare in a wilder direction with some of its first expansions. Among these will be rules to turn the world’s creatures and robots, which otherwise primarily appear as environmental elements during encounters, into their own playable factions – including the chance to build an army of fearsome chameleonic deathclaws and mutated crab-like mirelurks, or a legion of assaultrons, protectrons and other custom automatons created with build-it-yourself robot parts. All of this builds towards Birch’s ultimate vision for Wasteland Warfare: a highly adaptable wargame that allows players to play out conflicts great and small in one of the richest post-apocalyptic universes ever created. With the world of Fallout ripe with endless stories to be explored on the tabletop, it looks like Wasteland Warefare is well on its way to find its own place at the end of the world.

FALLING OUT

We played through one of Wasteland Warfare’s early missions. Here’s what happened… The scenario opens with a Brotherhood of Steel knight and couple of initiates that have encountered three super mutants around the Red Rocket gas station. We pick the Brotherhood of Steel side for the gatling laser, which fires five times and reduces armour with every consecutive hit. With an equal number of figures, we roll to decide the first player. It’s the super mutants, which move up into cover behind a pile of junk and the main building. The knight charges up his gatling laser and takes all five shots at the approaching super mutant leader while he’s still exposed. Two shots land, but are stopped by the mutant’s armour. One of the initiates takes a pop at another of the mutants and successfully dishes out a wound thanks to the laser rifle’s special armour-bypassing ability. The Brotherhood hold their ground behind cover. The knight lets off another blast of the gatling laser at the mutant leader, with one single shot of the five dealing a wound despite the cover bonus. As the leader moves out into the open to charge at the knight, an initiate opens fire but misses. His squadmate moves closer to benefit

from the shorter range of his rifle, sinking a shot through one of the mutants’ armour but failing to bring down the giant. A super mutant finally closes the gap, charging into melee with one of the initiates, which gets him a bonus as he swings at the human’s head with his board. Somehow it misses, allowing the soldier’s companion to join the fray and retaliate with his stun baton, stunning the monster – but it hardly matters with his cranium completely turned to mush. He drops down dead. The knight opens fire for a third time at the mutant leader and a lucky series of four hits in a row turns him into a bloody mess. Two down, one to go. The remaining super mutant runs up to the initiates and, after shrugging off a series of knife and baton attacks from the pair, tears right through one of them with a single point-blank shotgun blast thanks to two bonus damage dice. Gulp. With just one hit point left, the mutant survives one more knife attack and takes out the other initiate with another brutal blast. Weakened, the beast finally falls to an attack from the charging knight – but not without leaving his gory mark on the wasteland.

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Stuff of

Dreams A young girl’s toys battle against her nightmares in the latest visionary creation from the designer of Mice & Mystics. Jerry Hawthorne reveals how he turned his love of storybooks and Pixar movies into an emotional adventure to remember

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Words by Matt Jarvis

f literature has Roald Dahl, it could be that gaming has Jerry Hawthorne. The designer’s Mice & Mystics was a dungeon crawler unlike any other, combining the adventuring and dice-throwing of Dungeons & Dragons and HeroQuest with the in-depth story of a children’s novel, contained in its tome of narrative directions that doubled as a kind of artificial paper game master. Players weren’t just characters; they were readers, both passively discovering and actively controlling the action and plot during each of the game’s scenarios, fittingly referred to as ‘chapters’. Just as the work of Dahl, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett never shies away from addressing the darker side of life and fantasy, Hawthorne’s tale of staunch courtiers transformed, The Witches-style, into field mice was full of moments of tension and horror as the group encountered insects, rats and cockroaches now big enough to snuff them out. To say nothing of the game’s greatest threat: the prowling housecat, Brodie. The result was an experience that was grown-up enough in its tone and roleplaying-lite gameplay to keep parents and other older players interested, while still having the simplicity and fairytale feel needed to give kids their first proper taste of gaming. Hawthorne’s next big project stays true to his commitment to storytelling on the tabletop and all-ages approach to design. While Stuffed Fables can in many ways be seen as a student of Mice & Mystics’ philosophies, though, the designer is resolute in pointing out its differences to his best-known work.

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“I approached this as its own separate project,” he says. “It’s a whole new game system that I created so that I could tell stories like this. But the similarities it has with Mice & Mystics are a natural comparison because the game is also a story. I don’t know of any other games out there that really do as heavy storytelling as Mice & Mystics and now Stuffed Fables. You really are playing inside of a storybook.” On this last point, he’s being quite literal. Where Mice & Mystics’ structure felt like a book with chapterstyle scenarios and a connected storyline, Stuffed Fables takes the comparison to its conclusion by combining rules and game board into a single tome that is laid out flat in the centre of the table. Players place their miniature adventurers directly onto the environment, while the opposite page might explain the story, narrative choices or any special rules needed for that particular mission. “The book is really a great innovation because it allows me to tell a much richer story since every page is completely different,” Hawthorne says. “You don’t know what to expect because the information is somewhat hidden from you because it’s in the book form, too. So you’ve gotta play to the point where you can turn that page and find out what happens next. That pageturning kind of dopamine response you get, that’s different than Mice & Mystics, because Mice & Mystics you were always working with that same set of tiles that were arranged in as many creative ways as I could possibly imagine, but you would cross that fairly quickly.”

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STUFFED FABLES

DREAM TEAM Stuffed Fables’ story takes place a world away from the castles and dungeons of Mice & Mystics,, but the fairytale morals and childhood themes remain as strong as ever. Players take on the role of the ‘Stuffies’: stuffed toys tasked with protecting a young girl from nightmares while she sleeps. In the game’s opening, the girl is moved from her crib to a full-size bed for the first time, with her parents using the toys to help calm her nerves. “Stuffed animals are kind of like surrogate parents if you think about it,” Hawthorne explains. “They really exist so that parents can get a good night’s sleep. They give kids something to snuggle and fight away their fears so that parents can sleep and the child can sleep and everybody gets a good night’s rest.” With the magical protection of the crib’s bars gone, the forces of the Nightmare King, an evil presence that takes advantage of children’s disturbed sleep, invade the girl’s room. After a tussle with the minions, the Stuffies end up being sucked into the portal to the nightmare world, which is inhabited by broken and lost toys. Stuffed Fables follows the party as it attempts to help those stranded in the nightmare realm while also fighting off further attacks by the Nightmare King. The story spans seven chapters, each representing a different year in the girl’s life from the age of three until she turns ten. The natural progression of the overarching narrative means that each scenario is based on a fresh confrontation with the Nightmare King as the girl grows up and overcomes the various challenges of getting a good night’s rest.

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ABOVE One of the hero Stuffies, proving the pencil is mightier than the sword BELOW The AdventureBook format uses a storybook as both its rulebook and board

“When you sit down to play one session of Stuffed Fables you’ll be playing through one night in this little girl’s life where you would normally expect her sleep to be troubled,” Hawthorne reiterates. “Those are the nights where the Nightmare King is going to come and those are the nights where mayhem happens. For instance, the second chapter of the book is the night where the players put her to bed for the first time without an overnight diaper, so she’s potty training. That night when the minions arrive they run around the house turning on faucets, making all this water. So you have this little caper where our heroes are running around the house trying to turn off faucets before the little girl wets the bed. That just leads to more and more adventure.” Although the wider saga has a fixed story it wants to tell, players’ actions will be able to influence the outcome of each separate section, resulting in different encounters and even finales depending on what they choice to do. “A play session will be roughly 90 minutes, give or take, because the story is branching – so you might take a different turn in the story that might make the story last a little bit longer,” Hawthorne explains. “You just play through the book; the book just basically guides you right on through. “You’re going to play through the seven stories in the game, and each of them have three possible endings to them. So if you were to play through it again you might have different endings and a different experience. But it is a fairly linear story – there’s just different paths and different tracks you can take to get to the same sort of thing. Once you finish all seven stories, it’ll tell a complete story.”

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LEFT The story takes place over seven years of a young girl’s life BELOW Mice & Mystics and Stuffed Fables designer Jerry Hawthorne

It’s not just the story that players’ choices will impact. The gameplay will be subtly altered as the group completes different objectives and explores the world, unlocking various items and other discoveries that persist between the chapters and can pop up later in the same campaign. “There’s some other elements in the game that kind of change the game,” explains Hawthorne. “So as you play the game some of the events that happen, some of the things you do in the game, will alter the game itself so it changes – in a small way, not in a big overblown way, because everything here is real streamlined and easy to pick up and learn so families can play without the rules getting in the way.” The main way this will occur is through new cards being added to Stuffed Fables’ various different decks. “When you encounter those cards through gameplay in the future you’ll have a different experience because of having seeded those cards into the deck earlier through choices,” Hawthorne clarifies. It’s a system that sounds similar to the evolving card pools of legacy games such as Gloomhaven and Pandemic Legacy, but Hawthorne is quick to point out

that any changes made during a single playthrough will be able to be reset for future campaigns, rather than causing permanent alterations. “Just in a single campaign those cards will be fed into the decks and then, later on, if you wanted to reset the whole thing, each little deck has a card that tells you what goes in it so you can easily reset everything,” he confirms. “It’s done very lightly, it’s not real heavy or rooted heavily in the mechanics or anything. Basically, when you go through the story, it’ll tell you: ‘Oh, you did this? Okay, put this card into your deck.’ So there’s no micro-management or anything like that.”

The book is really a great innovation because it allows me to tell a much richer story.

MICE & DICE Clearly inspired by Hawthorne’s adoration of HeroQuest, Mice & Mystics was a dice-chucker through and through. You threw dice to move. You threw dice to attack and defend. You threw dice to cast spells, use abilities and even level-up. It was a straightforward setup that earned as many admirers for its simplicity and tense excitement as it did detractors for encouraging gameplay so heavily rooted in luck.

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STUFFED FABLES

Ticking Toy Bomb

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re imminent!” "Warning! Warning! System failu 4... 3...” 5... in ct cried the robot. “Self-destru defuse the bot? CHOICE: Do you run or try to 4 spaces. If you run: Move your stuffy form a yellow + If you try to defuse the bot: Per Successful" pair "Re s: a Pas 3. g ty in icul skill test diff n perform he W S: U data. N able O e B dice ar said Robbie and he gave you valu , if no purple at thre the . from melee attack lts dice Remove up to 2 threat red die resu in k bac l used, add 2 to poo ard disc the in ding a track. Put all dice ad n he w r , you of ge end Once per pa that . Fail (or cannot): At the task, change the bag p ce spa ou this gr of a ces spa to 3 . fies within red die of your choice turn, all stuf die to a facing . receive 3 damage

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ABOVE The childhood themes run throughout Stuffed Fables’ story and gameplay OPPOSITE, TOP Players will encounter and battle creatures and characters from the nightmare realm OPPOSITE There are plenty of inventive enemies, such as this doll... crab... pliers... thing

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sehold • Fix

Stuffed Fables doesn’t shy away from Hawthorne’s love of rolling dice. In fact, it ratchets up the element of randomness even further with a second layer of luck, as players pull five colour-coded dice from a blind bag of 35. The colours of the dice dictate what that player can do on their turn – move, attack, use abilities and so on – and are rolled in a similar manner to Mice & Mystics to decide the level of success. “One of the things that I found restrictive after I had designed Mice & Mystics was working within the use of those dice, the custom dice, and working with a limited amount of tiles for telling stories,” Hawthorne recalls. “So when I was creating this game, I tried to create the most open-ended and flexible system possible.” The designer is adamant that combining two random elements doesn’t overdo the reliance on chance – “I like dice and I like luck games, so I’m not afraid of that sort of thing,” he asserts – but adds that there will be ways for players to help recover from less fortunate draws and rolls by swapping dice with their teammates. “We have all these little gizmos in the game that are all about co-operating together by sharing dice and making sure you optimise the way that your team uses all of the dice you have available to you, keeping track of how many dice have been used up and what’s going to be available and what you anticipate pulling out of the bag,” Hawthorne details. “All that stuff really works well, especially with a wide variety of ages playing the game. It’s fun and

pretty intuitive. Once you learn how to play it, it’s not like you’re going to have to go back and relearn how to play each time you sit down to play because it really is a simple and pretty elegant ruleset.” Hawthorne believes that using dice rolls is central to both Mice & Mystics and Stuffed Fables’ appeal to adults and children alike, allowing every player – no matter their experience – to be subject to the same strokes of good fortune and ill fate. “When you’re designing for a wide variety of gaming skill levels and a wide variety of ages, luck is your great leveller; it really evens things out,” he states. “I think that everybody will probably, depending on their luck tolerance, find within this system ways to maximise your capabilities without being too luck-dependent.” That’s not to say that skill won’t play a part. Another major modification from Mice & Mystics is the concept of levelling up, which in the squeaky fantasy game was handled with the ‘cheese system’; specific die results would grant players crumbs of cheese that could be consumed to perform special abilities or level up. Minions had their own cheese wheel, which could trigger extra waves of enemies and advanced the timer for each scenario. Stuffed Fables strips back some of this light roleplaying dressing for a sense of progression that keeps the players right at its centre. “The idea that I’m working with is that because of the way that the dice and stuff work in the game, as you get better at playing the game, you’ll be able to handle

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based on family virtues?’ That’s how I started to design Mice & Mystics, the mechanics behind it.” With the game’s basic feel beginning to take shape, it was another precious moment spent with his children that led Hawthorne to develop the storytelling focus and magical world that would come to define Mice & Mystics as a modern family gaming staple. “My daughter was struggling with reading at the time – she was young and learning how to read and we were really concerned about her,” Hawthorne recalls. “So I thought, ‘Okay, I’m just going to make a game, I’m going to use this family thing because that will draw everyone in my household in, and I’m going to make reading a big part of the game.’ I wanted to break up the reading with game, so that she could have it in smaller chunks. Then I made it about mice, because mice were her favourite thing at the time. So that’s how Mice & Mystics turned out.” As he begun to sketch out his ideas for Stuffed Fables, Hawthorne found himself inspired by another Pixar movie, 2015’s Inside Out, which represented the clashing emotions of a young girl as distinct characters living inside her head – Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust. “You get to watch how emotions work, it’s kind of like a model on how the human emotional spectrum works,” the designer says. “Each of those characters was colour-coded, I noticed, so I thought, ‘Oh wow, wouldn’t this be a cool way to gamify something, to more and more challenges,” Hawthorne says. “So there’s nothing mechanical really; it all basically relies upon the players getting better at co-operating with each other and better at optimising their choices. It’s not really all about getting the best gear or levelling-up or anything like that. There’s nothing really like that in the game; you just level-up basically by becoming better at playing the game.”

CRAWLY

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A FAMILY AFFAIR While its world of adventuring animals aligns closer with classic fantasy such as Dungeons & Dragons, Lord of the Rings or, perhaps most of all, Brian Jacques’ Redwall novels (“I love Redwall!” !” Hawthorne confirms when the comparison is mentioned), Hawthorne recalls that the key inspiration for Mice & Mystics actually came from a place many may not expect – Pixar’s 2004 animated superhero movie, The Incredibles. “What I loved about The Incredibles was that you had this family and they’re superheroes, but they’re a superhero family,” he enthuses. “Each member of that family had a superpower that also kind of matched their typical role in the household; so the father was strong, the mother was flexible, the daughter just wants to disappear and the little boy’s just a handful running around all of the place. I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you could have a co-operative game where a family could work together as a team using their own special powers and accomplish missions that basically were

1-5: RUSH

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LEADER

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At the end of this Minion Tur n, if there are 1 or more crawly car ds in the minion discard pile, add 1 of them to the bottom of the min ion column and place its figure adjacent to this crawly. Do not add a crawly if there are already the same number or more minion s than stuffies in play.

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have this colour-coding and then have each player play something that represents an emotion or something?’ “That morphed into Stuffed Fables, where each of the stuffed animals basically represents an aspect of this little girl’s personality. They’re colour-coded and they work with the different-coloured dice that are in the game.” To reflect each Stuffie’s individual nature and the role they play in the young girl’s psyche, the characters have the ability to re-roll a single colour of dice during the game as an ‘always-on’ talent. “The coloured dice match the character attributes,” explains Hawthorne. “So if you’re playing the little lion, he’s always angry all the time and he’s really good at fighting, so he gets to re-roll the dice that’s connected to fighting: red dice. So he’s much better at combat than the other Stuffies.” More powerful are so-called ‘heart’ abilities, which reinforce the game’s kid-friendly preaching of peace, love and understanding and tie into the wider lore and enchanted wonder of the universe. “Inside each little stuffed animal is a plastic heart that was placed there by the great manufacturer,” Hawthorne narrates. “When all those stuffed animal heroes are in this other world, doing good deeds fills that little heart with love energy, and that love energy is how they power up their special abilities. So we have this sort of system where you are encouraged to be charitable and to help out the needy little broken lost toys in this other world. By doing so, you power up your superpower and become more powerful. It’s all based upon merit.”

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ABOVE Sleep tight – and maybe try not to imagine this gang of nasties under your bed

With a more moralising tone than most board games and its creator’s affinity for creating memorable moments between parents and children (as well as groups of adults absorbed by inventive fantasy), Stuffed Fables – like Mice & Mystics before it – begins to blur the line with the literary and cinematic works inspiring Hawthorne. “I’m a parent and I have a couple of kids at home, so I kind of put a lot of the things that are important to me into my games,” he says. “I just really love getting together with my kids, watching movies and stuff like that, and those ideas come to me in the form of stories that I basically gamify, so that if families want to they can sit down and play through an experience that’s similar to reading a book or seeing a movie.”

GAMES FOR THE SOUL More than half a decade on from Mice & Mystics, Hawthorne is still searching for ways to tell his tales on the tabletop. Stuffed Fables is the latest destination along that journey, but its designer doesn’t see the game as bringing a close to his last tale just yet. If anything, it’s simply a new chapter. “I don’t look at it as an end for Mice & Mystics,” Hawthorne insists. “It might be an evolution. If you’re able to play Mice & Mystics inside of a storybook like this, the variety of experiences would be amazing. I would love to bring this book concept to Mice & Mystics. I think that everybody would respond to that quite well, being able to play inside of a book. It’s really pretty cool.”

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Even Stuffed Fables may prove to be just the middle chapter of Hawthorne’s ongoing hunt for captivating yarns spun through a pattern of play. “I don’t currently have any plans to do a sequel to Stuffed Fables,” he reveals. “I’ve had some people already asking if I’m going to do one where the central character is a little boy so you can get a little boy’s perspective. I have no plans right now for that. I’m more in the moment right now and not trying to plan out too far, because I think that I can create better games if I keep my mind on what I’m working on right now.” Yet, having found the ideal format to mirror his own melding together of gaming and storytelling, Hawthorne is keen to experiment further – perhaps even going beyond the realms of fairytales and childhood. “Once you learn how this game system works, you could pick up and play an AdventureBook game in any setting and the mechanics would have the flexibility to adapt to all of those settings,” he says. “You could be playing a space version of an AdventureBook game or even a dark theme or an adult theme, it doesn’t have to be always about stuffed animals or mice or whatever.” As our conversation draws to a close, Hawthorne begins to tell an anecdote that captures his own

absolute desire – to not only tell stories, but to emotionally move players to the point where the experience of playing his games become stories to be told themselves. “I was on an airplane one time and I was sitting next to a lady and she was reading a book she was almost finished with,” he begins. “On the other side of me was somebody who was doing a sudoku puzzle. The woman finished her book and she leaned back and her eyes got filled with tears and she just clutched the book to her chest. The experience was obviously emotionally moving for her. The other person finished up their sudoku puzzle and they curled up their newspaper and put it away. I thought to myself: ‘A year from now, who’s going to remember this plane flight? Is it going to be the lady who read the book, or is it going to be the person who played the sudoku puzzle?’ Sudoku is a rewarding experience, but can you remember your last sudoku puzzle? Does it stick out in your mind? But you remember the last book you read or the last emotional experience you had, or the last great exciting game that you played. “While both of them bring enjoyment into our lives, I want my games to be more like the books that have an indelible impact on your soul.”

BELOW A valiant teddy and adorable elephant are two of the hero Stuffies players can take control of

THEADORA Versatile: Once per turn, when taking a turn with Theadora, you may swap 1 of your attribute dice for an attribute die in the discard pool.

Resourcefulness: Use this ability when a player rolls attribute dice. That player may re-roll 1 or more of those dice.

Persevere: Choose a stuffy. Remove 1 or more status cards from the chosen stuffy.

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Words of Motivation: Use this ability any time a player draws dice. That player may return all dice just drawn to the bag and redraw.

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H AV E Y O U P L AY E D ?

TERRA MYSTICA Come explore an ever-changing fantasy landscape where a medley of races must adapt the terrain around them and jostle with their neighbours to grow their home – but there’s little room for luck

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o matter how big the fantasy world, it’s inevitable that its inhabitants will eventually begin to rub up against each other. From Tolkien’s tension between elves and dwarves to the interfamilial conflicts of A Song of Ice & Fire, much of fantasy’s greatest drama springs from the classic gripe of not getting along with your neighbours. Terra Mystica places this tension right at its heart, constructing an intense strategy game around the idea of several factions trying to carve out their own place in the world. Players

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Words by Matt Jarvis are able to pick from more than a dozen different races, from mermaids and witches to fakirs and giants, each of which has their own distinct personality and abilities. With luck all but absent from the way players are able to expand their territory and advance their civilisation, Terra Mystica becomes a game of pure strategy and competition between the rival groups – and the players controlling them. The intricate but tight mechanics and depth involved in mastering each of the 14 peoples has led the 2012 title to become one of the most acclaimed strategy board games of all

time – a success story that its recent sci-fi sequel no doubt hopes to repeat.

WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT? Although its denizens drive the action of the game forward, it’s actually the land of Terra Mystica itself that’s the star of the show. You see, the terrain of the world isn’t the most hospitable to begin with. Each of the races starts on one of seven home landscapes – desert, plains, swamp, lake, forest, mountain and wasteland – they’ve already adjusted to survive on, but they’ll need to adapt to take spread their

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rule across more of the land. More specifically, they’ll need to adapt the terrain; each faction is able to terraform an unoccupied space to their home landscape by paying a varying amount of spades depending on the starting type and their unique transformation cycle. To cross and traverse rivers to travel even further across the world, the sides will need to develop their ability to use boats or (literally) build bridges. Once a plot has been made habitable, a faction can build a dwelling on it, which can later be upgraded to a trading house, temple, sanctuary or stronghold to increase their income of coins, power or priests. Victory points are partially awarded for having the largest connected areas on the map and players’ progress along four cult tracks, representing their advancement in the worship of earth, fire, water and air, which can also grant some bonuses at the end of each round.

HOW DO YOU PLAY? Designed by Jens Drogemuller and Helge Ostertag, with help from Agricola, Patchwork and A Feast for Odin mastermind Uwe Rosenberg, Terra Mystica features no direct conflict between players but masters the passive-aggressive competition of the Eurogame genre. Each turn consists of a simple set of actions that quickly gain complexity as the claustrophobic feel of the map takes effect, forcing players to carefully consider every move and the potential benefits it could hand to their rivals. As they say: keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. In Terra Mystica, this has real gameplay benefits. Players can gain extra power when an opponent builds next to their existing structures and it costs more to upgrade a dwelling next to another building, making staying in close proximity to your rivals very beneficial indeed. Placing a group of four structures of the same colour next to each other forms a town, which grants extra victory points, other rewards and the chance to advance to the final space on a cult track – which is only accessible by the first player to do so. Creating sacred structures also presents the chance to collect favour tiles, which boost that side’s standing with a particular cult and might also unlock a special ability. Players can improve up their standing further by utilising a selection of bonus cards selected when moving between rounds, which can gain extra victory points or resources once a player finishes their actions for the turn – with those who pass earlier getting to pick their bonus for the following round first.

Although terraforming spaces and establishing buildings to build up their resources is the core of Terra Mystica, players are aided by several special abilities that increase their capability to conquer the map. Each faction has a special power unlocked once a stronghold has been constructed, allowing them to gather bonus points or changing the standard rules in other interesting ways to propel them towards victory.

NOT ENOUGH SPACE Five years after Terra Mystica was released, a follow-up to the game was announced. Gaia Project takes the terraforming concepts that drive the gameplay and blasts them into outer space, expanding the idea of civilisations looking to spread their presence to an entire galaxy of planets instead of a single world. In a major change to the way players must transform potential new homes, the board is made up of ten (seven in the two-player game) modular sector tiles that create a different layout in every match. There’s another 14 unique factions from players to choose from, too, which are once again equipped with special abilities and bonuses to help them colonise the universe. To help them further, the various sides can advance six different types of technology – terraforming, navigation, AI, economy, research and gaiaforming – making it easier for them to travel further across the system, gather resources, increase their scientific knowledge or terraform a wider variety of planets

Some of the worlds are known as ‘transdim’ planets, strange worlds that can’t be built upon but can be harnessed for their resources. To access the worlds, players must begin a Gaia Project, which grants them the chance to utilise gaiaformers to transform the transdim planet into a gaia planet. Created by Drogemuller and Ostertag and said to be a ‘spiritual successor’ to Terra Mystica, Gaia Project offers a whole new way to enjoy the head-to-head empire-builder without changing its heart.

WHY SHOULD I TRY IT? Terra Mystica is an endlessly replayable strategy gem that shines due to its combination of luckless strategy and asymmetrical player abilities. Every match feels unique as the different opposing factions lock horns, but the gameplay has been finely tuned to ensure that each race has an equal chance of victory in the right hands. If the basic game wasn’t enough of a puzzle to be solved, the game’s first expansion, Fire & Ice, adds another six factions to the mix – including two that really shake things up by changing the rules even more. Although the game’s complexity, length and variability between races can be imposing for first-time players, the payoff is more than worth the effort. There are also digital versions of the game available on mobile and PC that include a handy interactive tutorial and the ability to play against different computer difficulties and review your moves to help you develop and improve your play style with even less effort. Half a decade on, Terra Mystica remains one of the finest strategy experiences on the tabletop. With Gaia Project taking the brilliant gameplay one step further, it seems that Drogemuller and Ostertag’s creation will remain a firm favourite for years to come. Each of the 14 races’ unique powers and starting habitats is key to its strategy – and players’ victory

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KICKSTARTING F R O M S C R A T C H

Holly Gramazio grapples with the hard decisions involved in putting together a campaign video for Art Deck – and starts to have regrets about the drawing game’s name

It’s worth paying for a professional – even if we won’t be able to recoup the money if the Kickstarter fails.

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s we get ready to fill in our Kickstarter page, slowly edging towards the point where we can hit the big launch button on our project, we’ve got some tough decisions to make. Some of these are design decisions. Some of them are about our target audience; do we stress the party game aspect of Art Deck, its possibilities as a creativity tool or its function as critical commentary on 1970s instructional artwork? (Probably not that last one!) Some of the decisions are about what we’re offering backers, and how elaborate we want to get with our reward levels. Some of the scariest choices are about how much money to spend upfront, before we even know whether the campaign is going to succeed. One of the biggest tasks before we can launch – and one of the biggest possible expenses – is the campaign video. You know the sort of thing: a video where we show a moment from Art Deck, explain how it works and then try to let people know why we think they might want to support the game. We could make something ourselves. It wouldn’t be great, but we could put something together that explains the game and shows a bit of gameplay. It would save money (a professional video would cost

somewhere in the low thousands of pounds), and it’s a decision a lot of tabletop games go for. But projects whose creators go for a homemade video are often either made by people with at least a little skill at creating video – which isn’t us – or they’re for games firmly aimed at a definite hobbyist market. They’re promoting their project to people who’ve backed games on Kickstarter before, people who understand how this whole process works and who are excited to find new interesting work to support. In the case of Art Deck, we obviously want to involve that audience, but it may be more immediately appealing to people who want a party game, or something to play with their kids, or even something to use to get themselves to start drawing. People who may have never backed a game on Kickstarter before. To draw these potential players in, to get them watching the video and to make it clear that we’re able to deliver on our promises, needs a higher level of polish. So it’s probably worth gritting our teeth and paying for a professional – even if that does mean we’re paying money that we won’t be able to recoup if the Kickstarter fails. So that’s where we are now: planning a video, talking to people who might make it and trying to get the rest of the game to the point where we actually can film it. Working on draft designs for the cards, getting a couple of decks printed, making any last-minute rule tweaks. It’s all getting very real. And that’s making us think about something we’ve been unconsciously trying to avoid for the last couple of months – the sneaking suspicion that ‘Art Deck’ is maybe... not a good name. That it might, in fact, even be... a bad name. It’s certainly not a very memorable name; even our friends are sometimes pretty vague on what the game’s called. (In the last few weeks people have tried “Art Game”, “Art Cards”, “That Drawing Game of Yours” and “You Know, That Thing You Made Where Anna Hid Under The Table”.) We’re both just really, really bad at naming things – I mean, we run a company called Matheson Marcault, a name which people can’t successfully spell, pronounce or remember. So maybe we should just stick with the pretty bad name we’ve got, content that it could be so much worse. Or maybe it’s time for a last-minute rebrand...

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HOW WE MADE

DOMINION

Donald X. Vaccarino’s revolutionary card game was like nothing that had come before – but has been copied countless times since. The designer looks back on the origins of deckbuilding and the pressure of living up to its legacy a decade on Words by Owen Duffy

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enuinely new ideas are rare in gaming. Designers take inspiration from one another’s work and riff off of existing concepts, tweaking and tinkering to develop new spins on what others have done before. 2008’s Dominion is an exception. It created the concept of a deckbuilding game, where players craft a deck of cards as they play. It’s proved massively influential, with a host of creators incorporating its novel approach into their own designs but, a decade after its release, Dominion remains one of the most popular games in the hobby. I spoke to its designer, Donald X. Vaccarino, about the game’s development, its success and what its future might hold.

BUILDING BLOCKS “I made games even as a kid,” Vaccarino says. “But I didn’t really start making lots of games until 1995, inspired by Magic: The Gathering; I was really grabbed by the idea of interacting rules on cards. But, while I played lots of Magic, the idea for Dominion didn’t come from there.” “I was working on a game called Spirit Warriors II, where each player would have a deck representing their party of fantasy heroes, à la Dungeons & Dragons. Each hero was represented by ten cards and you shuffled them together to make your deck.” He worked enthusiastically on the idea, but soon saw that his design had some problems. “I realised that the math involved would be too hard,” he says. “You’d be looking at a card in your hand; it’s a card for your ranger, it deals two damage per level of bow skill. What’s his bow skill? It’s three, so that’s six damage. Now remember that number and

look at the next card in your hand, a card for your paladin, and his sword skill is… “You’d look back and forth and back and forth remembering numbers, and at the end maybe you didn’t even decide to fight. It didn’t seem like it would work.” Undeterred, Vaccarino worked to simplify his design. Along the way he came up with a concept that seemed intriguing. “I really wanted to be building up my party,” he says. “I hit on the idea of having you build the deck as the game went on – when your ranger levels up, you get a new card for him, better than his previous cards.” The approach allowed players to incrementally improve their characters with each passing turn, starting the game with a handful of low-powered cards and gradually upping the quality of their decks as their inexperienced adventurers grew into battlehardened warriors. While it first came to Vaccarino as an element of a more complex design, he suspected that the idea could stand on its own. “I realised that I could make a game out of just that with none of the other pieces,” he said. “Just building a deck. “I jotted down some notes on it, then went back to Spirit Warriors II. Months later I needed a game quickly for a game night, and Spirit Warriors II still needed tons of work, but the simple deckbuilding game was something I could just whip out. So I did.” The basic side project would go on to become Dominion, dropping the original D&D-inspired theme and instead casting players as aspirational monarchs competing to build thriving kingdoms. As they played, they added cards to their deck to generate victory points or to take a variety of actions – drawing extra cards, forcing opponents to

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HOW WE MADE D O M I N I O N

discard some of theirs, removing weak cards from a deck to improve the odds of drawing more useful ones. It allowed for a variety of tactical approaches that evolved in different ways over the course of every game, and it proved to be an instant hit with Vaccarino’s game group. “Dominion took over all of our gaming,” he says. “I had a Magic night and a game night; they both turned into Dominion nights, with extra Dominion on the side. “I had made the game on the weekend and put it out on the kitchen table. For all I knew it wouldn’t work at all. But it was good times, and we were enthusiastic about playing another game immediately. And, I mean, that was that for years to come; the game of choice was Dominion Dominion.. A few months later I made a couple of new games, and my friends just were not interested in trying them. Trying

something new would cut into Dominion time. So, I made more expansions instead.” Vaccarino and his friends experimented with different strategies, discovering the power of different card combinations and the importance of stripping out less effective cards from their decks. As they played, Vaccarino made changes to the design, removing cards

WORLD DOMINATION

Encouraged by his friends’ enthusiasm, Vaccarino decided to approach publishers with his design. He struck a deal with Rio Grande Games, whose previous releases included English-language versions of European games like Power Grid and Puerto Rico. His experience with his own game group had left him confident that Dominion could be a similarly successful hit. “I wasn’t confident I could get the game published,” he said. “But I was sure that if I did, it would eventually have a shelf that didn’t work as he’d hoped. But he says to itself in game stores. I had already had the the final result wasn’t far removed from his experience of a group of gamers switching to original idea. nothing but Dominion Dominion,, so the fact that people “If you’d played the game shortly after became big fans was not surprising.” I made it, and then again when it was Strategic card games were already a mainstay published, you’d have had trouble figuring out of analogue gaming, with Magic and its the differences,” he says. competitors creating communities of players

I had a Magic night and a game night; they both turned into Dominion nights.

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around the globe. But where the likes of Pokémon or the gothic Vampire: The Eternal Struggle required players to trade or buy new cards to build their collections, Dominion offered a similar experience in a single, self-contained game. It met with a massively enthusiastic reaction from players and, in 2009, won the tabletop industry’s most coveted prize: the Spiel des Jahres or ‘Game of the Year’ award. “I didn’t think I had a shot, even after it was nominated, just due to Dominion’s complexity,” says Vaccarino. “And I think they added the more complex game category [the Kennerspiel des Jahres or ‘Expert Game of the Year’] later because they ended up deciding Dominion was too complex after all.” Fans were hungry for more, and Vaccarino had more to give them. Years before Dominion had been published, he had already begun work on expansions that added new cards to the mix. The first, Intrigue, could be played as a standalone game or combined with the original set to support up to eight players. The Seaside, experimented with the game’s next, Seaside turn structure, adding cards that played out their effects over multiple rounds. Later additions gave players new ways to score points or to use resource cards, opening up fresh strategies to explore. Vaccarino says he became more adept at designing expansions over time, with players’ reactions helping to guide the game’s ongoing development. “I feel like I got a lot better as I went along,” he says. “The early sets have the most duds because I wasn’t as good at the game. We would have a card sometimes and that would be enough for me. I wouldn’t play around with it and ask, ‘Could I make it stronger? How does it compare to other cards?’ “I got feedback from players. They didn’t like how some cards didn’t have resources, they just attacked opponents. I stopped making those. They liked attacks in general less than I’d expected. Later sets have fewer attacks, more non-attack interaction. “The Alchemy expansion was too slow. I hadn’t realised that until it was out. I started paying more attention to avoiding cards being slow to resolve. With Hinterlands I went too far in trying to dredge the last ounce of playability out of each card. It’s better to have simpler cards that are a little strong or weak. I’ve tried not to make that mistake since.” This self-criticism might seem harsh given the game’s ongoing popularity, but it’s left its designer with a firm perspective on how best to grow the card pool.

ABOVE Dominion’s ’s many (many, many) expansions introduce a variety of new cards to the game’s healthy roster, as well as other fresh gameplay concepts and strategies OPPOSITE Vaccarino based the concept of deckbuilding on the idea of a character levelling up “At this point the big challenge is trying to keep complexity down,” he says. “You run out of simple things to do, but it’s bad to get complex. It’s fine if strategy is complex, but not if the cards are.”

OFTEN COPIED, NEVER EQUALLED While Dominion is a highlight of Vaccarino’s design career, it’s not the only one. In 2011 he released Kingdom Builder, a simple but thoughtful board game that, like his previous hit, cast players as rulers looking to expand their domains. Players would draw a card from a communal deck corresponding to different types of terrain on the board, claiming territory and aiming to seize areas that best met the needs of their subjects – from

miners and fishermen looking for mountains and rivers to hermits seeking remote spots removed from civilisation. “It started out trying to be a Dominion spin-off,” says Vaccarino. “You played cards to take over spaces on the board, and took over spaces to gain cards. I eventually cut out the deckbuilding and replaced it with drawing a card and putting three pieces on that type of terrain. The deckbuilding part just didn’t seem essential; it was just there to be there.” The game earned him his second Spiel des Jahres, making Vaccarino one of a select handful of designers to win the accolade more than once. While he’s pleased to have one of the industry’s biggest recent hits to his name, he’s also glad to have received recognition for other games.

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“A big effect of Dominion on my career is that it’s meant I’ve spent years making Dominion expansions instead of new games,” he says. “Dominion winning was great, obviously. But it didn’t just make publishers want to publish my games. I still had trouble even getting games looked at. It was after Kingdom Builder won that publishers said: ‘Okay, show us something.’” Vaccarino continues to work on new Dominion expansions, although he says he plans to reduce the pace of his work on the game to allow him to devote time to other projects. While the game still boasts a large and enthusiastic community of players, it’s also inspired other designers to come up with their own spin on its deckbuilding premise. For Vaccarino, though, many of the games that followed in Dominion’s trail haven’t done enough to distinguish themselves from his original design.

“I always say that it’s great that people got to make Dominion-inspired games, and sad what most people decided to do with the privilege,” he says. “There are all these games that don’t add much to Dominion. I don’t look at those games so much because I don’t want anyone thinking I copied whatever Dominion mechanic from a Dominion clone. “There are actual new games inspired by Dominion. Two examples I always cite are A Few Acres of Snow and Eminent Domain. But I mostly haven’t played them.” While he thinks some deckbuilding games are a little too close to Dominion for comfort, a recent development is far more straightforwardly problematic. Counterfeit copies have started to appear online, with unscrupulous manufacturers pirating the game in its entirety. But while you might expect the designer to be furious at having

ALL HANDS ON DECK

Dominion’s success sparked a rush of games using similar deckbuilding mechanisms, with designers taking the concept in a host of new directions ARCTIC SCAVENGERS

Where Dominion cast players as wealthy nobles, Arctic Scavengers adopts a much bleaker tone, with bands of survivors struggling to eke out an existence in a frozen, post-apocalyptic wasteland. Players aim to build powerful tribes, recruiting characters with specialised skills and scouring the remnants of civilisation for precious supplies and equipment.

A FEW ACRES OF SNOW

Part of a trio of deckbuilding games from designer Martin Wallace, this two-player war game recreates clashes between French and British colonial forces in North America. You’ll gain new cards by capturing territory and strengthening your hold on the continent. Wallace developed the game’s mechanisms further in the fantasy follow-up Mythotopia and space conquest game A Handful of Stars.

TRAINS

Deckbuilding board game Trains puts you and your friends in the shoes of Japanese railway company directors. You’ll use your cards to acquire locomotives and lay down tracks, hoping to build a system that’s as efficient and dependable as the real Japanese rail network... as opposed to the British one.

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his work ripped off, Vaccarino doesn’t let it bother him. “Most games don’t make any money, and so won’t be counterfeited,” he says. “If your game is such a hit that it’s being counterfeited, it’s also making you good money. Making less money, when you’re making good money; like, it’s not what you want, but how much does it really affect your life?” He plans to keep working on expansions for the game, he says, but he’d also like to work on new spin-offs and unrelated titles. With keeping Dominion fresh for players taking up so much of his time, could he ever see himself passing on responsibility to other designers, just as long-running games like Magic have passed through the hands of many different creators? “No,” he says simply. “I don’t see someone else taking over.”

STAR REALMS

Designed by two former Magic: The Gathering pro players, Star Realms distilled the deckbuilding experience to a one-on-one showdown, with players controlling galactic empires fighting to dominate the universe. It’s a slick, simple and addictive take on the formula, and if you don’t have any opponents handy, there’s a well-executed smartphone app with a busy community of online players.

DICE MASTERS

Dice Masters takes the core ideas behind Dominion and swaps cards for custommade dice representing characters from a variety of pop-culture universes. While the first Dice Masters sets featured characters from Marvel comics, the game has expanded to incorporate DC characters like Batman and Wonder Woman as well as figures from Yu-GiOh!, Dungeons & Dragons and Teenage Oh! Turtles. Mutant Ninja Turtles

MYSTIC VALE

Where most deckbuilding games challenge players to create a customised deck, Mystic Vale takes things one step further, letting them build their own individual cards. Using a system of modular transparent cards that slide into plastic sleeves, it allows players to combine multiple powerful effects on a single card. It also comes with a blackjackstyle push-your-luck element, where players can draw additional cards, but at the risk of unleashing corrupting magic that could cost them the game.

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Blood Red Skies is the great new game of mass aerial combat from Warlord Games Release April 2018 with a great range of expansion sets Available to Pre-Order Now! £40/$50

Great range of game expansion sets available on launch

£20/$24.95

£20/$24.95

Squadron expansion box sets £20/$24.95, Ace Pilot expansions £12/$14.95 Visit our HQ store at: The Lenton Business Centre, Lenton Boulevard, Noongham, NG7 2BD Call our UK office on: +44 (0) 115 978 0386 For Trade enquiries: +44 (0) 115 978 4202 For North American Trade enquiries: (602) 445 6406 (Arizona me)

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IS THERE A FAKE BOARD GAME IN YOUR COLLECTION?

The number of counterfeit games being sold online to unwilling fans is rising. With players increasingly at risk of shoddy-quality and even dangerous versions of their favourite titles, we look into the dark world of tabletop forgery Words by Matt Jarvis | Illustration by Sam Richwood

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bout eight months ago we started to get all of these customer services requests. People picking up the phone saying, ‘Hi, I bought a Ticket to Ride from Amazon, the cards are all rubbish, I’m missing five black trains and the board doesn’t lay flat.’” At first, Steve Buckmaster says, it was assumed that the copies of Days of Wonder’s iconic train game were normal outliers from the production process. Esdevium, the dominant UK distributor of which Buckmaster is MD, began to send out replacement parts for the incomplete sets, as it would with any other game missing pieces. Still, something didn’t sit quite right – a feeling reinforced by the growing number of complaints about a title usually known for its high standard of quality. Three or four months later, overwhelmed by requests, Esdevium decided to look into the matter. It seemed that one of its most popular games had fallen prey to cheap forgeries being sold online via third-party sellers, with unsuspecting buyers unaware that their copy was an unofficial fake. Very quickly, it became clear that it was an issue far beyond Ticket to Ride. Sales of some of the industry’s biggest games have become flooded by fakes as part of what Buckmaster describes as an “endemic” counterfeiting problem. Especially at risk are titles that had become staple games for introducing new players to hobby gaming because of their accessible gameplay and simple components – factors that now made them easier to duplicate. “Games that have relatively simple card components in particular – Dominion being a great example – where it’s just printing cards, it’s relatively straightforward for someone to counterfeit,” Buckmaster says. “They need the print files and the ability to make cards – which most factories will have – then they just need to make boxes and plastic inserts, which again most factories will be able to do. Off they go on their merry way making a counterfeit version of the game. So I think the criteria for a target to counterfeit is that the game has got to be a relative perennial. “What we would consider the stable gateway games of this industry – Ticket to Ride, Catan, Pandemic, Dominion – have a good level of sales, yet they come from relatively small publishers that are going to struggle to be able to take the action required to try and get counterfeiters shut down. It’s a real challenge for our time.” Partly to blame for the surge in forgeries is gaming’s boom in mainstream popularity over the last few years, with multi-million-dollar Kickstarters

and consistently rising sales attracting both genuine and illegitimate attempts to cash in on the tabletop’s golden age. The biggest enabling factor has been the internet; while crowdfunding has made it easier than ever before for creators to find a global audience for their otherwise niche projects, the online removal of worldwide barriers has turned counterfeiting into an international issue. “Right now we’re dealing with significant counterfeiting coming out of the Far East and, no matter what we do, it’s very hard to contain because the internet and online commerce has made it able to reach far and wide and deep and it’s hard to figure out exactly where the nexus of all that stuff is originating,” says Christian T. Petersen, CEO of Asmodee North America, the mega-publisher that owns studios such as Fantasy Flight, Z-Man Games and Plaid Hat. Although the full extent to which counterfeits are pervading the market remains currently unclear due to some companies refusing to release their data, Asmodee’s internal figures suggest that up to 60% of all online sales for some games are now fakes.

No matter what we do, it’s very hard to contain. “We’re able to do a bunch of data analysis online and we can also compare year-over-year numbers and look at the sellers actually selling the product,” Petersen explains. “A product like – just as an example – 7 Wonders may have been affected more than 60%.” “We’ve been told that counterfeit games have dramatically increased recently,” observes Richard Lee, COO of major game manufacturer Panda. “Scanning and printing technology has improved by a large amount and has become much less expensive as well, which has led to more counterfeiting activities.” Scott Tepper of Dominion, Race for the Galaxy and Roll for the Galaxy outlet Rio Grande Games echoes that the overall scale of counterfeiting is still being looked into by the publisher, but suggests less of an impact on its affected games. “We are still investigating the extent to which the recent counterfeit Dominions reached the US market,” he says. “In comparison with our total sales, the percentage of counterfeits that we believe have recently appeared is a small percentage of our total sales.” Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro-owned publisher responsible for Dungeons & Dragons, Magic: The Gathering and wargame studio Avalon Hill, concurs that it has experienced counterfeiting, but adds that – at least from what it has seen –fake games still remain the exception.

“We take counterfeiting very seriously,” a representative for the company tells us. “While we can’t comment on specific anti-counterfeiting tactics or investigations, we can say that we occasionally learn of small quantities of counterfeit Wizards of the Coast games being sold online. When this happens, we investigate. Our investigation team is second-tonone in the gaming industry and works closely with our state, federal and international law enforcement partners to target and stop counterfeiters.”

DOING DAMAGE The targeting of gateway games by counterfeiters is particularly troublesome for publishers and distributors because of the players most likely to end up with a fake in their collection. There’s a good chance that committed gamers already own several of the entry-level titles affected, or will see notices put out via social media, websites and newsletters concerning possible fakes. But a standard consumer picking up a hobby game for the first time won’t necessarily be on the lookout. “What we’re really worried about is somebody who’s possibly new to board games and, rightly so, going for something like Ticket to Ride, Pandemic or Catan as their first or second board game purchase,” Buckmaster says. “They go online, buy the cheapest, get a counterfeit copy and go, ‘Ergh, this was a poor gaming experience,’ because they were missing components or the rules weren’t right because they’d been counterfeited. “We are more concerned about the, dare I say it, mums and families; people that are new to board gaming in general being caught out by this. For hardcore alpha gamers that are buying a mixture of games on Kickstarter and on release and all that sort of stuff, they’re probably safe at this moment in time.” “If a counterfeit game happens to be the first game that person has ever played, it could leave a bad taste in their mouth and keep them from trying other games,” agrees Panda’s Lee. It’s not only players who can be put off gaming by dodgy copies. With many designers making a living through royalties earned on sales of their games, having their work copied without compensation can drastically impact their living. “Counterfeits cause damage on several levels,” says Tepper. “The designer, who has done considerable work to create an exceptional game, does not receive the deserved royalties for the counterfeit copies. “Damage is done to our brand when customers receive these inferior knockoffs and think that this low quality is representative of Rio Grande Games and then decide not to try any of the Dominion expansions.”

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COUNTERFEIT GAMES

Some counterfeit games appear under different names, such as this Splendor clone The Stone Merchant (left); others try to replicate the game’s original packaging, as seen with this fake copy of Sushi Go! (right)

“Buying counterfeits only helps the counterfeiters – and takes money out of the pockets of the hard-working people who are creating the games,” agrees Shari Spiro, CEO of independent publisher Breaking Games and manufacturer Ad Magic, which has produced various games including Exploding Kittens and Cards Against Humanity. “Whether or not the end consumer cares about whether a game designer gets their royalty on games, they’ve put their heart and soul into something, they created a game that’s going to be fantastic,” Buckmaster adds. “They’re obviously being cheated out of their income, which is the royalties they make on selling games. Which I suppose also impacts their ability to continue to develop games and do stuff.” In the most extreme of cases, fake board games can even pose a risk to the health of players by bypassing universal safety checks “The world out there is not entirely aware of the enormous influence of counterfeiters online and how much stuff is actually not authentic and even potentially dangerous,” says Petersen. “Because we do, of course, a lot of testing on all our materials to make sure they’re [safety] compliant, vis-à-vis the poison in plastics, the lead paint on wood and so on and so forth. I can assure you that counterfeiters have no such testing.” Buckmaster presents a specific example of one game aimed at children that had been found to lack the quality control of the official product. “We don’t even know if the counterfeit Dobble game can be played properly because it’s quite a mathematical game. It’s not enough to sit there and have some cards with symbols on, you actually have to have the exact right mix and it has to

be a certain way. We have seen the counterfeit tins deform; we don’t know if they’ve been tested for harmful elements. As a genuine manufacturer, there’s quite strict safety testing that you have to do on your product to ensure it’s in no way going to be harmful.” Tepper offers a similarly frank warning. “The authentic Dominions and expansions are made in our partner factories in the US and in Europe,” he confirms. “We are confident in their quality and safety for our customers. From what we have seen, the counterfeit copies have cheaper card stock for the cards and have inferior card trays which

We can only guess at the harm end users are exposing themselves to.

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are flimsy and break easily. We can only guess at the harm end users are exposing themselves to from the counterfeit copies as they are not made using the strict standards we use in our games.”

RETAIL WOES The majority of publishers we spoke to pointed the finger at Amazon’s third-party Marketplace and ‘Fulfilled by Amazon’ programme – where third-party stock is stored and sent out of Amazon warehouses – for allowing online stores to freely offer illegitimate copies of games, which are often misunderstood by buyers to be vouched for by the retail giant. Buckmaster says that, in certain cases, direct sales of some Esdevium games through Amazon have been reduced by up to 80% of their usual level when a seller of counterfeits manages to get the ‘buy

box’ – making them the default choice for customers that land on the page and hit the ‘Add to Basket’ button. “The way that Amazon is structured, most consumers make the assumption that if it’s fulfilled by Amazon, it must be fine – this is unfortunately not always the case,” he says. Although Amazon does remove counterfeit sellers when flagged up by lawyers working on behalf of bigger studios, one major publisher that wished to remain anonymous told us that Amazon had been ‘difficult’ and ‘slow’ to work with on the matter, allegedly taking up to a week to shut down some stores and going so far as to reinstate multiple third-party sellers accused of offering counterfeit games when the claims had been contested. Multiple sources claimed that counterfeit sellers they had identified had later resurfaced under the guise of a different store, allowing them to simply sell the products under a different name. This reportedly even caused Amazon’s own sales of at least one popular game to ‘tank’, a source close to the matter said. “Amazon prohibits the sale of inauthentic and fraudulent products,” an Amazon spokesperson told Tabletop Gaming in a statement. “We remove items in violation of our policies as soon as we become aware of them and block bad actors suspected of engaging in illegal behaviour, such as counterfeit. “If merchants sell counterfeit goods, we may immediately suspend or terminate their selling privileges and destroy inventory in our fulfilment centres without reimbursement. In addition, if we determine that a seller account has been used to engage in fraud or other illegal activity, remittances and payments may be withheld. The sale of counterfeit goods can also lead to legal action by rights holders and civil and criminal penalties. “We are constantly innovating on behalf of our customers and working with manufacturers, content owners, vendors and sellers to improve the ways we detect and prevent counterfeit products from reaching our marketplace.” Amazon does require that Marketplace sellers offer a return policy equal to or better than its own 30day rule and offer replacements for products found to not be as advertised within a “reasonable time”. “As much as we’ve been struggling with Amazon, there is an element of accountability where you can go back and go: ‘Look, I think I’ve got something counterfeit,’” Buckmaster says. That’s not the case with another online retail giant alleged to be offering fake board games for sale: auction site eBay, which Buckmaster calls “a dog-eat-dog marketplace, basically”. Under the

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SPOT THE FAKE

platform’s rules, sellers are not required to offer a returns policy, but eBay does offer a Money Back Guarantee to reimburse users who receive an item that fails to match its listing description. “Counterfeits are illegal and not welcome on any of eBay’s sites,” a spokesperson for eBay told us. “eBay is fully committed to combating the sale of counterfeit goods and has consistently been the internet industry leader in working to stop the online sale of counterfeit goods. eBay runs several anti-counterfeit initiatives including the Verified Rights Owner Programme, and is continually introducing new proactive measures to combat the global trade in counterfeits.”

Rio Grande’s Scott Tepper runs us through the differences between a genuine copy of Dominion: Second Edition (on the left) and a fake (on the right) “It is difficult to tell if you have a counterfeit copy of Dominion without opening up the box. The counterfeit copy is lighter in colour, but that would be difficult to perceive without having an authentic copy next to it. “Another hint that you might have a counterfeit copy is that there is a code, ELM 62812, in white print that appears

under the Dominion logo on the side panel that has the picture of the bandit. That is a code referencing a particular print run from our factory. All of the counterfeit copies we have seen so far reference that code. But it is possible to have a copy with that code that is authentic, so that code alone is not an indicator of a counterfeit. “There is also a difference in the linen finish of the box paper. An authentic copy has a flat, non-glossy linen finish. The counterfeits have a more glossy

finish that looks like a linen finish, but that is more due to the photograph of the cover art than an actual linen finish. But it is hard to discern this through the plastic wrap. “Once you open the box, it is easy to see obvious tells. The counterfeit game has a very badly-made thin plastic inlay that crumples and breaks easily. The cards are lower quality than authentic Dominion cards, and the artists’ names on the cards are not white, but tend toward orange and red.”

COUNTERATTACK As tabletop gaming grows and matures further, it’s all but certain that counterfeiting will continue. Petersen describes the problem as like an endless game of whack-a-mole, while Buckmaster says the number of games finding their way into the mainstream and hunger for popular titles means there’s no shortage of targets for forgers. “I think the problem will continue, even if we can get some games cleaned up,” Buckmaster says. “Let’s say, for example, we manage to close down the problem on Dixit; my gut feeling is they might go onto something like Forbidden Island instead. They’ll just choose another stable product that’s always ranked highly on Amazon and go start counterfeiting that product, as well.’ However, steps are being taken to try and combat the number of fakes finding their way into players’ hands. Ad Magic and Breaking Games recently artnered with security and authentication specialist De la Rue to place custom 3D holograms on the companies’ games as proof of their genuineness. Other publishers and manufacturers have similarly stepped up their own efforts to stem the flow. “As games become more complex and advanced from a production standpoint, the harder it will be for counterfeiters to keep up,” predicts Panda CEO Michael Lee. Ultimately, though, it seems that the best way to avoid ending up with a counterfeit in your collection comes back to age-old advice. “If a deal looks too good to be true, it probably is,” Buckmaster advises. “I know in this day and age a lot of people will want to buy the cheapest online offer, but it’s always worth checking the source; if in doubt, buy from a brick-and-mortar store where you can actually see what you are buying” “If you are going to buy from a third-party seller, read their feedback comments,” Tepper says. “The third-party resellers that we caught selling counterfeit Dominions had multiple instances of feedback regarding counterfeit products. So either people are not checking these comments or they are willing to roll the dice for a ‘good deal’. You get what you pay for.”

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VIKINGS ON BOARDS When they weren’t blood-raging or feasting for Odin, the Vikings loved a good board game – one that, centuries later, is making a comeback

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Words and lead image by Dan Jolin

uring the 1880s, while excavating the ancient Swedish town of Birka, archaeologist Knut Hjalmar Stolpe unearthed a large, well-furnished grave containing a Viking warrior. Alongside the armour-clad remains, Stolpe found weapons (sword, axe, spear, arrows), two shields, the skeletons of two unfortunate horses and, nestled lovingly in the corpse’s lap, a full set of board game pieces. The importance of this final element was only emphasised when, in September 2017, DNA testing confirmed that the remains were in fact female. The arms and armour suggested she was a warrior, but the game pieces encouraged the most exciting conclusion: that she was of high status – perhaps “a powerful military leader,” as archaeologist Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson put it at the time of the revelation. Which means, in terms of upending our view of Viking society as male-dominated, the fact this real-life shieldmaiden could swing a blade is actually less significant than her ownership of a board game.

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Tabletop gaming wasn’t just a frivolous pastime for Vikings – male or female. It was a sign of status. A huge deal. These days, if you threw an axe in a board game café, there’s a good chance it would hit a box with Vikings on it. From Eric Lang’s epic, Ragnarokkin’ Blood Rage (itself a reimplementation of his 2007 game Midgard), through 2016’s rather more whimsical Blue Orange title Vikings on Board, to Uwe Rosenberg’s gorgeously complex worker placement/tile-laying hybrid A Feast for Odin (which even comes with a detailed almanac on Norse life), the Viking theme has never been more popular. Not that it’s a new phenomenon, of course. Look at TSR’s 1982 game Viking Gods, for example, or 2004’s Fire & Axe. Technically, the world-dominating Catan’s Viking-themed, too; designer Klaus Teuber was inspired by the Viking settlement of Iceland. But there’s also a chance your café-terrorising throwing axe would (aside from getting you

arrested, of course) strike the oldest Viking game of all. The original Viking game. The one whose pieces lay in the lap of that ancient chieftess, and which now is making something of a comeback. Namely, hnefatafl.

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT In June 2017, IT development manager David Lonsdale drove over 100 miles from his home in Peterborough to take part in a hnefatafl tournament held at the Hull and East Riding Museum. His brother Steve travelled with him, having introduced David to the game three years earlier, and the pair ended up facing each other in the final. David was triumphant. “I guess its simplicity was the main thing,” says Lonsdale of why the game – which he also plays online – first hooked him. When we speak, he reveals he’s just qualified for the top group on the Aage Nielsen website’s World Tafl Federation hnefatafl championship tournament. “I was a reasonable chess player when I was younger, but I’m not the sort of person who

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can sit down and learn lots of openings and things. What I liked about hnefatafl is generally it’s a simpler game with very simple rules. Whoever you’re playing, be they experienced or a learner, that simplicity means you can be on a relatively level playing field.” Pronounced “neffa-taffle” and meaning ‘king’s table’, it’s a two-player abstract strategy game which, intriguingly, is asymmetric. The white player takes the defensive role, with their fewer pieces starting arranged in a diamond pattern around the king at the centre of a grid-based board. Their objective

Hnefatafl involves an asymmetric setup where one player attempts to protect their king while the other tries to capture him

is to move the king to safety, typically by reaching a corner square. The black player has no king, and commands twice as many troops as the white. These are arrayed in four, arrow-shaped groups around the board’s edge, and their task is to capture the white king. Every piece moves like a rook in chess, and capturing usually happens when one player’s piece is trapped between two of the other player’s; although capturing a king in most versions of the game means you have to surround him on four sides. As you can guess, choosing black makes it a much tougher game, more reliant on long-term strategy than the reactive style white requires. Hnefatafl’s asymmetric nature is what appeals to Dr. Roderick Dale who, as cultural engagement fellow at the University of Nottingham’s Centre for the Study of the Viking Age, is one of the UK’s leading Viking experts. “It makes you think,” he says, “because it requires different things from you depending on which side you play. I actually find it more interesting than chess. If you swap sides you’re effectively playing two different games, in some ways.”

LOST IN TRANSLATION One of the game’s foremost proponents in the UK is Damian Walker, who in 2004 founded the hnefatafl website (tafl.cyningstan.com) – an excellent online repository of all things Vikinggamey – and has written two books on the game (Reconstructing Hnefatafl and An Introduction to Hnefatafl). It was in fact Walker who organised the Hull tournament won by David Lonsdale. He first came across hnefatafl 15 years ago, while reading a book about ancient board games, titled The World Of Games.

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H N E F ATA F L : T H E V I K I N G G A M E

“It was the striking appearance of the game that caught my eye,” Walker says. “Though it’s got an asymmetrical division of forces between the two players, the board layout looks very symmetrical and pleasing. Once I discovered the game, it was the mystery surrounding it that kept me interested; it turned out that there was a lot of information waiting to be found. We know a lot more about it now than we did 10 or 15 years ago.” At the heart of that mystery were the rules of the game itself, which it seems the Vikings never wrote down. “For decades,” explains Walker, “everyone was trying to reconstruct it from a faulty translation.” It turns out that an English misunderstanding of Swedish scientist Carl Linneaus’ 18thcentury Latin account of the rules, recorded after he played the game in Lapland, gave rise to the idea that the king needs to be surrounded on all four sides when, in fact, says Walker, “the Latin passage says that the king is captured like other pieces except when he still sits in his central ‘castle’ square; only then does it take four enemies to surround him”. Hence the imbalance, “where it’s very hard to capture the king – especially since both the English and Latin rules have the king winning when he gets to the edge of the board”.

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This has led to dozens of modern variants on the game that attempt to balance out the rules, such as by stating that the king needs to get to a corner, rather than the board’s edge. This is stated by the ‘Copenhagen’ ruleset, followed by the Aage Nielsen tournament. Other variants include the Fetlar rules (established for the world championship on the Hebridean island of Fetlar, overseen by hnefatafl enthusiast Peter Kelly until his death in 2014), as well as the different ancient versions of the game, played on a variety of board sizes from seven-by-seven up to 19-by-19: brandub, tablut, tawlbwrdd, alea evangelii… For Lonsdale, this sheer variety and mutability is far from off-putting. Just the opposite, in fact. “What really interests me isn’t so much the playing of an individual game, it’s actually playing to try and work out the best version,” he says. “You know: on a particular-sized board, should you be playing with an unarmed king [ie. one that can’t take enemy pieces], cornersquare sort of combination? What’s the right combination of rules on a certain board to get an even balance between black and white?” For the more casual player, though, it’s probably best just to go with the rules as given in the History Craft Ltd version of the

game (as summarised above, and close to the Copenhagen ones), simply titled The Viking Game. This impressively designed set bases its pieces on the 12th-century Lewis chessmen found in the Outer Hebrides in 1831 and comes with a grid printed on natural linen that incorporates “typical Viking patterns”. You really feel, when playing with this set, that you’re experiencing the game as the Vikings themselves did, back in the historical murk of the Dark Ages.

NORSE PLAY Board gaming was, confirms Dale, “quite important” to the Vikings: “It was almost certainly something that everybody did.” Tafl (ie. “table”) games – which descended from even more ancient, Roman games – were significant enough to feature in The Sagas of Icelanders; plus, of course, there’s all the archaeological evidence to show that, as Dale puts it: “Playing board games was something you did when you weren’t busy trying to conquer the Danelaw.” Hnefatafl sets were “prized possessions,” says Damian Walker; “Archaeologists have found some very fine examples buried as grave goods.” It was, as its name suggests, truly the game of kings. Not that playing it with an actual king was a good idea.

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It seems to have been played mostly for relaxation.

And then, from around the 13th century onwards, hnefatafl almost completely disappeared from tabletops. Its younger, cooler and distinctly less lop-sided cousin chess sidled into town and became the new rage. Scandinavians, thinks Dale, must have noticed the aristocracy in Francia playing this intriguing, impressive Eastern import, and adopted it as a new kind of status symbol. “The popular kids were playing it,” he notes. “So everybody else wanted to play it.”

THE RETURN OF THE KING’S TABLE

A medieval gaming piece from the 9th to mid11th centuries made from cast lead or lead alloy. The shape of the piece (similar to a rook in chess) might mean that it was used as a king in hnefatafl matches (The Portable Antiquities Scheme/The Trustees of the British Museum) Museum “There’s a story that Cnut the Great, king of England and Denmark [from 1016 to 1035], was at a feast at Roskilde when his brotherin-law Ulf saw that he was in a bad mood and thought, ‘Right, let’s cheer him up with a board game,’” relates Dale. “But when they played, Cnut wanted to take a move back, and he and Ulf argued about it until Ulf kicked the table over and stormed out. So Cnut had him killed the next day.” Still, whatever the risks, if you wanted to be considered a proper member of Viking aristocracy, you needed to know how to play board games. “Earl Rögnvald of Orkney wrote a poem describing his skills,” Dale explains, “all the skills you would need to be a well-rounded member of the aristocracy. And he includes in it his skill at playing board games.” You can’t help but wonder if hnefatafl was treated by the Vikings as some kind of strategy primer – a way of honing their battle tactics. You can imagine that its asymmetric nature, which makes victory harder for the ‘invading’ force

and therefore more glorious when achieved over the besieged whites, might appeal to a people who, while actually mostly fishers and farmers, were nevertheless renowned and feared for their raiding and pillaging tendencies. Certainly, the presence of tafl pieces in that unknown female warrior’s grave was taken as a strong sign she might be a military leader. “It would have been a good way to teach tactical thinking,” says Walker, “but I don’t know if the Vikings used it for that purpose. It seems to have been played mostly for relaxation.” Historian Dale is even less sure: “Whether the board games were actually intended to teach strategy per se, or whether that type of thinking is just a byproduct of playing board games, we have absolutely no idea. They’re never presented as teaching strategy in the source material that we have. And I don’t think we can even begin to speculate as to why they’d particularly like an asymmetric game. I mean, you have to remember this style of game had been popular for thousands of years.”

It wasn’t until the mid-19th century that hnefatafl truly reappeared, when chess company Jacques of London put out the firstever commercial version of the game, using James Edward Smith’s (mis)translation of Linnaeus’ rules (albeit with the rule-balancing addition that the king couldn’t capture black pieces). Much later, in 1965, it was reimagined as naval strategy game Breakthru (although Walker says that’s “a different game altogether”, only loosely inspired by hnefatafl). Then, in 1970, Milton Bradley published its own version of the game named Swords and Shields. Neither exactly took off. It’s only in more recent years that players are rediscovering the Vikings’ favourite pastime (apart from, y’know, sacking Lindisfarne) in any significant numbers, with Walker’s tournament joining annual events in West Stoke and Formby – as well as the Fetlar tournament, which is expected to return this spring. History Craft’s The Viking Game, which smartly makes a virtue of its ancient nature rather than trying to gussy it up in modern clothing, is certainly helping spread awareness, as are websites like Walker’s and Aage Nielsen’s. People – not just Eric Lang and Uwe Rosenberg – can’t seem to get enough of those hairy, Dark Age raiders. “It may be that it’s kicking off more now because Vikings are particularly fashionable at the moment,” suggests Dale, who himself has been besotted with Vikings since hearing Norse myths as a child on his Hebridean grandmother’s knee, “thanks to the Vikings TV series and The Last Kingdom. I think more people may be getting interested in it just because of that.” Hnefatafl certainly rewards that interest. It’s more accessible than chess, while its asymmetric nature gives it an idiosyncratic appeal. Besides, if it was good enough for old Earl Rögnvald – a saint, no less – it’s surely good enough for any of us.

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The tabletop has the ability to bring people together – and sometimes drive them apart when the competition heats up. How can players avoid dreaded gamer rage?

in fostering collaboration. In other words, science tells us that Monopoly (a game that is based entirely on luck and resource management) might well be the worst game to play with non-gamers, as there’s a very real risk that they will come away with the impression that board games are little more than a cause of conflict and strife. Of course, conflict is at the heart of many games. As Roger Caillois, a key figure in game studies, puts it, competition (what he calls ‘agôn’) is a key element of play. Competitive games, he says, are “like a combat in which equality of chances is artificially created”. Illingworth Players of Monopoly will be all too aware Doctors Paul Wake and Sam that any such ‘equality’ is often abandoned the moment that its uncontrollable human any of us will be beginning variables (players) sit down at the table. This 2018 by trying to undo the can be fine; it can even make the game worth excesses brought about playing, when everyone understands the game’s during the tail end of 2017. (unwritten) rules. As Caillois puts it, play is Joining a gym, opening a an activity that’s separate (in time and space) new savings account, cutting down on cheese from everyday life, so if in-game conflicts are and perhaps gleefully returning Monopoly to the deepest recesses of our shelving units. What is it about family get-togethers that makes us reach for the red and white box when spending time with the extended family? We certainly don’t seem to enjoy the game... Hasbro’s 2013 ‘Disconnect Reconnect’ advert certainly captures the sentiment behind us getting games to the table, but it is some way off the reality of what happens once play begins. One online response to the video says it all: “Monopoly doesn’t make friendships, it breaks them.” A recent survey named Monopoly as the cause of nearly half of all game-related arguments and the game most likely to end with a flipped board (which is exactly what happens in Hasbro’s 2017 ‘Monopoly New Classic Edition’ ad). But why? Research ‘Semi-collaborative’ games such as Betrayal from the Georgia Institute of Technology has at House on the Hill are one way of stopping shown that games that minimise luck and competition from boiling over into frustration resource management are the most effective

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spilling over into the ‘real’ world (as Hasbro’s 2016 Monopoly Christmas helpline suggests) then things are clearly going awry! Perhaps we might conclude that being comfortable with ‘competitive play’ is something that takes practice. Readers of this magazine won’t need Caillois to tell them that competition is just one aspect of play. Eurogames such as Carcassonne allow for less painful ‘indirect competition,’ collaborative games such as Pandemic and Arkham Horror displace competition by treating the system as the antagonist, while ‘semi-collaborative’ games such as Dead of Winter and Betrayal at House on the Hill match competition with storytelling and imaginative roleplay. In other words, there might be better games to play with your nongame-playing family and friends than Monopoly, especially if you want to play with them again. So, the next time Uncle Nigel suggests a friendly game of Monopoly, reach for your copy of Betrayal and suggest swapping hotels and stations for statuary corridors and research laboratories. Paul Wake and Sam Illingworth are Manchester Metropolitan University academics and co-directors of the Games Research Network

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PAINTS & TECHNIQUES PAINTS USED Abaddon Black Agrax Earthshade Alaitoc Blue Baneblade Brown Blood for the Blood God Bloodletter Blue Horror Bugmans Glow Cadian Fleshtone Celestra Grey Ceramite White Dark Reaper Dawnstone Dorn Yellow Drakenhof Nightshade Fenrisian Grey Flayed One Flesh Gauss Blaster Green Genestealer Purple Jokearo Orange Khorne Red Kislev Flesh

Lothern Blue Lugganath Orange Macragge Blue Mechanicus Standard Grey Mephiston Red Moot Green Nuln Oil Pallid Wych Flesh Rakarth Flesh Reikland Fleshshade Russ Grey Screamer Pink Squig Orange Steel Legion Drab Sybarite Green Temple Guard Blue Troll Slayer Orange Ulthuan Grey Warpstone Glow Wazdakka Red Xereus Purple Yriel Yellow

ZENITHAL HIGHLIGHTING

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. 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.

1 BASE COLOURS

STAGES

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. Stage 1 is base colours. Base colours are applied using a mix of glazes and flat colours. Stage 2 is applying shading. In this stage we use various washes and glazes to add an element of shading to the models. Stage 3 is highlighting. This stage involves applying a line of your 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. Stage 4 is final highlight. This involves adding a small dot or dash of a colour, generally in the same area as the previous highlight, but focusing on corners or where folds in cloth meet. For hair or fur it involves adding a dot to the tip of each strand. 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. Stage 5 is the final details. This stage involves cleaning up and adding a few spot highlights. This stage also includes painting the base of the model.

3 HIGHLIGHTING

2 SHADING

4 FINAL HIGHLIGHT

Drakenhof Nightshade: Apply across the arm, gun and face. Dark Reaper: Apply a highlight to the folds and hard edges of the fatigues and the cap. Dawnstone: Apply a line highlight to the armour sections. Also, with very little paint on the brush, apply small dashes across the armour surface.

Blue Horror: Add a highlight to the arm and gun, focusing on the corners and hard edges towards the top of the model. Flayed One Flesh: Apply a line highlight to the face. Fenrisian Blue: Add a fine highlight to the fatigues and cap. Sybarite Green: Apply a coat to the eye lens. Lothern Blue: Mix with one part water and apply on and around the wrist screen and the chest are opposite.

1 BASE COLOURS

Mechanicus Standard Grey: Paint the majority of the armour using this grey. Macragge Blue: Pick out sections of the armour and apply one to two coats until you have an even colour. Khorne Red: Paint the visor, lights and pipes. Steel Legion Drab: Apply a coat over the gun.

Dawnstone: Apply a line highlight to all of the grey armour sections. Also, with very little paint on the brush, apply small dashes across the armour surface. Alaitoc Blue: Apply a line highlight to all of the blue armour sections. Again, with very little paint on the brush, apply small dashes across the armour surface. Wazdakka Red: Apply a highlight to the top and hard edges of the visor, over the lights and along the piping. Baneblade Brown: Apply a line highlight to the gun. Temple Guard Blue: Mix with two parts water and lightly apply within the centre ring of the wrist generator.

Blue Horror: Apply a light highlight to the screen and the hard edges around it. Ceramite White: Add a spot highlight to the arm and gun. Pallid Wych Flesh: Add a spot highlight to the face. Gauss Blaster Green: Add an edge highlight to the bottom right of the eye lens. Ceramite White & Abaddon Black: With a tiny amount on the tip of your brush, carefully paint the eye. Once dry add a dot of black to the top, centre.

GRAVES

1 BASE COLOURS

2 SHADING

Drakenhof Nightshade: Apply a coat to all the areas previously coated with Dawnstone. Celestra Grey: Apply a layer over the fatigues, leaving only the recesses the base colour. Yriel Yellow: Apply a layer over the gloves and knee pads, leaving the recesses and bottom edges the base colour. Dark Reaper: Apply a line highlight to the cabling and boots. Squig Orange, Xereus Purple & Sybarite Green: Apply orange over the lights on the arms, joints and chest piece and apply the purple and green to the vials found across the model.

5 FINAL DETAILS

Blue Horror: Add a spot highlight to the edges and the lines of both the blue and grey sections of the armour. Lugganath Orange: Apply a spot highlight to the visor and the centre of the lights. Ceramite White: Mix with three parts water and apply a light wash to the wrist generator.

5 FINAL DETAILS

3 HIGHLIGHTING

Fenrisian Grey: Add a line highlight to the mechanical arms, armour and wrist guards, focusing on corners and hard edges. Ulthuan Grey: Apply a layer over the fatigues, leaving a little more of the base and the previous layer showing through. Dorn Yellow: Apply a line highlight to the gloves and knee pads. Russ Grey: Apply a spot highlight to the cabling and boots. Trollslayer Orange & Moot Green: Apply a layer over the lights and vials.

4 FINAL HIGHLIGHT

Celestra Grey: Apply as an edge highlight to all of the grey armour sections. Also apply a spot highlight to the lines added in the previous stage. Russ Grey: Apply as an edge highlight to all of the blue armour sections. Also apply a spot highlight to the lines added in the previous stage. Squig Orange: Add a fine highlight to the visor, focusing towards the corner created by the last stage. Also add a spot highlight to the lights, and a line just in front of each light. Lothern Blue: Make a mx with two parts water and add a very fine line around the centre disc of the generator. Screaming Skull: Add an edge highlight to the gun.

4 FINAL HIGHLIGHT

MONARCH

Blue Horror: Apply a final highlight to the mechanical arms, armour and wrist guards, focusing on the corners. Flayed One Flesh: Apply a line highlight to the face. Ceramite White: Apply a line highlight to the hard edges of the fatigues. Mephiston Red: Apply a coat over the wires on Dr. Koyner’s head. Lothern Blue: Mix with one part water and apply a coat over the eye lenses. Fire Dragon Bright & Gauss Blaster Green: Apply a spot highlight to the lights and the vials.

Pallid Wych Flesh: Apply a spot highlight to the face. Ceramite White: Apply a spot highlight to the mechanical arms, armour and wrist guards. Ceramite White & Abaddon Black: With a tiny amount on the tip of your brush, carefully paint the eye. Once dry, add a dot of black to the top, centre. Blue Horror: Apply a spot highlight to the eye lenses. Lugganath Orange: Apply a spot highlight to the lights.

January 2018

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IT

O R'

I S CHO

AZUL

More fun than tiling your bathroom! Designer: Michael Kiesling | Artist:

I

t was only a matter of time before someone took term ‘tile-laying’ literally and designed a game about – you guessed it – laying down tiles. Azul embraces this prosaic premise and takes it to a wonderfully colourful place, delivering ambitious gameplay on its way. ‘Azul’ – Spanish and Portuguese for 'blue' – comes from the word ‘azulejos’, decorative tiles used by Portuguese monarch Manuel I. This sets up the game, giving players some background information to justify tiling walls – beyond this, though, the theme is entirely window dressing. This is fairly insignificant as, at its heart, Azul is a quick abstract game with beautifully-made tiles. At a first glance, it might seem that there are a lot of luck elements within the game. After the initial random drawing of tiles out of a bag, however, the game becomes pure strategy. Players can collect tiles of the same colour from one of the plates, moving remaining tiles to the centre. Alternatively, they can also pick from the centre, once at least one tile has been moved there. Once taken by

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5 FINAL DETAILS

Dawnstone: Apply a basecoat to the mechanical arms, armour and wrist guards. Cadian Fleshtone: Apply a basecoat to the face. Fenrisian Grey: Apply a basecoat to the fatigues. Abaddon Black: Apply a coat to the boots and cabling. Jokearo Orange: Apply a basecoat to the gloves and knee pads.

2 SHADING

Nuln Oil: Apply over the entirety of the model in one even coat. Warpstone Glow: Once the wash is dry make a mix with two parts water and apply to the wrist generator..

3 HIGHLIGHTING

Kislev Flesh: Add a layer to the face, leaving the recesses dark. Ulthuan Grey: Apply a spot highlight to the armour, focusing on corners and where the lines from the previous stage meet the edge of the armour. Russ Grey: Apply a line highlight to the fatigues and cap. Fenrisian Grey: Apply a layer over the arm and gun, focusing towards one corner on each section and the edges.

Cadian Fleshtone: Apply one to two light coats to the face until you have an even colour. Abaddon Black: Mix with two parts water and apply a good coat over all of the armour and fatigues. Dawnstone: Apply a basecoat to the arm and gun.

ED

GET YOUR MAGAZINE THE WAY YOU WANT

Chris Quilliams

30-45m

2-4

8+

£40

players a single point. Put tiles adjacent to each other instead and you'll score one point for each tile in a horizontal and vertical row attached to the newly-placed tile. This means that points can rack up quite fast with thoughtful sequence of placements. It also eliminates a possibility of a runaway winner, because one cleverly added tile to the wall can bring in enough points to catch up, even in the last round. Winning in Azul depends entirely on the player and the set of decisions they make during the game. This is not to say that Azul lacks player interaction and opponents cannot influence each other’s moves. In the drafting stage of the game it is quite easy to steal tiles form under an opponent’s nose or, alternatively, leave them with tiles they do not want. This confrontation is most pronounced in a two-player game, where Azul turns into a tense chesslike game of push-and-pull between the players. Despite the simplicity of its mechanics, Azul’s ’s rules can feel fiddly and confusing, especially with its scoring. Azul is the type of game that will ‘click’ after playing it once, and the second time going players will make more strategic and betterinformed decisions. Luckily, one game of Azul,, even with four people, lasts about half an hour, so it is very easy to play just one more.Taking its cues from Azul is everything one would violent revenge movies want from an abstract game; it lookslike Kill Bill and Oldboy, instantly beautiful on the Vengean ce puts table and its gameplay is challenging blood-soaked players in the boots of characte and addictive. The game is hunting really rs good at rewarding players for their down those that have done them wrong thoughtful moves and placements, in order to set them right. For and, despite one minor luck karmic justice. element, there is a real breadth And victory of points, natch choice and decisions to be made throughout the game. Words by Matt Jarvis ALEX SONECHKINA

the player, the tiles are moved to the ‘pattern lines’. Already, this simple action of picking up tiles and placing them on the player mat has a myriad of possible tactical decisions. Players might take a risk and discard several tiles to the middle, in the hope that WHAT’S IN enough tiles of the same colour will THE BOX? accumulate by the time the turn ◗ 100 resin tiles returns to them, allowing them to ◗ Four player boards pick up a lot of them at the same ◗ Nine factory displays time – but there's always the chance ◗ First player marker their opponents might get those ◗ Linen bag tiles ahead of them. The order in which the tiles are transferred to the ‘pattern lines’ is important, too. Which colour is best to build first? Which colours are other players going for? Which combinations need to be picked up to avoid excess tiles WE SAY going to the ‘floor line’ and hence Breathtakingly beautiful and tactically earning a player minus points? exciting, Azul will be a great addition The scoring part of Azul is equally to any board game shelf. While its tactical. Transferring one tile from premise is seemingly mundane, this the pattern line to the ‘wall’ earns is a game unlike any other.

A DISH ST SERVEDBE ROLLED

TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… SAGRADA

Azul has fewer moving parts than Sagrada, , but its drafting and tile-laying mechanics are just as strong and the visuals are equally gorgeous.

January 2018

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January 2018

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13/12/2017 13:22

A DISH BEST SERVED ROLLED

Taking its cues from violent revenge movies like Kill Bill and Oldboy, Vengeance puts players in the blood-soaked boots of characters hunting down those that have done them wrong in order to set them right. For karmic justice. And victory points, natch Words by Matt Jarvis

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13/12/2017 13:27

“T

he axe forgets, but the tree remembers.” Vengeance opens with an African proverb. It’s more than just a clever way to imbue its tales of revenge and reprisal with a particular tone of unrelenting drive and pent-up fury come unleashed. The aphorism also very deliberately brings to mind the opening shots of cinematic efforts from directors from Tarantino to the Coen brothers; from True Grit and John Wick to Gladiator and Inglorious Basterds Basterds, film is full of stories of aggrieved victims rising up to dish out payback on those responsible for their suffering. Vengeance aims to find that same level of heightened emotion and unflinching action in the rolling of dice and drafting of cards. “It’s a board game take on revenge movies – your Kill Bill, thing,” Bill Oldboy-style Oldboy sums up creator Gordon Calleja. “Oldboy, “ more than Kill Bill. The Korean [original] – Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy. The Vengeance trilogy was mainly the inspiration. Kill Bill was second, maybe.” As with any good revenge flick, Vengeance starts with each player’s character being horribly mistreated by one of the game’s cast of baddies, during a phase fittingly titled The Wronging. The antagonists inflict one of three different types of lasting damage to the heroes, from crushing their knee to inflict broken damage, which reduces that character’s combat ability throughout the rest of the game, to mentally scarring them, which limits their ability to heal, upgrade and more. It’s these cards that serve as the thematic motivation that spurs each character to seek justice, but they also serve as a key foundation for the ensuing gameplay, dictating which boss and surrounding gang that player must pursue to maximise their score by the time the cardboard credits roll. This means that players can also choose to ramp up their avatar’s anguish to increase their own challenge, with the potential to reap the rewards if violent karma is delivered.

“At the start when you draft, you have to suffer three cards, but you can suffer as many as you want – the more you suffer, the more damaged you are and the less ability you have, but the more points you can score,” Calleja says. True to its onscreen muses, Vengeance’s core action sees its protagonists working their way through their foe’s underlings before eventually facing their ultimate nemesis at the top of the chain. “The heart of the game is the fight,” enthuses Calleja. Combat is executed with dice rolls that are cashed in to allow each hero to take down an enemy in their current room, a minion in an adjacent room or to move out of an area to avoid taking damage themselves. Upgrades acquired over the course of a playthrough present the chance to modify rolls, helping to deal with the various types of attacker standing in the way – whether it’s cannon fodder needing to be eliminated first, blockers restricting the character’s movement or tough guys able to deal extra hits. “Each of these minions has a different ability,” Calleja explains. “That’s how the dice-based puzzle works. It’s like a dungeon crawler. The difference is here it’s a post-luck situation – you have your dice rolled and then you make your decisions after, rather than make your decisions then roll dice, which is what most dungeon crawlers do. It’s pre-luck versus post-luck.”

GONNA NEED A MONTAGE Dispatching adversaries may be where Vengeance’s title rings truest, but it’s not all there is to the game. Just as the best action movies establish their characters’ motives and justify their superhuman-seeming abilities, Calleja has integrated natural lulls in the fighting to allow Vengeance’s characters – and players – to catch their breath and prepare for the next battle. “The game alternates between montage phases, which are your classic Eye of the Tiger ‘getting better’ training, and going out to recon,” he details. Each montage consists of players selecting cards and drafting dice from a central pool to set up their next run at taking down their rival, before seeking out the boss or their affiliated gang members in one of several different locations during the recon phase. “These are like little snapshots, little scenarios, vignettes,” Calleja says of the separate environments that are placed next to each other on the table and can be tackled by different players at the same time, in a blending

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VENGEANCE

of simultaneous action that brings to mind the splitscreen visuals and parallel editing associated with 24, The Godfather and The Silence of the Lambs. The result is a game that the designer is confident pays ample thematic homage to its filmic inspirations and conjures the right emotional responses from players without diluting or losing its interactive aspects as a board game. “I always start with the theme,” Calleja reveals. “This and [2015 post-apocalyptic survival game] Posthuman, all my games are theme first. So theme/idea first, then I start shaping the mechanics, then I develop the theme more, then I develop the mechanics more. It’s an iterative process between rules and story or images in the player’s mind. I try to have things that are not abstracted but rather little actions to stimulate those sequences of little mental images that create a sort of ongoing story.” Calleja’s commitment to mimicking not only the tone of movies, but also their gradual build-up of dramatic momentum, helps keep the background mechanisms of the gameplay tight, ensuring that a match of Vengeance would play out in the same time it might take to watch a silver screen blockbuster. “It’s two hours for four people,” Calleja states confidently. “The idea was to keep it two hours, and it’s two hours. When you play with a timer, if you’re speedy, you can play in an hour and a half. Test groups that take up the time or don’t play with a timer take about two hours.” Despite the game’s rip-roaring action movie feel, Calleja says that early versions of Vengeance were stretched to wearisome lengths by players failing to take the necessary risks and live out the momentto-moment fight for survival demanded by the genre. “The fight was always the same,” the designer recalls. “The fight was there, and the theme and the overall [idea of] you needing to find the guys and score them by going to find them, that was there. But the montage was the thing that changed a lot. Initially you chose whether you fought or stayed in – montage or fight. But we found after a couple of months of testing that one group was taking really long, like four hours, because they were playing really safely. They’d heal everything, upgrade everything and then go in. So the only way to keep it under a certain amount of time was to have that structure.

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“I took the inspiration from movies themselves that have a structure and went for a prelude, The Wronging and then acts one, two and three that replicate that kind of movie structure. That worked a lot better because I could control the time. That was the biggest change.” Although Vengeance’s dice-driven exploits are inherently reliant on luck and keep the feeling of tension running suitably high, Calleja is keen to stress that players still have plenty of agency and control over the outcome of their quest for retribution. “Initially the montage was only dice and that’s it,” he says. “Then we added the cards to make it a bit less luck-based. Then there’s two modes – easy mode and a hardcore mode, which is the more interesting and tactical one. In easy mode, you have six cards, you choose three of them and play them and get them back. In hardcore mode, you play your three, then you discard two of them. So you only keep one and you cannot use them again. So you have to kind of plan an arc.” The more strategic aspects of the game can be highlighted further by removing the use of a three-minute sand timer, which is used in the standard mode to force players to make quick decisions during the fighting phase. “Some test groups didn’t want to use the timer,” Calleja says. “Then it becomes a much more tactical attempt to get the perfect combination of moves. At first it’s

easy when you have only your first upgrade and it’s easy to mitigate the rolls and stuff, but then when you get lots of these chained together it can become quite a head-spin.” Another proposed variant isn’t found in the core box, but is instead set to be released as a separate expansion that reintroduces direct player-versus-player combat to the game, dramatically altering the dynamic of the otherwise passively competitive setup. The Saboteurs set allows players to recruit the titular guns-for-hire and plant them on a gang’s den, ambushing rival characters as they attempt to chase down their target. “We found that most of our testers did not want that kind of direct conflict, so we left that type of conflict out of the main game and put it in a separate place,” Calleja reveals. Perhaps even more intriguing than Vengeance’s multiplayer mode is its solo campaign, which sees a single character play through a predetermined narrative based on their in-universe history. Replacing the competition with fellow avengers and randomised elements with a more focused perspective, it’s the closest the game comes to offering a scripted, movie-like experience. “Each character, on the back, you have a backstory and setup sheet for the solo game,” explains Calleja. “Then it tells you which vengeance decks you use and how to prepare the boss deck. You have a story for that character.

The heart of the game is the fight.

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“You can do this thing like it tells you the backstory, what they’re trying to do – ‘He’s getting back at the guy who wrecked his punk club’ – and you go through the various objectives you need to get. Some of them are simple – go nab this boss – and then they get more complex as the character progresses.”

THREE CHEERS FOR SWEET REVENGE With its in-built narrative structure, character-centric drama and fast-paced, dice-powered combat, Vengeance’s cinematic world of troubled heroes and pervasive archvillains might seem like a setting ripe for further exploration. Calleja answers carefully when asked about the possibility of a follow-up that would allow him to double-down on the storytelling aspect, such as a roleplaying game. “Yes,” he replies coyly after a brief pause. “Actually, I’m working on something using the same dice-based system at the moment. It’ll be a co-operative RPG-ish thing. That’s all I can say about it at the moment. That’s the idea. “I seem to enjoy making things using rules to create story. I’m a games researcher and a games academic, so I write a lot about game narrative and involvement and immersion. So I guess that stuff finds its way through the board games. Initially Posthuman was created as an illustration of this series of papers I’ve been writing on emergent narrative in games. I made a board game to try and illustrate it. That’s where this all started.” Calleja is openly passionate when it comes to his attempts to push the ability of board games to emotionally engage players and tell stories that go beyond the linear form of film – while still boasting a comparable level of refined artistry and overall vision. His latest project may be indebted to the cinema screen and played on the tabletop, yet the designer outwardly expresses a desire to imprint his stylistic intent on a canvas touched by film and games alike. “My main job is in video game research and I have a video game studio, Mighty Box,” he says. “It’s been nice moving over to the cardboard world. I feel like I have more of a direct relationship with the imaginations of my players, because they have to animate the rules and pieces and art internally rather than have that worked out for you onscreen. That’s what I enjoy. “You have to fill in those gaps, right? Scott McCloud has a great book on comics and how the work in-between the panels is what generates or stimulates the imagination more than anything else. That’s the kind of thing I try to do with my games.”

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STRANGE ENCOUNTERS

STREAMING AHEAD Watching people play RPGs and board games online has never been more popular – and the boom in livestreaming on YouTube and Twitch is leading to a new wave of on-screen stars

F

Words by Richard Jansen-Parkes rom increased sales, booming convention numbers and the success of this very magazine, it’s clear that tabletop gaming is enjoying a bit of a renaissance. There are dozens of strands that have all contributed to this trend, but it’s hard to get the numbers and stats needed to fully quantify their impact. Recently, however, Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast revealed one

interesting nugget of information: more than 50% of players who started with the roleplaying game’s latest fifth edition got into it through watching people play online. This is backed by numbers from popular streaming platform Twitch, which show that the amount of D&D content its users produce has been doubling each year since 2017. These are the kind of numbers that can shape an industry.

It seems strange to call someone a veteran of an industry that’s only been around a handful of years, but if you could call anybody a veteran streamer it would be Will Jones. The founder of Encounter Roleplay, Jones has been living, breathing and sleeping tabletop RPGs since setting the group up in 2015. What started as a hobby has morphed into a full-time career that has taken him across the globe. “I started DMing when I was just 10 or 11, roping in my family to play with me, and it all spiralled out of control from there,” he says. “Twitch is quite similar in a way. This feels like something I’ve been doing for much, much longer than I actually have been.” From humble beginnings, the Encounter Roleplay network has blossomed to include ten different weekly shows, ranging from a horrific Call of Cthulhu campaign to a high fantasy D&D playthrough. Its Twitch channel is followed by more than 19,000 people and the group recently launched a Kickstarter campaign for its own adventures. One of the advantages of livestreaming RPGs, and why the format has proved so successful, Jones says, is the way it allows content creators and audiences to interact directly. “We used to run a Q&A show,” he explains. “People would ask us about DMing or playing the games and we’d talk back. But I realised that what would actually be best would be to actually provide real examples – to run through games in a way that allowed us to talk directly to the audience while playing. “That’s something you couldn’t achieve if the format didn’t work like this. That’s one of the big advantages you get from streaming, and why it’s been so popular, I think. It’s been

STREAMER SELECTIONS DICE, CAMERA, ACTION!

Hosted by industry legend Chris Perkins, this D&D liveplay stars a motley band of YouTubers and streamers – Holly Conrad, Jared Knabenbauer, Anna Prosser Robinson and Nathan Sharp – as they look to defeat evil and overcome terrible dice rolls. twitch.tv/dnd

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FRONTLINE GAMING

If you’re a fan of competitive Warhammer you probably know about the Independent Tournament Circuit. What you may not know is that the company behind the ITC rules, USbased Frontline Gaming, streams competitive games most nights through its Twitch channel. twitch.tv/frontlinegaming_tv

YOGSQUEST

The Yogscast crew are best known for their work on video games, but their Yogsquest show cuts down on the tech for a focus on pen-andpaper RPGs. Like many others they started out with D&D, but have since embraced several of the other systems out there. twitch.tv/yogscast

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great to see the explosion in the people playing RPGs online since we started.”

MAJOR PLAYERS Of course, it isn’t just the fans that are turning their eyes to streaming. Tabletop developers and publishers across the globe have leapt upon the idea of having fans show their love for their products online and, for the most part, are moving to support and foster growth wherever they can. While D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast is perhaps the most visible company to make a major move into livestreaming – its latest major announcements have all come through streaming events and its Twitch channel features a huge range of shows, including one from Encounter Roleplay – others are also taking a major interest. Games Workshop has run its ‘Warhammer TV’ channel on Twitch and YouTube for several years now and has moved to livestreaming major tournaments and events, while board games giant Asmodee teamed up with Twitch to showcase content from the 2017 Essen gaming expo. Even when companies aren’t moving directly into the streaming circuit themselves, more and more are putting out video content that at least feels inspired by the movement – less

formalised rules explanations and pre-scripted adverts, more chatter and realistic gameplay. Modiphius, publisher of countless RPGs, board games and wargames, has started putting out video content with precisely this kind of feel. In the run-up to the release of Fallout: Wasteland Warfare, founder Chris Birch and wargames manager Jon Webb put out a series of videos showing themselves playing through the game that had a friendly, informal feel reminiscent of fan-made streams. “We’re always trying to be quite friendly as a business – to be open and talk directly to our fans,” explains Birch. “That means we don’t always want to be highly polished, super-edited. We want to talk to people at their level rather than talk down to them.” The company has certainly embraced this approach, which highlights one of the other advantages to getting games and other products out in front of fans and streamers alike – it allows developers to communicate directly with the communities that buy their products and play their games. Birch notes that “this doesn’t always mean doing exactly what the loudest, shoutiest voices are saying,” but nevertheless provides another

Talking directly to the audience while playing is one of the big advantages of streaming.

ENCOUNTER ROLEPLAY

It’s rare to find a group of people so committed to their cause as the Encounter Roleplay team. The sheer range of shows they offer is baffling, as is the quality. Lose your mind with Lovecraftian horror one day, fight a dragon the next. encounterroleplay.com

CRITICAL ROLE

The granddaddy of all RPG streams, Critical Role has spawned fans in the hundreds of thousands and helped to shape D&D’s explosion into the mainstream. The original campaign has finished, but new ideas are on the way and the archives remain a treat. twitch.tv/geekandsundry

route for fans to communicate, in the same way that the streamers themselves can interact with their watchers. “At the moment we’re focusing mainly on recorded video, but we’re setting up to do livestreaming,” he adds. “With a worldwide fanbase, being live isn’t necessarily always a bonus. Especially as much of our audience is in the US; if we want to talk to them we either need to schedule things at a weird hour or just assume that much of the audience isn’t going to watch it live.”

WHATEVER WORKS One of the exciting and worrying things about being on the cutting edge is working out what works and what doesn’t. Even when you think you have that nailed down, some new technology or approach comes along and quickly changes that, too. Just a decade ago most people would have laughed at the idea of millions of people watching strangers stream themselves playing video games, but now we live in a world where more than 15 million people tune into Twitch every day – and that’s only one site among many. There are technical and logistical challenges when it comes to showing live gameplay at the tabletop, even when compared to ‘conventional’ video games. Ideally you need several cameras and mics, all of which need to be set up correctly and reliable enough to run for several hours without any issues. Even when you have the practical side of things solved, there’s the more esoteric side of things to settle. Do you show a battle grid, if you have one? How about character sheets and dice rolls? What do you do about things like secret rolls and notes passed to the DM? Is it even possible to stream something like Battlestar Galactica or Dead of Winter, where vital information being hidden on a tiny card is an integral part of the experience? “Wargames always look great on camera, and RPGs are getting better and better as people work out how to present that stuff,” says Birch. “Shield of Tomorrow, the Star Trek Adventures show from Geek & Sundry on Twitch, is a great example of that. “Ultimately, it all comes down to the people. With the right people, and the right chemistry, anything can look good. I’m a huge fan of Watch It Played, a show by Rodney Smith, because he’s such a passionate and engaged fan of the games he’s talking about. You can’t help but want to play them! “Likewise, you can sometimes get people playing a great game – but if they’re boring…” No matter what happens next for tabletop gaming, it’s hard to imagine that streaming is going to go away anytime soon. The only real uncertainty lies in where the next major success will be.

tabletopgaming.co.uk

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PLAYED January 2018

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64 63

65

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62 AZUL

72 BETRAYAL AT BALDUR’S GATE

63 PULSAR 2849

73 EX LIBRIS

64 SID MEIER’S CIVILIZATION: A NEW DAWN

74 HUNT FOR THE RING

65 D&D: XANATHAR’S GUIDE TO EVERYTHING

77 PHOTOSYNTHESIS

75 SIDEREAL CONFLUENCE

67 INDIAN SUMMER

78 ARISTEIA!

68 CLANK! IN! SPACE!

79 ELITE ENCOUNTERS

69 QUEENDOMINO

80 INBETWEEN

70 RAXXON

80 ASSET DROP

71 MASSIVE DARKNESS

81 DRAGON CASTLE

tabletopgaming.co.uk

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AZUL

More fun than tiling your bathroom! Designer: Michael Kiesling | Artist: Chris Quilliams

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t was only a matter of time before someone took term ‘tile-laying’ literally and designed a game about – you guessed it – laying down tiles. Azul embraces this prosaic premise and takes it to a wonderfully colourful place, delivering ambitious gameplay on its way. ‘Azul’ – Spanish and Portuguese for 'blue' – comes from the word ‘azulejos’, decorative tiles used by Portuguese monarch Manuel I. This sets up the game, giving players some background information to justify tiling walls – beyond this, though, the theme is entirely window dressing. This is fairly insignificant as, at its heart, Azul is a quick abstract game with beautifully-made tiles. At a first glance, it might seem that there are a lot of luck elements within the game. After the initial random drawing of tiles out of a bag, however, the game becomes pure strategy. Players can collect tiles of the same colour from one of the plates, moving remaining tiles to the centre. Alternatively, they can also pick from the centre, once at least one tile has been moved there. Once taken by

62

WHAT’S IN THE BOX?

◗ 100 resin tiles ◗ Four player boards ◗ Nine factory displays ◗ First player marker ◗ Linen bag

30-45m

2-4

8+

£40

the player, the tiles are moved to the ‘pattern lines’. Already, this simple action of picking up tiles and placing them on the player mat has a myriad of possible tactical decisions. Players might take a risk and discard several tiles to the middle, in the hope that enough tiles of the same colour will accumulate by the time the turn returns to them, allowing them to pick up a lot of them at the same time – but there's always the chance their opponents might get those tiles ahead of them. The order in which the tiles are transferred to the ‘pattern lines’ is important, too. Which colour is best to build first? Which colours are other players going for? Which combinations need to be picked up to avoid excess tiles going to the ‘floor line’ and hence earning a player minus points? The scoring part of Azul is equally tactical. Transferring one tile from the pattern line to the ‘wall’ earns

players a single point. Put tiles adjacent to each other instead and you'll score one point for each tile in a horizontal and vertical row attached to the newly-placed tile. This means that points can rack up quite fast with thoughtful sequence of placements. It also eliminates a possibility of a runaway winner, because one cleverly added tile to the wall can bring in enough points to catch up, even in the last round. Winning in Azul depends entirely on the player and the set of decisions they make during the game. This is not to say that Azul lacks player interaction and opponents cannot influence each other’s moves. In the drafting stage of the game it is quite easy to steal tiles form under an opponent’s nose or, alternatively, leave them with tiles they do not want. This confrontation is most pronounced in a two-player game, where Azul turns into a tense chesslike game of push-and-pull between the players. Despite the simplicity of its mechanics, Azul’s rules can feel fiddly and confusing, especially with its scoring. Azul is the type of game that will ‘click’ after playing it once, and the second time going players will make more strategic and betterinformed decisions. Luckily, one game of Azul, even with four people, lasts about half an hour, so it is very easy to play just one more. Azul is everything one would want from an abstract game; it looks instantly beautiful on the table and its gameplay is challenging and addictive. The game is really good at rewarding players for their thoughtful moves and placements, and, despite one minor luck element, there is a real breadth of choice and decisions to be made throughout the game. ALEX SONECHKINA

WE SAY Breathtakingly beautiful and tactically exciting, Azul will be a great addition to any board game shelf. While its premise is seemingly mundane, this is a game unlike any other.

TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… SAGRADA

Azul has fewer moving parts than Sagrada, but its drafting and tile-laying mechanics are just as strong and the visuals are equally gorgeous.

January 2018

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PULSAR 2849

There’s limitless energy in them thar stars… Designer: Vladimír Suchý | Artist: Sören Meding

60-100m

2-4

14+

£40

WHAT’S IN THE BOX?

◗ Star cluster board ◗ Dice board ◗ Gyrodyne board ◗ Die modifier board ◗ Six double-sided

technology boards

◗ Four HQ boards ◗ 24 transmitter tiles ◗ 17 planetary

system tiles

◗ Six goal tiles ◗ 30 gyrodyne tiles ◗ 24 pulsar claim rings ◗ Six construction

award tiles

◗ 12 exploration

bonus tiles

◗ Four 100-point tiles ◗ 12 +/-1 die

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ith its central, circular star cluster board and curving peripheral mats – including a stack of technology boards that trail pleasingly out like the tail of a comet – Pulsar 2849 certainly looks the cosmicenergy-harnessing business. So much so, it’s initially rather overwhelming. Planetary system tiles, colourthemed interstellar routes, a dice board, pulsar-power-harnessing gyrodynes, modular transmitters, die modifier tokens and tracks for both engineering (which rewards cubes that in turn reward a bonus die) and initiative (aka turn order) – not to mention playermat HQs with their own pyramidically arranged extra actions – mean the first few plays will need to be approached carefully and with much reference to the rulebook. But once you start rolling (literally, as Pulsar’s driven by dice drafting), you’ll gradually come to appreciate the absorbing theme and fine-tuned balance that lie beneath the pretty-but-bewildering surface. After a couple of quaintly humorous games (2011’s Last Will and 2015’s The Prodigal’s Club), designer Vladimír Suchý has returned to the more epic territory of his earlier titles, like Shipyard (2009) and 20th Century

modifier tokens

◗ Nine +2 die

(2010). Except, for the first time, he’s gone sci-fi rather than historical, pitting players against each other in the galactic equivalent of a gold rush (the date in the title is deliberately a millennium after the famous 1849 Californian scramble for gold). It’s not shiny metal you’re after but interstellar energy generated by pulsars, which you race to reach before your competitors, before constructing immense gyrodynamic generators (or gyrodynes) and setting them spinning. It might help to build a few energy transmission arrays to help distribute this energy to all the planets you’ve discovered and established stations on. Every possible action (there are tons to choose from, varying from game to game depending on your layout) is determined by the result of a die roll, with seven tossed at the start of each of the game’s eight rounds in a two- to three-player bout and nine with four people. You can only select two dice each per round (plus possible bonus dice, whose value you quickly come to appreciate), so you have to think extra carefully about those choices. Suchý rather smartly adds another level of decision-making; with a median value attached to each round’s

roll, picking a low number provides you with a mitigating bonus move up one of the two aforementioned tracks. For example, taking a one could push you into pole position for receiving enough engineering cubes to purchase a high-numbered bonus die on a future turn. In contrast, going for a sweet high number moves you back, with possible penalties to your victory point tally at the end of each round. Like all good Euros there are multiple routes to victory and minimal take-thatiness. Even if someone snatches a die you were craving, you have many other options; and besides, you’ll likely have a handy modifier token you can use. It’s impressively elegant, and each replay allows whole new strategies to be explored. Like the black hole that sits at the hub of that attractively cornerless board, it will utterly suck you in. DAN JOLIN

modifier tokens

◗ 25 engineering cubes ◗ 12 four-cube tokens ◗ 120 player tokens ◗ 12 rocket figures ◗ Median marker ◗ Time marker ◗ Nine silver dice ◗ Red bonus dice ◗ Technology manual ◗ Four quick

reference sheets

TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… CASTLES OF BURGUNDY

Like Stefan Feld’s fief-building Euro classic, Pulsar combines dice drafting with limited action selection and a wide array of action choices to fantastic effect.

WE SAY A triumphant, innovative blend of mechanism and theme; whether you dig racing spaceships, exploring systems or constructing immense moneymaking structures, Pulsar 2849 delivers in space-spades.

tabletopgaming.co.uk

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SID MEIER’S CIVILIZATION: A NEW DAWN Build an empire in a flash with this elegant strategy game Designer: James Kniffen | Artist: Various

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espite its suggestive title, A New Dawn bears little in common with the two previous board game adaptations of Sid Meier’s popular strategy series. Nor does it share much DNA with the classic Avalon Hill Civilization that originally inspired the PC game franchise. The main surprise for fans of epic empire-building favourites such as Through the Ages, Clash of Cultures or Civilization will be that A New Dawn isn’t a multi-hour marathon of complex technology trees (a system that the original Civ pioneered), micro-management and gradual cultural evolution from the beginning of humanity to the modern age and beyond. A New Dawn can be learnt, played and packed away in well under two hours – a feat rarely heard of in this genre. Despite its relatively short length, the game ticks almost all of the boxes you’d expect from a quality civ-builder. There’s the expansion of territory, advancement of tech, forging (and breaking) of diplomatic bonds and option for direct conflict when the need arises. It’s just all been elegantly condensed and streamlined into a game that – while perhaps not as deep as the heavyweights – manages to occupy a very comfortable space as a still meaty filler. What makes the game particularly pacey is the decision to make each turn consist of a single action, rather than covering every element of running an

64

WHAT’S IN THE BOX?

◗ Eight leader sheets ◗ 16 map tiles ◗ Event dial ◗ 80 focus cards ◗ Four tech dials ◗ 16 city-state

diplomacy cards

◗ 16 player

diplomacy cards

◗ Five victory cards ◗ 24 world

wonder cards

◗ 24 world

wonder tokens

◗ Barbarian

direction token

◗ Four city-state tokens ◗ Eight water tokens ◗ Four natural

wonder tokens

◗ 124 control tokens ◗ 44 plastic figures

(capital cities, cities, caravans) ◗ 32 resource tokens ◗ Nine barbarian tokens ◗ 34 trade tokens ◗ Two six-sided tokens ◗ Four focus bars

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empire at once. One turn you might choose to attack nearby barbarians (which randomly move and respawn between the players' turns) or conquer a city-state; the next you might instead focus on expanding your territory by placing more control tokens or advancing your caravans across the map to establish diplomacy and trade with your neighbours. This not only helps those less familiar with the multifaceted strategy of empire-builders understand what’s going on, but also keeps everyone engaged as control quickly bounces between players. The vast majority of actions are dictated by five cards in a focus bar representing the broad strategic pillars, which are reset to the back of the queue after they’re used. Waiting to use a card makes it more powerful (greater combat strength, more tech points, the ability to expand into tougher terrain and so on), making the main tension of the game more akin to a tight hand management card game than a traditional strategy board game. The five cards can be upgraded by gathering enough tech points, but there’s no fixed linear progression – a starting card can be replaced with the most advanced version without needing to go through the two stages between. This keeps up the momentum and avoids funneling

2-4

14+

£50

players down a particular play style, but it does detract from the typical satisfaction of watching your empire progressively advance through the eras, leaving things feeling a little more thematically disjointed. The victory conditions are similarly less clear-cut, requiring three random achievements spread across the 4X spectrum rather than presenting the chance to win with a singular focus. On the whole, A New Dawn looks great, with a fantastic modular map and plastic miniatures for cities and caravans, supplemented by basic but easily-read counters that slightly abstract a kind of combined workerwarrior presence. Although one of the game’s strengths is its relative simplicity and most of the rules are communicated by the cards, some of the specific details (what you get for defeating a barbarian, what’s gained from trading with a city-state) will require referring back to the rulebook – at least until you’ve memorised them, which admittedly doesn’t take long. Each starting faction has a different unique skill and starting order, giving just enough of a sense of distinctness between them. A New Dawn packs so much of the satisfaction of a far heavier and longer game into its comparatively modest offering. It’s not a replacement for the grand epics of the genre, but it’s a brilliant option for those looking for an experience that still feels meaningful and engaging but could be played in a lunchtime. MATT JARVIS

WE SAY While it doesn’t have quite the same sense of grandeur as the classics in the genre, A New Dawn is a streamlined and satisfying empirebuilder that manages to do a lot with a little. It’s a perfect gateway option for strategy newcomers and a pleasing filler for diehard fans.

TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… CLASH OF CULTURES

With its smartly-crafted gameplay, A New Dawn condenses the strategy and feeling of weighter empire-builders into a mere fraction of the time.

January 2018

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D&D: XANATHAR’S GUIDE TO EVERYTHING Fifth Edition levels up in its first major expansion Designer: Wizards RPG team | Artist: Various

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t can be a little tricky to describe what Xanathar’s Guide to Everything (XGtE) represents. The core of the book is a wealth of new options for building and playing Dungeons & Dragons characters, but there are also clarifications or refinements of existing rules, as well as fresh advice on encounter- and campaign-building far beyond what you would expect of a simple supplement. In many ways the slightly unfocused air of XGtE is a reflection of how modern games – both tabletop and digital – are no longer static products, eternally fixed at version 1.0. It was clearly shaped by community feedback and directly addresses many of the questions and concerns that regularly crop up in Reddit threads and Twitter feeds. Sometimes this means clearing up ambiguous rules, such as setting out the penalties for sleeping in armour or determining whether player characters can tell what spell an enemy mage is casting. Mostly, however, it involves setting out a whole load of new rules for subclasses, equipment and spells. Even these new options are based around what the D&D community has

2+

£42

been looking for – or, at least, what the most vocal part has been looking for. Many of the character options are designed to take routes that some players felt were missing from the initial release, such as a ‘death’ cleric that focuses on helping the fallen rest for good rather than turning them into cackling zombies. There’s also been a real focus on letting players translate some less traditional fantasy archetypes from their head to the tabletop without the need for reflavouring or house-ruling existing content. For example, with the inquisitive rogue sub-class you can now create a Sherlock Holmesesque investigator with an eye for detail and a fighting style based around reading enemy movements, while new spells allow brawny warrior-wizards to mix it up in close combat and still pump out damage. Barring one or two missteps – the designers have already acknowledged that some groups may want to houserule an ultra-efficient healing spell – the new character options presented

in XGtE are great fun and slot snugly into the existing ruleset. In many ways, the fact that the new rules feel fun without seeming overpowered is perhaps the book’s biggest success of all. Major RPGs such as D&D tend to suffer from a phenomenon known as ‘power creep’. This is where the developers feel the need to push out new content – classes, races, magic items and so on – that begins to eclipse the earlier options in terms of raw power or usefulness. D&D's fifth edition has thus far steered well clear of this problem and has showed considerable restraint in terms of new supplements but, as XGtE is arguably the first major content update, many veterans were keeping an eye out for the telltale signs of the creep. For the most part, this doesn’t seem to be a problem. There are a few things that appeal to the power gamers out there, but this is always going to be the case and none of them seem to make any existing abilities or characters completely obsolete. Indeed, plenty of the content doesn’t have any impact on the gameplay whatsoever, such as a guide for generating character backstories or long tables of random names for the DM to consult when players insist on speaking to everyone in the tavern. The best way to describe XGtE, perhaps, is that it upgrades your experience to D&D 5.1. It’s a huge content update that tweaks things here and there, presented with all the usual top-notch design and writing work we’ve come to expect from the D&D team. Arguably some of the rules clarifications should be presented as errata or an update to the existing core books rather than requiring you to buy a new one, but when that’s the biggest complaint going you know you have a success on your hands. RICHARD JANSENPARKES

WE SAY It’s a little on the pricey side for what you get, but Xanathar’s Guide to Everything is an excellent way to upgrade your group’s Dungeons & Dragons experience.

TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… D&D: PLAYER’S HANDBOOK

While you certainly don’t need XGtE to play the latest edition of D&D, its additions and clarifications mean it's definitely worth grabbing a copy if you can.

tabletopgaming.co.uk

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Now go to the next level with

Available at your local friendly boardgame store! Retailer contact: Coiledspring Games, Unit C1, Twickenham Trading Estate, RugbyRoad, Twickenham, TW1 1DQ T: + 44 (0)20 3301 11 60 — E: [emailprotected] p066.indd 1

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INDIAN SUMMER

Take a relaxing walk through the woods in search of treasure with the creator of Agricola Designer: Uwe Rosenberg | Artist: Andrea Boekhoff

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few years ago video games saw a strangely controversial new genre emerge: games in which you explored an environment and looked at things. Dubbed ‘walking simulators’, they were a tranquil, meditative alternative to the running and gunning of bigbudget titles. Now board games are producing a similar genre: gentle games with themes so laid back they’re practically horizontal filled with elements guaranteed to give you warm fuzzy feelings: fallen leaves, autumn berries, hazelnuts, badgers, squirrels – and Uwe Rosenberg. Indian Summer is the sequel to 2015’s Cottage Garden, and the second part in a ‘puzzle trilogy’ of games by the designer of Agricola, Bohnanza and Patchwork. Both Cottage and Indian, and Patchwork too, involve arranging odd-shaped tiles to cover boards, where some of the spaces you cover have special effects.

January 2018

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WHAT’S IN THE BOX?

◗ Six forest floor boards ◗ Two game boards ◗ 75 leaf tiles ◗ 20 animal tiles ◗ 32 squirrel tiles ◗ 80 treasures ◗ Four backpacks

(player aids)

◗ Berry bush ◗ Hiking shoes tile

15-60m

1-4

10+

£38

Here, each player gets a board showing part of the forest floor, including what the game calls ‘treasures’: mushrooms, berries, feathers and nuts. Each also gets a hand of five tiles showing fallen leaves, which can be red (five squares), orange (four) or green (three). All the pieces are gorgeous. They’re not flashy, but they’re beautifully harmonious and work together to build up a lovely collage of autumnal detritus. However, each tile also has a hole in it, and if you can position that hole over a treasure then you put a relevant token over the hole. Complete a subsection of the board and you can claim every token on it. Complete a particular arrangement of holes and you can cover them with an animal tile, which gives you

more tokens and makes your board even prettier. First to fill their board ends the game, but there are some special conditions that may snatch the victory from you and shatter your inner calm. Two styles of play become obvious quickly. You can arrange leaves, tokens and the occasional animal in a pleasing fashion, and Indian Summer is great for that. It’s a lovely, very satisfying game to play. Its theme of having a walk through the woods doesn’t quite fit, but you’ll feel you’re doing well right up to the moment you lose, and you won’t really care because it’s the kind of game where you can swap nuts for squirrels to fill holes in your pattern. It’s just nice. Or you can realise the way to win is using the treasures effectively, because each one can be spent for an advantage – refilling your hand early, taking other players’ tiles and so on – and you can spend more than one each turn. If every player twigs this, the game stops being a nice walk through the forest and becomes a frantic sprint trying to avoid muggers. This is Indian Summer’s true form, and where you’ll have most fun on replays. There’s also a solo-play ruleset, where the ‘puzzle trilogy’ earns its name. You have just ten turns to fill your board, and it is properly hard. Indian Summer is the child of Patchwork and the sibling of Cottage Garden, but its mechanics are more elegant (though twiddly in places), its gameplay more holistic and its charm more obvious. It is not a truly great game – if you already own one of its relatives then don’t feel you have to have this – but, for the connoisseur, watching a master designer work through variations on a theme is a true pleasure. JAMES WALLIS

WE SAY The core gameplay is nothing new, but this is not the same game as Cottage Garden and its bucolic theme hides tactical depth. Not many games make you ask yourself whether you should risk shattering the tranquility around the table by grabbing the win.

TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… BÄRENPARK

If you prefer the woods without bears shitting in them, Indian Summer is a more elegant and less numeric exploration of a similar tile-placing mechanic.

tabletopgaming.co.uk

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CLANK! IN! SPACE! In space, no one can hear you laugh. But you probably won’t. Designer: Paul Dennen | Artist: Rayph Biesner

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016’s Clank! combined Dominion-style deckbuilding with dungeon-crawling fantasy, with players sneaking through subterranean caverns, stealing priceless treasures and avoiding the ire of a justifiably angry dragon. It generated considerable buzz online, and now it’s spawned a sci-fi sequel, Clank! In! Space!, which swaps swords and spells for lasers and lightsabers. At its core, the follow-up will feel familiar to anyone who’s played games like Star Realms or Marvel Legendary. You start with a handful of low-powered cards, adding new, more impressive ones to your deck with each passing round. Clank! In! Space! builds on the deckbuilding formula, though, with a board representing a space station; you use the cards in your hand to explore its twisting maze of corridors, conveyor belts and teleporter pads in search of high-tech goodies to pilfer. Like its predecessor, the game’s biggest hook is its emphasis on stealth. As you move around the board you generate noise, represented by cubes in each player’s colour. These go into an ominous black bag and

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WHAT’S IN THE BOX?

◗ Modular board ◗ 180+ cards ◗ 80+ tokens ◗ Market board ◗ Five power crystals ◗ Player cubes,

markers and pawns

◗ Boss cubes, marker

and cloth bag

45-90m

2-4

12+

£56

can prove fatal when Lord Eradikus, the station’s commander, attacks at random intervals throughout the game. When that happens, you draw some cubes from the bag, with players taking damage whenever one of their own appears. Bigger, more effective moves generate more noise, meaning you can never be sure whether an audacious play will earn you a glorious victory – or a splattery death. It adds drama to proceedings, but it also introduces an element that’s been virtually abandoned in modern game design: player elimination. Suffer too much damage and you’ll be knocked out of the race. Escape before your rivals and you’ll be sidelined while they finish the game without you. In either case, you’ll be reduced to a secondary role, pulling cubes from the bag of doom to inflict additional pain on your remaining opponents. It’s not particularly entertaining, and it isn’t the only place where the game shows some rough edges. Its deckbuilding

element comes with a decent assortment of strategies to discover, but little that other games haven’t done already. The nerdy sense of humour, which incorporates tongue-in-cheek references to everything from Star Trek to Hitchhiker’s Guide, suffers from the Munchkin problem of losing its comedic punch after your first playthrough. The game does manage to create an atmosphere of ramping tension, with boss attacks getting deadlier over time. Its combination of clever cardplay and board-based thievery also throws up some interesting problems to solve, and for fans of the original Clank!, this deep-space reimagining offers some tweaks on its predecessor’s blueprint. But if you’re in the market for a deckbuilding board game, you aren’t short of choices – and Clank! In! Space! does little to elevate itself above the middle of the pack. OWEN DUFFY

WE SAY Clank! In! Space! creates some tricky logistical puzzles and its bag-building damage system makes for some tense moments, but it’s hampered by player elimination, a deckbuilding system that offers little new for experienced players and an over-reliance on pop culture injokes that quickly becomes grating.

TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… CLANK!

Clank! In! Space! takes the underlying mechanical pinnings of Clank! and provides some new elements to play with in its futuristic sci-fi setting.

January 2018

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11/12/2017 17:14

QUEENDOMINO A royal occasion to celebrate Designer: Bruno Cathala | Artist: Cyril Bouquet

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without finding yourself unable to act in later rounds. This tension is increased by the way that buildings on the board decrease in cost as other structures are built, meaning that holding off on purchasing a tile – and hoping your opponents don’t take it in the meantime – can be crucial. The expanded number of ways to gather points outside of just having the biggest territories means there’s more opportunity for closer competition and routes to victory – something sure to please those who felt Kingdomino was overly simplistic. The race to construct certain buildings first and compete for the favours of the queen adds a few more layers of player interaction to the game on top of the fundamental selection of dominos – especially in the way that the dragon can be coaxed from its cave to burn down one of the available buildings, leaving a gap in the row for the remainder of the round and allowing a player to watch their rivals’ plans go literally up in flames. The added rules do mean that there’s a little more score-keeping to do at the end of a match, often resulting in a minute or two of maths. Luckily, this is ably helped along by the included score pad, which does a fantastic job of breaking down the

2-4

8+

£30

various sums in a way that avoids the momentum hitting a wall. To be honest, the only possible criticism of the set we can see is that the adorable 3D castles seem to be just a smidge too small for the queen meeple to sit within while in residence. Queendomino builds on Kingdomino’s foundation in a way that feels just right. The queen, knights, dragon and buildings are a natural fit for the charming fantasy world (which continues to look eye-wateringly gorgeous) and avoid tipping the gameplay complexity scales too far or stretching the 20-minute play time past its breaking point. The rules can still be learnt by adults and children alike in a couple of minutes, but it feels like deepening the scope of the dominolaying treasure has taken it from being one of the best releases of 2016 to becoming a gaming classic for all time. MATT JARVIS

WHAT’S IN THE BOX?

◗ Four starting tiles ◗ Four 3D castles ◗ Eight king meeples ◗ 48 dominoes ◗ 32 building tiles ◗ Builder’s board ◗ 22 knight meeples ◗ 15 towers ◗ Queen meeple ◗ Dragon meeple ◗ 42 coins ◗ Scoring pad

TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… KINGDOMINO

The royal couple can be combined to support bigger grids and more players, and feature slightly different gameplay styles that makes both well worth having.

WE SAY Expanding a brilliant idea with just a dash more complexity and depth, Queendomino is an utter joy to play. The new buildings and scoring rules are a natural fit without diluting the pure strategy that made Kingdomino such a pleasure, confirming the tilelayer’s rightful rule on its throne.

CE

escribed by creator Bruno Cathala himself as the game he wanted to play after hundreds of Kingdomino matches, Queendomino evolves the Spiel des Jahres winner’s simple kingdom-laying game with the abilities to construct buildings, tax your lands and even play host to the eponymous royal. The basics remain the same as in Kingdomino: players connect dominoes to their grid, before reserving their next tile (and deciding the following turn’s order) by popping their king down on one of the next four tiles. The bulk of players’ points are still earned from multiplying the number of connected matching squares by the number of crowns in that territory – but there are several new aspects to consider, too. The order in which players take their turn is even more important here, as it grants first dibs on the available row of building tiles, which can be constructed on a vacant red space by spending coins. These buildings blow open the strategy of Kingdomino’s straightforward tile arrangement with the chance to gather bonus points for each individual territory, knight or tower – with the greatest number of towers resulting in a visit from the queen, who lowers costs and adds another score multiplier at the end of the game. Knights are used as a simple way of collecting income by earning tax based on the size of a specific territory, but their limited numbers mean that careful planning is needed to juggle acquiring valuable buildings

25m

O R'S C H OI

tabletopgaming.co.uk

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P L AY E D

RAXXON Raxxon, Raxxoff

Designer: J. Arthur Ellis | Artist: Fernanda Suarez

R

iding on Dead of Winter’s success Plaid Hat Games has come up with a new game set in the same universe. Raxxon is a Wayland-Yutani or Umbrella Corporation equivalent based in the Dead of Winter universe; it is the evil corporation responsible for the zombie outbreak, hiding behind a fake mask of being a progressive technological saviour. In this co-operative game, players are trying to identify the healthy population among the infected and safely rescue them from the city. On paper, everything about Raxxon sounds exciting and interesting. Players select their characters, each with a set of available actions that are similar overall, but with some intricate differences. Every good deed triggers a set of not-sogood and sometimes even disastrous consequences on the following turn, requiring players to carefully weigh the benefits of their actions against possible bad outcomes every round. The second main element of the game is a grid of citizens, among which the healthy and infected are hiding. Here there is another push-your-luck element, as cards have different effects upon being turned over. For example, when two ‘hostile’

70

WHAT’S IN THE BOX?

◗ Six character sheets ◗ Game board ◗ 60 population cards ◗ 40 Raxxon cards ◗ 60 action tokens ◗ Raxxon power token

45m

1-4

14+

£40

cards are face-up, another card has to be revealed or, upon discovering ‘chaotic’ within the crowd, an extra card is added to the grid. So, as much as one might be inclined to turn over every card on the grid before committing to any strategy, revealing cards carelessly can lead to dire outcomes. Of course, this would not be a game in the Dead of Winter lineage if it did not have special cards – here called Raxxon cards – that present players with a scenario and a set of choices to make. The world that Raxxon paints seems comprehensive and logical. It has a human and a story element with the scenario cards, and the push-your-luck mechanics are well placed within the game. Yet, somehow, Raxxon manages to be just slightly off in all of its elements, firing wide of its aim at ‘challenging’ to land squarely on ‘frustrating’. Raxxon cards only trigger when a certain set of events has occurred, meaning they almost never do. This in turn throws off the balance of the consequences on the player’s mat,

because choosing an action that will require them to take a Raxxon card feels less like a bad outcome and more like 'whatever, it won’t trigger anyway’. The game also lacks a feeling of achievement. Typically, during the round, a few healthy citizens will be saved, some infected will be put into the quarantine – which means they will return to the game in a few rounds – and a mixture of cards will be ‘killed off’, which also means they will eventually return to the game. There is a constant cycle of the same set of cards, where players make small changes, weeding out the good ones from the mix every so often, but otherwise not doing anything else of significance. The more healthy cards that are taken off the board, the higher the probability of revealing infected cards and hence triggering bad outcomes. That element of challenge is what might keep some people coming back to Raxxon in an attempt to beat it, especially as the game has several levels of difficulty. But when things go bad, they quickly turn to being disastrous, and attempts to prevent it feel like trying to hold back an avalanche. You could be playing a round knowing that you have already lost; aware that one wrong turn, one bit of sour luck, will end the game immediately. However, as you have not technically triggered the game’s end, you persevere, diligently taking your actions until there are no more options left and you have, predictably, lost. This comes with a certain feeling of hopelessness which, while thematically appropriate, is not enjoyable in a cooperative setting. Raxxon builds on the base of an excellent theme with some really good ideas and push-your-luck elements. Even a slight balance change and minor rules adjustments could easily transform Raxxon into a very good game. For now, however, the main reason to pick it up is the bonus Dead of Winter cards that come in the box. ALEX SONECHKINA

WE SAY Raxxon definitely has some interesting ideas, especially in its push-your-luck mechanics, but it forgets that tough games also need to be fun and rewarding.

TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… DEAD OF WINTER

While Dead of Winter is undeniably superior in both gameplay and its use of theme, if you are yearning for more games in that universe, Raxxon can scratch that itch.

January 2018

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11/12/2017 17:14

MASSIVE DARKNESS

The makers of Zombicide shift into full-on fantasy mode Designer: Raphaël Guiton, Jean-Baptiste Lullien, Nicolas Raoult | Artist: Édouard Guiton, Jason Hendricks

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ho doesn’t love a good, old-fashioned dungeon bash? If you’re the kind of person who likes answering rhetorical questions, and your answer to that one was “Me, actually,” then you’ll probably want to skip Massive Darkness. Otherwise, keep reading: you may be in for a bloodletting treat. This latest CMON/Guillotine Games big-box offering is the Zombicide gang’s stab at doing a straightforward high-fantasy hack ‘n’ slash adventure, featuring characters (wizard, ranger, barbarian) as stock as the monsters (goblins, orcs, giant spiders). Its particular similarity to Zombicide: Black Plague is undeniable, right down to the ‘spot the difference’ box art. But, as you might expect, it also draws from the likes of Descent (though this is pure co-op) and Super Dungeon Explore – albeit without the swollen-headed chibi stylings. There are no real surprises during the unboxing. Lavishly-illustrated modular tiles? Check. Impressive minis? Check. A cascade of multicoloured dice? Check. Numerous item, monster and event cards? Check, check, check. As in Black Plague, each player gets a nifty, cardcouching plastic dashboard, complete

with peg holes to track health and XP – though spending that XP requires a bit of old-school pencil-and-papering, as each class (tanky Paladin of Fury, roguish Bloodmoon Nightrunner, DPS-flavoured Pit Fighter Berserker and so on) comes with a box-checking sheet pad on which to mark your skillup choices. The gameplay unfolds either in normal mode (where each session’s a standalone run) or the tougher story mode: a non-legacy campaign that slows progress to a gelatinous cube’s pace by reducing experience gains by a factor of five. As you’d expect, every scenario is about tackling wave after wave of foe, while looting and itemmanaging like crazy. The only big twist – and it’s a neat one – is the ‘Shadow Mode’ concept. Every character has special abilities that only trigger in the dark, as defined by the art on those beautifully-designed tiles. This allows for some intuitive strategies to play out; strike from, or retreat into, the unlit murk and you gain an advantage over your enemies. What really elevates Massive Darkness above much of its dungeoncrawly brethren is the way designers Raphaël Guiton, Jean-Baptiste Lullien and Nicolas Raoult have taken the

90m

1-6

formula and refined it into to a satisfyingly sleek experience. The menu of actions is short without being restrictive. Movement and line of sight is quick and intuitive, with large-squared ‘zones’ replacing small grids or hexes. Combat is swift, maths-light and blissfully stat-free, with attack and defence dice tossed simultaneously. Item pickups are entertainingly generous; so much so, you’ll find yourself often taking the game’s ‘transmute’ action to trade up three bits of loot for a single new, improved item. Each game levels-up as a whole as you progress from tile to tile, rather than each character dinging individually – which sounds clumsy, but really works. Thinking about it, even if you did answer “Me, actually” above, Massive Darkness might just win you over. Go on, give it a bash. DAN JOLIN

14+

£120

WHAT’S IN THE BOX?

◗ 75 miniatures ◗ Nine double-sided

game tiles

◗ Six hero dashboards ◗ Six hero class

sheet pads

◗ Six coloured bases ◗ 18 coloured pegs ◗ 12 custom dice ◗ 299 cards ◗ 106 tokens

WE SAY It’s not going to give the gamechanging Gloomhaven a run for its gold coins and its fantasy setting is, frankly, industry standard, but Massive Darkness remains a bit of a treat thanks to some smartly streamlined and intuitively-executed mechanics.

TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… ZOMBICIDE: BLACK PLAGUE

It’s a no-brainer, really: the same designers, a similar setting and some almost identical components. Except you’re killing orcs, trolls and goblins rather than necromancers and zombies. They should have called it Monstercide…

tabletopgaming.co.uk

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P L AY E D

BETRAYAL AT BALDUR’S GATE The horror hit swaps ghouls and ghosts for Dungeons & Dragons Designer:: Chris Dupuis, Mike Mearls | Artist Designer Artist:: Various

60m

3-6

12+

£45

WHAT’S IN THE BOX?

◗ Traitor’s Tome ◗ Secrets of Survival ◗ 42 tiles ◗ Elfsong Tavern/

B

etrayal at House on the Hill is the tabletop equivalent of a horror B-movie; often inconsistent in gameplay, pacing and tone, its haunts where one player is revealed as a surprise traitor and turns against their former companions are an acquired taste best enjoyed for their silly fun and schlocky selfawareness rather than earnestly. In many ways, the original game’s exploration of a haunted manor – complete with one-off events and items – was reminiscent of a lighthearted Dungeons & Dragons campaign where the DM and scenario are only decided once the ectoplasm hits the fan. Betrayal at Baldur’s Gate takes the natural step of relocating Betrayal to the streets, shops and catacombs of D&D’s iconic city, recasting its paranormal investigators as adventurers doing battle against some of the storied RPG’s various creatures. To fit with the now explicit roleplaying inspiration, Betrayal’s

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inner chamber/ kitchen start tile ◗ Catacomb landing/ kitchen basement start tile ◗ Six pre-painted plastic adventurer figures ◗ Six two-sided character cards ◗ 30 plastic clips ◗ Eight dice ◗ Turn/damage track ◗ 86 cards ◗ 215 tokens mechanics have been evolved with some notable changes. Not least is the addition of powers to its cast of 12 selectable characters, who hit all of the D&D tropes you’d hope for – you can even cast Magic Missile. A few of the background mechanics have been tweaked, too, in an effort to lessen some of the divisive balance issues often derided by Betrayal’s detractors. Biggest of all is a rethinking of the way that haunts are activated – instead of rolling six dice (with 0, 1 and 2 results) and triggering a haunt when the total is lower than the number of revealed omen cards, players now roll a number of dice equal to the number of omens in play and only begin the haunt once they roll a six or higher. It means that setting off a haunt prematurely while the players are still gathering items and revealing the map is far less likely, but it does detract from the tension somewhat by negating the first couple of rolls – although there’s nothing stopping you playing by the old rules.

TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… BETRAYAL AT HOUSE ON THE HILL Even if you’re not a Dungeons & Dragons diehard, there’s plenty to like in this set of 50 new haunts.

The components – another one of Betrayal’s weak spots – have likewise been improved. The dreaded stat clips do make a return, but have been subtly altered to stop them sliding straight off the edge of character cards – easily one of the original game’s most frustrating aspects. The pre-painted character miniatures won’t win any painting competitions, but for the modest price of entry the decoration does more than enough to bring the world to life. There are another 50 haunts here, and they’re as hit-and-miss as in the first Betrayal. A few fall flat with combat-heavy dice fests and iffy writing, but there’s plenty of fun to be had in the mix as you run around and enjoy lighthearted spins on classic D&D themes – although it has to be said the outside setting with its incongruous mix of buildings, alleys and underground tunnels lacks the claustrophobic panic of being trapped in a haunted house with a potential murderer. Perhaps the biggest shame about Baldur’s Gate is that the presentation sticks too closely to the half-and-half nature of its title. It feels like there’s a missed opportunity in keeping characters’ traits the same as those in Betrayal (speed, might, sanity and intelligence) rather than simply swapping them for D&D’s iconic character attributes of DEX, STR, CON and INT. Despite D&D-specific details and images, the general event, item and omen card icons remain untouched, with the Traitor’s Tome and Secrets of Survival books also sticking to their Betrayal roots – would it have been too much to ask for a fun play on the Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide? Still, what is here is still fun enough if you’ve explored every corner of Betrayal and its expansion – or you’re a D&D fan looking for a fast and amusing reimagining of the roleplaying universe. At the very least, those new clips are almost worth it alone. MATT JARVIS

WE SAY The D&D redressing doesn’t go as far as it could, but the improvements made to Betrayal’s often inconsistent gameplay and components are very welcome – and there’s still lots of laughs in store.

January 2018

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EX LIBRIS

There's a sasquatch in your library! Designer: Adam P. McIver | Artist: Jacqui Davis

E

x Libris immediately taps into the geeky love of organising collections by carefully curating types, genres and alphabetical order, and, most importantly, feeling pride in it. In this game, players are collating their own library and competing with other aspiring book collectors for the honour to become Grand Librarian of a magical, but unnamed – yet clearly well-read – village. Even for those who might find that type of activity mundane or boring, Ex Libris still provides a game full of charm with a wonderful sense of humour. Ex Libris effortlessly blends elements of worker placement and card drafting together. Players send their meeples around the board to different places to get more book cards and abilities, while building their own library back at home base. As with every good library, a certain set of instructions must be followed; for example, the obvious alphabetical ordering and structural shelf stability. Even in libraries, rules were made to be broken, and particularly sneaky players can even get away with some of the inconsistencies if the library

WHAT’S IN THE BOX?

◗ Folding town board ◗ Double-sided

dry-erase ‘Official Library Inspection Form’ board ◗ Dry-erase marker ◗ 12 double-sided library tiles ◗ 18 oversized location tiles ◗ 12 standard assistant meeples ◗ 12 special assistant meeples ◗ ‘Crystal ball’ first player token ◗ 152 book cards (with 510 unique book titles) ◗ Six category cards

45m

1-4

10+

£60

inspector does not spot them at the end of the game. Ex Libris is really good at rewarding players for almost everything they do. Collected the most books from the ‘prominent books’ category? Get some points. Have very stable shelves? More points! Here, have some points for the rarest category in your library, too! While keeping track of all the bonus points might initially seem overwhelming, all the scoring elements are so seamlessly integrated into the actions players would be doing anyway that they are not at all hard to achieve. The tactical choice within the game is to pick one or two of them to focus on, as well as keeping an eye on the types of libraries other collectors are making. It is rare to find a game that is such a joyful experience throughout – this even includes its rulebook, which can be a real buzzkill in most board games, but that isn't the case here. Having trudged through

so many illogical, unnecessarily complicated and term-heavy instructions that even some of the best games can have, it is refreshing to open a rulebook that is structured logically and has witty well-placed observations that make you want to play the game, rather than give up on it. The game components are equally a delight; each player chooses their own library, with a unique special ability and a matching meeple to suit, including a sasquatch, snowman and wizard meeples, and even a gelatinous cube. All 152 cards have different book titles that not only match their respective letters and correspond thematically to the book category to which they belong, but are also funny. These include gems like Not a Guide That Won’t Help With Double Negatives Negatives, twin volumes Parasites & You and Parasites in You, An Incomplete Guide to Procrastination Procrastination, and many more. The game also provides a dry-wipe checklist board and a marker for scoring, so take that, tear-away scoring sheets! The components are generally so well thought-out and produced that one weird misstep in the design of the game’s worker placement tiles really stands out. Every tile offers a different power, typically described in white text across colourful and busy artwork, which is hard to see even when seated directly in front of the tile. With tiles rotating each round, it is hard to learn them and players have to keep referring to them by picking up and bringing them almost to their nose to see the text. That graphical hiccup aside, Ex Libris is charm in a box. Although it definitely has a competitive edge, it is one of those rare games where the experience of playing it is more of a reward than the victory points at the end of the game. ALEX SONECHKINA

WE SAY Ex Libris effortlessly blends tactical gameplay with humour and whimsy, while celebrating our inner geeky love of collecting and organising.

TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… LORDS OF WATERDEEP

Once you have successfully domesticated owlbears, visit the village of Ex Libris for more magic and insightful reading – but a touch less skullduggery.

tabletopgaming.co.uk

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P L AY E D TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… WHITEHALL MYSTERY

Hunt for the Ring builds on its hidden movement core with meaningful powers and fantastic use of its setting – perfect if you prefer Middleearth to murder.

HUNT FOR THE RING

Hobbits and hidden movement make for a perfect pair Designer: Marco Maggi, Gabriele Mari, Francesco Nepitello | Artist: John Howe, Francesco Mattioli

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unt for the Ring is the latest Tolkien adaptation from two of the masters of capturing the author’s epic fantasy world of Middle-earth on the tabletop: War of the Ring co-creators Francesco Nepitello and Marco Maggi. This time, the pair has teamed up with hidden movement expert Gabriele Mari, best known for Jack the Ripper favourites Letters from Whitechapel and Whitehall Mystery, and scaled down their scope from simulating the entirety of the Lord of the Rings trilogy to focusing on just the opening of Fellowship of the Ring as Frodo and his hobbit companions attempt to flee the pursuing Nazgûl and reach Bree before moving on to Rivendell. Hunt for the Ring feels very much like the meeting of minds behind its designers’ signature games. The tense pursuit and claustrophobic escapes of the Ripper games are here, combined with the dice drafting, thematic powers and dedication to Middle-earth lore seen in War of the Ring. In fact, Hunt for the Ring can be played as a prelude to War of the Ring, with the outcome of the game handing either the Free People or Shadow a starting advantage. That may sound like a hell of a commitment, but Hunt is nowhere near the length or weight of War – even if you complete both of its two separate chapters in a single sitting. (A way to save your progress between the halves is included.)

74

WHAT’S IN THE BOX?

◗ Double-sided board ◗ Seven plastic figures

(Nazgúl, Frodo, Gandalf, Lord of the Nazgûl) ◗ Ring-bearer’s screen ◗ Journey log sleeve ◗ 36 journey cards ◗ 22 sorcery cards ◗ 44 ally cards ◗ Five company cards ◗ Five Ringwraith reference cards ◗ Gandalf reference card ◗ Black Riders reference card ◗ Seven Ringwraith action dice ◗ Letter from Gandalf envelope ◗ 90 tiles and tokens

What Hunt does have in common with War is that it feels distinctly like you’re living through the events of Tolkien’s novels. As they search for ‘Baggins’, the Nazgûl are able to gather information to narrow down Frodo's potential location from a section of the map to a more specific area, before searching individual locations to pick up his trail – and key information can increase their power, enabling extra abilities and potentially unleashing the fearsome Lord of the Nazgûl. To help Frodo, each of his companions has a helpful talent, supplemented by ally cards and tokens that present the chance to distract, block and resist the corruption of the Ringwraiths and the One Ring. There’s a lot of variety in the powers and decisions going on, and it all feels true to the world of Middle-earth. The Nazgûl travel faster on roads and at night, while Frodo must rest at the end of a day – or can choose to press on, but risks being discovered by his hunters. The core gameplay is quick to pick up, and being found as Frodo doesn’t mean an instant loss, making it a relatively easy game to get into – like the best in the genre, the complexity is left to what decisions you can make, rather than how they are performed. Uniquely, Hunt for the Ring is two hidden movement games in one. If Frodo reaches Bree, the outcome sets up a second half where the hidden

90+m

2-5

13+

£50

player switches control to Gandalf, while Frodo’s movement becomes an automated journey to Rivendell defined by a deck of route cards. Gandalf serves as a sort of escort needing to mislead the Nazgûl for long enough to allow Frodo to get through and gains some slightly different powers, but the gameplay otherwise remains largely the same – there’s no need to relearn every aspect. The second chapter isn’t quite as engaging for the ‘good’ player as the first given the inability to choose Frodo’s path, but it does make for a fun and interesting variant on the idea of hidden movement. Hunt for the Ring isn’t a revolutionary entry in the hidden movement genre, but that doesn’t stop it being an impeccably well-crafted game – especially for those wanting to spend more time immersed in Middle-earth. If you can't get enough of the fantasy world, this is the perfect excuse to dive right back in. MATT JARVIS

WE SAY

Hunt for the Ring absolutely nails its Middle-earth theme by capturing the same tension and drama of Tolkien’s novel with excellent use of its characters and lore. The gameplay isn’t necessarily world-changing, but it’s still a fantastic hidden movement experience with plenty to enjoy – especially if you love Lord of the Rings.

January 2018

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11/12/2017 17:15

SIDEREAL CONFLUENCE: TRADING AND NEGOTIATION IN THE ELYSIAN QUADRANT It’s all for one and everyone for themselves in this brain-burning game of interstellar politics Designer: TauCeti Deichmann | Artist: Nakarin Sukontakorn

I

ts title may sound like some sort of embarrassing medical condition, but Sidereal Confluence is actually a game of deep-space diplomacy where starfaring species vie to become the dominant faction in a cut-throat cosmos. While that’s hardly a novel concept, the game combines free-wheeling negotiation with complex economic strategy in some intriguing ways. It rejects the militaristic flavour of many sci-fi games in favour of interplanetary politics. While it’s undeniably competitive, it encourages co-operation between players. You’ll use resources represented by different coloured tokens to research technologies, gaining new abilities and victory points in the process. But each new discovery requires a different combination of resources to unlock, and you won’t be able to acquire them without help. During each round you’ll trade resources with your opponents – it’s here that things get interesting, because just about everything is up for grabs. You’ll exchange goods,

planetary colonies and fleets of spaceships, and striking deals that see you come out ahead while remaining palatable to your opponents is a subtle art. To complicate things further, you’ll also be able to make agreements that play out over multiple turns, or to forge complex trades between three or more players at a time. The really interesting bit, though? All of this negotiation happens simultaneously. Rather than taking turns to propose trades, players all pile in at once, with goods, promises and recriminations passing back and forth across the table like a kind of mathsy mosh pit. It’s hard to stay on top of it all and, if you’re not careful, you can find yourself out of your depth and at the mercy of your rivals. A bit like the Brexit negotiations, but in space. Each of the game’s factions comes with a unique set of abilities that lend themselves to different tactical approaches. The Faderan are cosmic venture capitalists, handing resources to other factions and cashing in when they use them to develop new

2h

WHAT’S IN THE BOX? 4-9

14+

£65

technologies. The Unity coalition generates valuable multi-purpose tokens that command a hefty price from other players. The insectoid Kt’Zr’Kt’Rtl (pronounced exactly as it’s spelled) are anarchic hackers, shaping technologies to their needs. Each species comes with a player sheet outlining their strengths and offering some advice on how best to play with them. They also come with a difficulty rating, and some are far more complicated than others to get to grips with; this means newer players can pilot one of the simpler races to ease themselves into the game. But it also introduces imbalance, and how much can you really savour a victory if your opponents are playing a much harder faction than you? There’s also the rulebook, which throws around in-game terms before explaining what they actually mean, and the game’s complex graphic design, which means that you probably won’t understand how everything works until you’ve actually played a few rounds. That could definitely be frustrating, especially at a time when so many publishers are working to make the process of learning games as pain-free as possible. But if you’re looking for a mix of frantic player interaction and cold, cruel logic, then Sidereal Confluence has a lot to get your teeth – or hideous alien mandibles – into. OWEN DUFFY

WE SAY Sidereal Confluence will delight some players and repel others. Its emphasis on deal-making makes for some heated negotiations, and its cube-pushing economics requires some serious analytical skills. But it comes with a convoluted setup and a punishing learning curve, and you should ask yourself whether you’re likely to enjoy it enough to justify the hard work it entails.

◗ Nine faction sheets ◗ 292 wooden

resource tokens

◗ 390 cards ◗ Ship, victory

point and faction ability tokens

TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… COSMIC ENCOUNTER

Sidereal Confluence has a sci-fi theme, asymmetrical factions and wheeling-dealing negotiation. But it cranks up the complexity to a brain-melting level.

tabletopgaming.co.uk

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05/12/2017 16:35

P L AY E D

PHOTOSYNTHESIS The seed of a brilliant idea blossoms into a green-fingered delight Designer: Hjalmar Hach | Artist: Sabrina Miramon

P

hotosynthesis has perhaps one of the loveliest concepts seen in any game. Players act as a sort of stand-in for Mother Nature, sowing seeds that gradually grow into towering trees as the seasons pass, eventually ending their life cycle before new seeds spring up through the earth, continuing the loop. Photosynthesis isn’t just a cute idea, either. Although the game looks absolutely gorgeous thanks to its 3D cardboard trees in hues of green, orange and blue, there’s also a core of pure strategy that runs through its trunk, leaving the gameplay as solid as an ancient oak. No game about plants could truly flourish without the sun and, true to its name, Photosynthesis depends on the star to fuel its interesting choices. The sun rotates around the board each turn, allowing players to collect light points to spend on growing seeds and trees already on the board or adding more to their pool of potential florae. It’s an ingenious idea implemented with such beauty and simplicity it’s a wonder it’s never been done before – although it’s hard

January 2018

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WHAT’S IN THE BOX?

◗ Game board ◗ Sun segment ◗ Four player boards ◗ First player token ◗ 24 scoring tokens ◗ Four light

point trackers

◗ Four sun

revolution counters

◗ 24 seed tokens ◗ 32 little trees ◗ 16 medium trees ◗ Eight big trees

30-60m

2-4

10+

£30

to imagine it being realised much better than this. What’s even smarter is the way that the shifting rays begin to cast shadows as players’ saplings spring up through the ground, stopping plants caught in the shade of a taller tree from collecting light points or growing taller until they emerge back into the sun. Because the spaces towards the centre of the board earn greater bounties of victory points when trees reach their highest point, this results in an intense and tightknit battle for sunlight as players carefully position their plants to leave each other in the dark. Cashing in a tree for points means removing it from the board, leading to standoffs between players as those in an advantageous position balance gaining points (which steadily decrease with each tree that completes the cycle in each of the four regions) with maintaining their dominance over smaller shrubs.

The full rules about shadows restricting the growth of shaded trees are actually proposed as an advanced mode in the rulebook, but we found them to be so crucial to the game’s depth and enjoyment that we’d recommend using them from the off. There’s no luck involved at all in the way that plants collect light points and the sun shifts around the edge of the forest, making the strategy as dependent on the constant sparring, blocks and reversals between players as something like chess – that just happens to involve seeds and trees. This also means that the game plays just as well in a head-to-head between two people, with extra opponents escalating the feeling of fighting for room in a crowded wood. That said, Photosynthesis isn’t perfect. The straightforward loop of gaining light, planting seeds, growing trees and collecting points doesn’t change up much over the course of the game, which can lead to less than satisfying repetition if the more engaging interactions between players fails to take hold. On the other hand, those who don’t like the feeling of being blocked at every turn by other players may find that the claustrophobic competition relies a little too much on overly-aggressive play – and loses too much tension to stay interesting if playing with the trimmed-down rules. These are very minor problems with a game that otherwise delivers on the promise of an intense abstract strategy experience wrapped up in a presentation that leaves other games in the shade. As it turns out, being all bark still leaves plenty to chew on. MATT JARVIS

WE SAY

Photosynthesis doesn’t just look gorgeous – it also delivers plenty of gameplay punch with its surprisingly intense battle for sunlight. The simple yet brilliant idea at its core is beautifully executed, although you may find it becomes a little repetitive on repeated visits or is a bit too hostile for less confrontational players.

TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… TAK: A BEAUTIFUL GAME

A pure strategy title at its heart, Photosynthesis relies on the same back-andforth blocking and simply complex rules as this absolutely abstract gem.

tabletopgaming.co.uk

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P L AY E D

ARISTEIA!

Extreme sports goes to Infinity and beyond Designer: Alberto Abal, Jesús Fuster, David Rosillo | Artist: Kenny Ruiz

60-90m

2

14+

£50

WHAT’S IN THE BOX?

◗ Eight miniatures ◗ Eight initative cards ◗ 52 tactics cards ◗ Reversible board ◗ Custom dice ◗ Counters ◗ Tokens ◗ ID stickers ◗ Access Guide to Human Sphere

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elcome to the future and the 25th season of Aristeia!, a fastpaced and brutal extreme sports game. You'll be playing with a team of four Aristos, fighting and manoeuvring for control of the HexaDome. The game has four simple phases – planning, turns, objectives and recovery – with a match lasting for five rounds or until eight points are scored, which you achieve by controlling the scoring zone. Each player takes alternative turns with each of their Aristos until all of them have been activated. Each character model comes with a stat, initiative and four tactics cards. The models come pre-assembled and of decent quality with plenty of details, if you wish to paint them. Each character has five action points and spends two to walk as many spaces as they have movement, which can be interrupted by other abilities – so you could walk Parvati three spaces, use her medikit, let rip with her submachine guns akimbo and then move again. Parvati’s versatility at fighting, healing and removing conditions probably makes her the best all-rounder of the box. The custom dice mechanics of rolling for attack and defence are very familiar, but with a couple twists that put Corvus Belli's Infinity signature on them

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– which makes sense, given Aristeia! is set in the sci-fi miniatures universe. Just like Infinity, when you roll for an attack it can quickly lead to the death of the attacker, so it's best to remember Infinity's 'It’s always your turn' philosophy and leave expert swordsman Miyamoto Mushashi be while he is adjacent because he can turn blocks into damage. Every character has a 'switch' that allows them to use certain symbols on a dice roll to pull off a wide range of abilities. For example, 8-Ball’s switch allows the character to displace himself, so often you can’t attack him for fear of him moving into a scoring zone or out of a melee zone. In the turns phase, the character with the highest initiative controls activation order. Gata is all about speed and starts with the highest native initiative in the box, but is very fragile with only two wounds – you can use this control to keep her safe from harm by activating her last in one round and then first in the next. You can make a green action without fear of your opponent rolling any dice, which makes heXx3r very powerful at displacing both enemy and friendly models around the dome. When you use a red action it’s a damage-dealing attack and, as well as using switches,

the enemy can damage the attacker by rolling successful hits in defence. Each team starts with a deck of ten basic cards and every character adds two more for a full deck of 18. You start the match by drawing four and gain a card whenever an enemy model is moved to the infirmary. At the end of a round you draw a card, plus an additional card if you scored that round. The cards clearly state when and how they are used, and can be used for a wide variety of actions, but adding extra dice or free attacks are the most common – I lost one game due to my opponent adding an extra action point then walking straight into the scoring zone. Aristeia! is a simple, addictive game that runs for around an hour and allows for more tactile depth as each match goes on. It captures the idea of a superstar battle arena, with heroes trading blows and jockeying for position rather than statically standing there trading blows. LUCY ORR

WE SAY If you liked Infinity's setting and miniatures but found the 300plus pages of rules too heavy, this is the unquestionably the board game for you.

TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… WARHAMMER UNDERWORLDS: SHADESPIRE

Looking for something like Shadespire, but with more depth or as a gateway to miniatures games? Look no further.

January 2018

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11/12/2017 17:15

ELITE ENCOUNTERS The old-school future rises Designer: David T. W. Hughes

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ow you feel about Elite Encounters will likely be determined by one simple question: does the idea of a game with detailed rules for a bionic liver fill you with glee? If the answer is yes, followed by a barrage of questions on exactly what stats it modifies and how much it can be traded for, this may well be the RPG for you. Like the video game series that inspired it, Encounters plants the players in the boots of explorers, fighters and traders making their way through a rich sci-fi world. It’s a setting where grand galactic politics melds with mundane delivery runs and encounters with space pirates and, while it will naturally appeal to fans of either the classic 1984 game or its more modern sequels, the game uses enough sci-fi tropes that even newcomers will feel comfortable in short order.

2+

£20

When it comes to talking about the game itself, the first thing that needs to be established is that this is not the only RPG using the Elite licence to come out recently. Elite: Dangerous, which has been developed by Spidermind Games, followed hot in Encounters’ heels and seems to be a rather different experience – arguably a more modern one. It’s worth noting that ‘modern’ does not necessarily equal ‘better’. Encounters has a truly old-school feel that permeates everything from the dense typeface and monochrome design to the tables and charts listing different trade goods. Besides a few touches of modern design here and there, Encounters wouldn’t feel particularly out of place among the RPGs of the ‘80s and ‘90s.

The main mechanic is incredibly simple. It only uses a handful of d6s, with the amount being rolled being determined by circumstances and stats and the target you need to beat relating to the difficulty of the task. In order to climb a rocky cliff, for example, a player may need to roll at least one 4+ on two or three dice depending on how they built their ‘avatar’, while an incredibly difficult task may require them to roll a 6+ or even a 7+. Where things start to get interesting is all the modifiers that can be added, depending on everything from equipment to experience. That bionic liver, for example, provides you with a bonus to ‘sense’ rolls when you’ve been drinking. Different weapons work in different ways, and these can diverge even further once players start loading up on alternative ammo types that are neatly codified and set out in the rules. Likewise, ships can be completely customised depending on the number of hardpoints and systems available. There is an incredible amount of depth on display, but Encounters is not the easiest RPG to pick up and play. It can be confusing in places and trying to get the entire table caught up on all the rules and options open to them can be an exercise in frustration. If your gaming group has only ever dallied with modern systems, Encounters may come as a shock. It is unapologetically lo-fi and old-school in both design and presentation, with the art on display seemingly culled from the video games themselves. The layout and presentation of vital rules are straight from an older generation of products and can be confusing if your experiences have mostly been with more streamlined RPGs. The book was almost completely written and designed by just one man, David Hughes, and it shows – again, for better and for worse. It lacks polish but the passion and dedication to the world of Elite on display is inspiring. If you and your friends feel like a return to the awe and wonder you felt when the original game came out in 1984 this may well spark happy memories. But if you just want a simple system for roaming about the galaxy, blasting aliens and having a good time it might be worth a miss. RICHARD JANSENPARKES

TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… STAR TREK ADVENTURES

Sometimes exploring the depths of space can be its own reward.

WE SAY Elite Encounters is an unapologetically oldschool slice of space adventure. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is up to you and your gaming group.

tabletopgaming.co.uk

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P L AY E D

INBETWEEN

Designer: Adam Kwapiński | Artist: Borkowski, Kalisz, Niziołek, Zakrzewski on whether they’re trying to protect the humans or attack them as a mysterious being called only 'the Creature’. Each side of the tense tug of war feels distinct to control; the town is able to utilise 28 diverse bits of equipment in their fight to survive, while the Creature has a more limited pool of seven repeatable actions. Gameplay is as easy as choosing a single card to play, which either moves a matching character one step towards your dimension or adds a symbol to their card so they’ll match more cards in the future, making them easier to move. Each player can also spend energy to trigger special powers or set off their one-time-use 'awareness' ability, making timing crucial to coming out on top – it does help if you’ve played at least a couple of times and know some of the cards in the deck, too. One of the game’s best features is the ring of characters that forms its main play area. As well as looking great, an

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lthough its gameplay was devised almost a year before Stranger Things made its Netflix debut, it’s perhaps no coincidence that InBetween’s full release comes hot on the heels of the second season of the ‘80s-inflected horror TV phenomenon; this is a Stranger Things card game in all but name. It’s a particularly enjoyable one, too, as two players take it in turns to try and drag the townspeople of Upsideville into one of two dimensions, depending

ASSET DROP Maker: Asset Drop

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ubscription boxes have become a booming industry in the last few years, so much so that they have now entered not only the sphere of tabletop gaming but also painting and modelling. Asset Drop is one such miniaturescentric subscription package, coming in at just under £20 a month. Each ‘drop’ contains a variety of paints, brushes and more niche tools like pigment powders. Something that always makes me wary of loot crates is their unpredictable nature, but Asset Drop mitigates this with the way it selects and presents the contents. The contents of each box aren’t random but carefully selected to complement each other. For instance, the three shades of grey paint, from Secret Weapon, are perfect when used together as a base, layer and highlight. There’s the combination of a textured paint, from Coat d’Arms, and a pigment,

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from BrokenToad – both of which can be used individually, but can also be combined to great effect. There’s even a Coat d’Arms basing brush included to make use of the textured paint, as it can be damaging to your usual brushes. This is something that is covered in the fantastic painting guide that comes in each box. Produced specifically around the contents of the box, each guide goes into a good amount of detail about the supplies: telling you a little about the company that makes them, what they are designed to do and how to use them. What’s great about these write-ups is that they provide examples and pictures, but they are also surprisingly in-depth. The guide included in our sample, on Ammo's Brass and Old Brass metallic paints, covered not only how to paint and layer with those specific colours but also hints and tips on using metallics in general.

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activity marker makes its way around the circle at the end of each player’s turn, activating the unique abilities of any characters who are in either dimension (those ‘in-between’ don’t do anything) which give either player a helping hand as they aim to devour (as the Creature) or secure (as the town) three people. Each side can also win by raising their awareness five times, which happens when the activity marker ends a turn on a player in either dimension – encouraging a heated back-and-forth battle to keep characters out of your opponent’s realm. InBetween pulls its thrilling headto-head concept off with aplomb thanks to a tight set of mechanics, fast pace and a fantastic visual style. In some ways it’s a shame it doesn’t have the Stranger Things name attached – if only so more people would be guaranteed to pick it up and give it a play. MATT JARVIS

This guide really helps to tie the whole package together; the result is that it really feels like you’re receiving a lesson rather than a random selection of paints and brushes. (Not to mention a lollipop – you can’t forget the lollipop). ANDY LEIGHTON

January 2018

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DRAGON CASTLE

Dismantle a castle to build your own in this stylish tile-based riff on mahjong Designer: Lorenzo Silva, Hjalmar Hach, Luca Ricci | Artist: Cinyee Chiu

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n games, mahjong means two things. It can be the classic Qingdynasty tile-based set-making game, the ancestor of rummy, or it can be the solitaire game, usually digital, where the player clears a pattern of tiles by finding matching pairs. Dragon Castle is inspired by both of them. What does that mean? Mostly that this is a heavy box, because it’s got 116 chunky plastic tiles in it. In Dragon Castle the players take tiles from the eponymous structure, formed of all the tiles stacked together, and use them to make smaller and altogether less impressive castles. You score points for arranging tiles in particular ways, but these can change depending on which dragons and spirits are watching over the game, because each brings its own special abilities and scoring conditions. You start your turn by removig tiles from the dragon castle – usually a matching pair, though you can take one tile and a shrine marker, or discard one tile for a victory point. Shrines are important because most of the scoring is based around them.

WHAT’S IN THE BOX?

◗ Two main boards ◗ Four realm boards ◗ 116 plastic tiles ◗ 40 shrines ◗ 85 victory tokens ◗ Eight misc tokens ◗ 10 dragon cards ◗ 10 spirit cards

The tiles have six suits in two groups of different value, and taking them works like the solitaire version of mahjong. This gives the game a puzzle dynamic, as well as being the only time where players can affect each others’ play – by taking tiles that someone else wants. Mostly Dragon Castle feels like you’re each playing a solo game, drawing from a shared resource while racing to be the one who has built the most points at the end. Once you have your tiles you place them on your realm board, aiming to make groups of four or more of the same suit, which you can ‘consolidate’ by flipping them. Consolidated tiles can be built on either with more tiles, or with shrines. The higher a shrine is, the more points it’s worth. The game’s strategy lies in arranging the tiles on your realm board, consolidating sets and having enough shrines, and this is where the game shines. The pair-matching mechanic of taking the castle apart is a natural

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2-4

8+

€50

fit for the components, but isn’t as interesting or tactical as it should be. The dragons and spirits with their unique powers are what bring the game alive and give it replay value, along with the different ways the Dragon Castle can be built. Without them the experience is quite dry. The tiles are wonderfully tactile and playing with them ought to be a pleasure, but the heart of the game lies elsewhere. Dragon Castle is a good game with clever touches and it’s beautifully presented, but it lacks the elegance and compulsiveness of either of its forebears – and even though the box is full of mahjong tiles, it’s not a full set and you won’t be able to play mahjong with them. JAMES WALLIS

WE SAY A clever and beautiful game about building through set-building, but strangely uninvolving.

TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… CASTLES OF MAD KING LUDWIG

If you have the bug for building castles on the tabletop, Dragon Castle brings a different angle and a third dimension to your in-game architecture.

tabletopgaming.co.uk

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Take your positions at the iconic Alexandra Palace

ADVANCE TICKETS

NOW ON SALE

Book and save today theticketfactory.com

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STAR SAGA

Give the sci-fi dungeon crawler a splash of colour by bringing its baddies to life

Words and photographs by Andy Leighton

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antic adds yet another game to its extensive catalogue with Star Saga, a sci-fi dungeon crawler set within the Warpath universe. The core box comes with 35 miniatures, representing everything from the military minions you’ll face to the abominations created by the universe’s deadly plague, and everything is one piece – for the most part they are great models, filled with details. My only gripes are a fair amount of mould lines and that some of the goons, especially the security forces and soldiers, feel a little generic. Each of the hero characters and

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the bosses they face, however, are fantastic. The heroes have the mixed squad feel we all love to see in our fantasy adventure games, with classic roles like the dwarf, elf and mage filled by the dwarf (but in space!), judwan and kayowan, all with an updated futuristic look. For this painting guide we are going to take a look at how to paint the villains of the game. Painted up they really help add to the narrative and capture the spirit of the tale Mantic has created, immersing you in the sci-fi adventure.

tabletopgaming.co.uk

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S TA R S A G A

PAINTS & TECHNIQUES PAINTS USED Abaddon Black Agrax Earthshade Alaitoc Blue Baneblade Brown Blood for the Blood God Bloodletter Blue Horror Bugmans Glow Cadian Fleshtone Celestra Grey Ceramite White Dark Reaper Dawnstone Dorn Yellow Drakenhof Nightshade Fenrisian Grey Flayed One Flesh Gauss Blaster Green Genestealer Purple Jokearo Orange Khorne Red Kislev Flesh

Lothern Blue Lugganath Orange Macragge Blue Mechanicus Standard Grey Mephiston Red Moot Green Nuln Oil Pallid Wych Flesh Rakarth Flesh Reikland Fleshshade Russ Grey Screamer Pink Squig Orange Steel Legion Drab Sybarite Green Temple Guard Blue Troll Slayer Orange Ulthuan Grey Warpstone Glow Wazdakka Red Xereus Purple Yriel Yellow

ZENITHAL HIGHLIGHTING

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. 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.

STAGES

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. Stage 1 is base colours. Base colours are applied using a mix of glazes and flat colours. Stage 2 is applying shading. In this stage we use various washes and glazes to add an element of shading to the models. Stage 3 is highlighting. This stage involves applying a line of your 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. Stage 4 is final highlight. This involves adding a small dot or dash of a colour, generally in the same area as the previous highlight, but focusing on corners or where folds in cloth meet. For hair or fur it involves adding a dot to the tip of each strand. 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. Stage 5 is the final details. This stage involves cleaning up and adding a few spot highlights. This stage also includes painting the base of the model.

1 BASE COLOURS

Mechanicus Standard Grey: Paint the majority of the armour using this grey. Macragge Blue: Pick out sections of the armour and apply one to two coats until you have an even colour. Khorne Red: Paint the visor, lights and pipes. Steel Legion Drab: Apply a coat over the gun.

2 SHADING

Nuln Oil: Apply over the entirety of the model in one even coat. Warpstone Glow: Once the wash is dry make a mix with two parts water and apply to the wrist generator..

3 HIGHLIGHTING

Dawnstone: Apply a line highlight to all of the grey armour sections. Also, with very little paint on the brush, apply small dashes across the armour surface. Alaitoc Blue: Apply a line highlight to all of the blue armour sections. Again, with very little paint on the brush, apply small dashes across the armour surface. Wazdakka Red: Apply a highlight to the top and hard edges of the visor, over the lights and along the piping. Baneblade Brown: Apply a line highlight to the gun. Temple Guard Blue: Mix with two parts water and lightly apply within the centre ring of the wrist generator.

5 FINAL DETAILS

Blue Horror: Add a spot highlight to the edges and the lines of both the blue and grey sections of the armour. Lugganath Orange: Apply a spot highlight to the visor and the centre of the lights. Ceramite White: Mix with three parts water and apply a light wash to the wrist generator.

4 FINAL HIGHLIGHT

Celestra Grey: Apply as an edge highlight to all of the grey armour sections. Also apply a spot highlight to the lines added in the previous stage. Russ Grey: Apply as an edge highlight to all of the blue armour sections. Also apply a spot highlight to the lines added in the previous stage. Squig Orange: Add a fine highlight to the visor, focusing towards the corner created by the last stage. Also add a spot highlight to the lights, and a line just in front of each light. Lothern Blue: Make a mx with two parts water and add a very fine line around the centre disc of the generator. Screaming Skull: Add an edge highlight to the gun.

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MONARCH

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1 BASE COLOURS

3 HIGHLIGHTING Kislev Flesh: Add a layer to the face, leaving the recesses dark. Ulthuan Grey: Apply a spot highlight to the armour, focusing on corners and where the lines from the previous stage meet the edge of the armour. Russ Grey: Apply a line highlight to the fatigues and cap. Fenrisian Grey: Apply a layer over the arm and gun, focusing towards one corner on each section and the edges.

Cadian Fleshtone: Apply one to two light coats to the face until you have an even colour. Abaddon Black: Mix with two parts water and apply a good coat over all of the armour and fatigues. Dawnstone: Apply a basecoat to the arm and gun.

2 SHADING

Drakenhof Nightshade: Apply across the arm, gun and face. Dark Reaper: Apply a highlight to the folds and hard edges of the fatigues and the cap. Dawnstone: Apply a line highlight to the armour sections. Also, with very little paint on the brush, apply small dashes across the armour surface.

4 FINAL HIGHLIGHT

Blue Horror: Add a highlight to the arm and gun, focusing on the corners and hard edges towards the top of the model. Flayed One Flesh: Apply a line highlight to the face. Fenrisian Blue: Add a fine highlight to the fatigues and cap. Sybarite Green: Apply a coat to the eye lens. Lothern Blue: Mix with one part water and apply on and around the wrist screen and the chest are opposite.

5 FINAL DETAILS

Blue Horror: Apply a light highlight to the screen and the hard edges around it. Ceramite White: Add a spot highlight to the arm and gun. Pallid Wych Flesh: Add a spot highlight to the face. Gauss Blaster Green: Add an edge highlight to the bottom right of the eye lens. Ceramite White & Abaddon Black: With a tiny amount on the tip of your brush, carefully paint the eye. Once dry add a dot of black to the top, centre.

GRAVES

1 BASE COLOURS

Dawnstone: Apply a basecoat to the mechanical arms, armour and wrist guards. Cadian Fleshtone: Apply a basecoat to the face. Fenrisian Grey: Apply a basecoat to the fatigues. Abaddon Black: Apply a coat to the boots and cabling. Jokearo Orange: Apply a basecoat to the gloves and knee pads.

2 SHADING

Drakenhof Nightshade: Apply a coat to all the areas previously coated with Dawnstone. Celestra Grey: Apply a layer over the fatigues, leaving only the recesses the base colour. Yriel Yellow: Apply a layer over the gloves and knee pads, leaving the recesses and bottom edges the base colour. Dark Reaper: Apply a line highlight to the cabling and boots. Squig Orange, Xereus Purple & Sybarite Green: Apply orange over the lights on the arms, joints and chest piece and apply the purple and green to the vials found across the model.

3 HIGHLIGHTING

Fenrisian Grey: Add a line highlight to the mechanical arms, armour and wrist guards, focusing on corners and hard edges. Ulthuan Grey: Apply a layer over the fatigues, leaving a little more of the base and the previous layer showing through. Dorn Yellow: Apply a line highlight to the gloves and knee pads. Russ Grey: Apply a spot highlight to the cabling and boots. Trollslayer Orange & Moot Green: Apply a layer over the lights and vials.

4 FINAL HIGHLIGHT

Blue Horror: Apply a final highlight to the mechanical arms, armour and wrist guards, focusing on the corners. Flayed One Flesh: Apply a line highlight to the face. Ceramite White: Apply a line highlight to the hard edges of the fatigues. Mephiston Red: Apply a coat over the wires on Dr. Koyner’s head. Lothern Blue: Mix with one part water and apply a coat over the eye lenses. Fire Dragon Bright & Gauss Blaster Green: Apply a spot highlight to the lights and the vials.

5 FINAL DETAILS

Pallid Wych Flesh: Apply a spot highlight to the face. Ceramite White: Apply a spot highlight to the mechanical arms, armour and wrist guards. Ceramite White & Abaddon Black: With a tiny amount on the tip of your brush, carefully paint the eye. Once dry, add a dot of black to the top, centre. Blue Horror: Apply a spot highlight to the eye lenses. Lugganath Orange: Apply a spot highlight to the lights.

the

DR. KOYNER tabletopgaming.co.uk

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S TA R S A G A

ORGANIC DATA STORAGE UNIT X-02-A 1 BASE COLOURS

Macragge Blue: Apply a basecoat across the chovar’s skin, leaving the tips of the tentacles. Xereus Purple: Apply a coat over the ends of the tentacles, feathering off at the middle. Mechanicus Standard Grey: Apply a basecoat over all of the metal areas. Squig Orange: Apply a basecoat to the horns and armoured plates.

2 SHADING

Drakenhof Nightshade: Apply over all of the metal sections. Genestealer Purple: Apply a highlight to the tentacles with lines going in from the edges and along the centre. Alaitoc Blue: Apply a layer over all of the blue areas of skin, leaving the recesses the base colour. Agrax Earthshade: Apply over the horns and orange plates.

3 HIGHLIGHTING

Fenrisian Grey: Add a line highlight to the metal sections, focusing on corners and hard edges. Slaanesh Grey: Apply a line highlight across the purple and blue areas of skin and tentacles. Moot Green: Apply a coat to the tubes and vials. Trollslayer Orange: Apply a line highlight to the horns and plates. Screamer Pink: Make a mix with two parts water and apply generously into the gills.

4 FINAL HIGHLIGHT

Blue Horror: Apply a final highlight to the metal sections, focused on the corners. Celestra Grey: Apply a edge highlight across the purple and blue areas of skin and tentacles. Lugganath Orange: Apply a spot highlight to the horns and plates. Gauss Blaster Green: Apply a line highlight to the tubes and vials. Wazdakka Red: Mix with two parts water and apply to the top of the gills.

5 FINAL DETAILS

Ceramite White: Apply a spot highlight to the metal areas. Pallid Wych Flesh: Apply a spot highlight over the skin and tentacles.

BASES

STAGE 1

Apply a basecoat of Dawnstone.

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STAGE 2

Apply a drybrush of Celestra Grey, focusing towards the edge of the base.

STAGE 3

Use some 3-4mm masking tape to mark out lines on the base.

STAGE 4

Apply a drybrush of Jokearo Orange within the lines.

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ABERRATION 1 BASE COLOURS

Baneblade Brown: Apply a basecoat to the the bone armour. Bugmans Glow: Apply a basecoat over all the flesh.

2 SHADING

Bloodletter: Apply a coat in the mouth. Xereus Purple: Mix with three parts water and cover all of the flesh. Reikland Fleshshade: Apply a coat over all of the bone armour.

3 HIGHLIGHTING

Slaanesh Grey: Apply a line highlight to all of the hard edges of the flesh. Screaming Skull: Apply a line highlight over the bone armour, focusing on hard edges and the tips of spines. Also add a layer to the teeth. Pallid Wych Flesh: Add an oval to each eye.

STAGE 5

Add small dots and dashes of Dawnstone within the line.

STAGE 6

Repeat stages 3 to 5 but replace Jokearo Orange with Abaddon Black.

STAGE 7

4 FINAL HIGHLIGHT

Flayed One Flesh: Add an edge highlight to the flesh. Ceramite White: Add an edge highlight to the bone armour and the tips of the spines and teeth. Mephiston Red: Add a small dot to the centre of the eyes. Blue Horror: Paint the small knobbly bits on the flesh.

Add some final details. Scorch marks are started with a drybrush of Steel Legion Drab, followed by a lighter drybrush of Abaddon Black in the centre.

STAGE 8

Blood stains are applied using the Blood for the Blood God technical paint.

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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

INTRODUCING NEW PLAYERS If you find yourself teaching an RPG newcomer – or are trying to roleplay for the first time yourself – follow our tips to ensure the introductory experience becomes the first of many Words by David Jagneaux

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e’ve spent a lot of time in this column covering specific ways to build campaigns and improve your DM process, but none of that is very useful if you don’t have a group of people to play with. Perhaps the most important skill a DM can have, in addition to being able to run a game well, is being able to entice and enthral new players. Let’s dive in!

START WITH THE BASICS Tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons are incredibly complex affairs. There’s a reason why thousands of pages of text go into each game’s system across several tomes of books, notes and rules. A sure-fire way to overwhelm a prospective

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new player is to hand them the Player’s Handbook for a weekend and tell them to go read it in preparation. That’s like asking someone to read the entire dictionary to learn how to speak English. Instead, you should slowly introduce concepts over time outside of a game night setting. Before you all gather around a table with dice and character sheets, chat about some ideas over lunch. If you’ve got a friend that’s never played a tabletop roleplaying game before just sit them down and do everything verbally: “You wake up in a dark dungeon with only rags for clothes. What do you do?” See where their imagination goes. Give them dice as needed for encounters and, by the time it’s done, they’ll likely be

curious about where things can go next. This would be a great time to introduce character sheets and the concept of roleplaying. When you do that, make sure you start with pre-generated characters, such as those included in the D&D: Fifth Edition starter set.

CHECK YOUR PRIORITIES Above all else, the most important thing to remember as a DM is that players always come first. Just because you’ve come up with this excellent idea for a challenging campaign that could take several months to complete doesn’t mean that your players will care or want to play it. Furthermore, don’t spend too long waxing poetic about your amazing world and unique

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Entertaining and keeping players engaged should come first – even if it means bending the rules (Wizards of the Coast) characters. Don’t let the focus drift towards the non-player characters too much. Bring it back and make it about the players as the protagonists and what they decide to do inside this world you’ve made. Don’t forget that players are people. It might sound silly, but when you really get into the heat of a campaign it’s easy to look at yourself as the DM first and friend second, but communication is vital to a successful RPG. Before the games start, take the time to discuss what the players want most out of the experience and what their goals are. Crafting a super-serious campaign without a hint of humour for a group of people that crack jokes constantly probably isn’t a good idea, for example.

SHOW, DON’T TELL (UNLESS YOU NEED TO) Once you get your priorities set and understand your players’ comfort levels you can more easily identify areas where players can be pushed a bit outside of their comfort zone to try new things. When you’re DMing a group of mostly new players, you may find that some aspects are tougher to grasp than others. A common example is a new player that loves combat often has trouble feeling comfortable with roleplaying out loud, especially in front of strangers. So when the game is underway don’t spend too long explaining the rules if you want to make sure no-one falls asleep. Teach them the basics and explain the gist of it all, but wait for specifics until necessary. For example, don’t

bother explaining the difference between attack and damage rolls until combat starts and don’t explain how ability scores affect a character’s success with actions until a player wants to do something requiring an ability check or saving throw. Once that ball starts rolling it will likely pick up steam very quickly. To ensure player experiences stay at the forefront of it all, feel free to bend the rules where necessary to encourage a fun and casual game. Players will appreciate something that’s fun, even if slightly off the rulebook, much more than they would blindly adhering to the game mechanics. As long as you follow these basic steps, you should be well on your way towards creating an open and accommodating environment for new players.

tabletopgaming.co.uk

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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. SALUTE is held at ExCel London, which is very easy to get to. Here is a simplified transport link map.

Tickets

£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.

SATURDAY, 14TH APRIL DOORS OPEN 10.00-17.00

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UPCOMING EVENTS WINTER STABCON

Friday January 5th to Sunday 8th Britannia Hotel Stockport, Stockport Stabcon has all types of gaming in its halls, but is more geared towards board games in general. It’s a welcoming convention with a well-established venue and is worth checking out, even if you don’t stay all three days. facebook.com/events/1314903291941444

CONTINGENCY

Wednesday January 17th to Sunday 21st Sandy Balls Holiday Village, Fordingbridge

EVENT REPORT

UNCON

Darius Twyman talks about organising the familyfriendly Thanet convention with a five-year-old host Interview by Matt Jarvis How did the idea for Uncon emerge? We started our first Uncon back in July 2016. It was originally meant to be a one-off Saturday for our board game group, ‘All Around the Board’. We enjoyed it so much that we decided the next time, we would do it properly. The July event was really just a massive usual games night for us, but October saw more stalls, test players and other activities. What’s the story behind the name? As we were halfway through the July event, I looked around and counted 80 people. I turned to my friend and said “There are 80 people in here!” and he replied, “It is more like a convention!” I laughed and said, “Yeah, an unconventional convention.” This is where the name ‘Uncon’ began. After that event, people were using the hashtag #uncon over social media and asking us “When is the next one?” After a talk with my partner, we agreed that we would host another one and try to make it more of a conventional convention, but kept the name ‘Uncon.’ What makes the convention stand out? We are all about family. We are a very inclusive group and welcome people of all ages and abilities. We really try to reach out to non-gamers and gateway gamers because it wasn’t that long ago that we were newcomers to the hobby ourselves. We really try to educate non-gamers that modern board gaming is much different and much more interesting than ever before. We really advertised the family zone to the locals to try and get children from around our area to experience something new and exciting. Plus, there aren’t many conventions that have a five-year-old games host – our daughter did a really smashing job of that!

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Uncon took place at the same time as Essen over in Germany. Did this affect your plans? Massively. I recall posting on the Board Game Trade + Chat Facebook page about Uncon and somebody informed of me the clash with Essen. I was very naive in my reply: “But that is in Germany, surely not that many people from the UK are travelling to Germany?” I was so wrong. I wish I changed the dates. I emailed and contacted at least 20 different game designers; only one of those agreed to come to Uncon. The others, you guessed it, went to Essen. I promise the next one won’t clash with Essen! We are looking around April 2018 for the next Uncon. What were some of the most popular games at the most recent event? How does this compare to past Uncons? Terraforming Mars has been a massive hit in our group so that got played. Kingdomino was played almost continuously in the family zone. I also saw games such as Scythe being played. But above all the other games, the true star of the show was Rhino Hero: Super Battle! Why do you choose to host Uncon in Thanet? I grew up in Thanet and have lived there my whole life. All my friends and family are here and I feel like Thanet deserved something different. People told me to go further inland, Canterbury or Ashford, but my heart was to keep this event in Thanet. We hold a board game social every Monday night which is attended by 25 to 40 guests every week, so we knew that we had the support. As a thank you to them, for helping us build such a unique gaming group, I wasn’t moving the event out of the area.

ConTingency is primarily a roleplaying convention, with a lively evening social scene. The convention centres around Sandy Balls holiday park and has a range of games, as well as a dedicated children’s games centre. con-tingency.uk

BASTION

Thursday January 18th to Sunday 21st YHA Conwy, Conwy Bastion is four days of all types of gaming held in north Wales. Taking place in a youth hostel, you can book a bunk in a room shared with fellow attendees for some late-night gaming – or just turn up each day. bastionwales.com

HANDYCON

Friday January 19th to Sunday 21st Holiday Inn High Wycombe, High Wycombe With many people having attended for the short duration that it’s been running, HandyCon is an excellent convention for beginners and has a full range of activities. handycon.co.uk

SPAGHETTI CONJUNCTION Saturday February 10th Geek Retreat, Birmingham

After its first two instalments in February and October last year, the event that calls itself the ‘other’ Birmingham gaming convention returns to the Geek Retreat gaming café meaning you can order food direct to your table. There’s a focus on roleplaying, with two slots during the one-day get-together. spaghetticonjunction.wordpress.com

SORCON

Friday February 23rd to Sunday 25th Holiday Inn Basildon, Basildon Celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2018, SoRCon often attracts more than 100 attendees, with a particular commitment to Eurogames. There aren’t any formal tournaments, but Saturday sees the popular Quiz-a-Hunt return for another year. sorcon.co.uk

REVELATION

Saturday February 24rd to Sunday 25th Garrison Hotel, Sheffield Up to 80 roleplayers get together to play Powered by the Apocalypse games at this popular and welcoming annual convention. revelationgames.org.uk tabletopgaming.co.uk

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CLUB DIRECTORY ABERDEENSHIRE

ABERDEEN WARGAMES CLUB

Aberdeen, AB15 4YQ

OLDMELDRUM WARGAMES GROUP

Inverurie, AB51 0AA AYRSHIRE

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 BERKSHIRE

BROAD STREET GAMERS Wokingham, RG40 3AQ

NEWBURY & READING WARGAMES ASSOCIATION

Carmarthen, SA31 3AD

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

GUARDIANS OF THE GAMES (TABLETOP GROUP) Macclesfield, SK11 6UB

Newbury, RG14 2RA/RG1 4PS

MUG AND GAME

WARFIELD BOARD GAMERS Bracknell, RG42 2DD

POYNTON BOARD GAME DAY

WARGAMES ASSOCIATION OF READING

VARIABLE MAGERS

Wokingham, RG41 5DU BRISTOL

HALL OF HEROES GAMING CLUB

Bristol, BS16 1NU BUCKINGHAMSHIRE

MILTON KEYNES WARGAMES SOCIETY

Milton Keynes, MK11 1JQ

NEWPORT PAGNELL BOARD GAMES CLUB

Newport Pagnell, MK16 8AN

WYCOMBE WARBAND

Beaconsfield, HP9 1LG CAMBRIDGESHIRE

2D6 LODGE

Cambridge, CB1 8NN

CHATTERIS WARLORDS GAMES CLUB Chatteris, PE16 6NA

NEWMARKET KNIGHTS GAMES CLUB Ely, CB7 5HS

PETERBOROUGH WARGAMES CLUB

Peterborough, PE1 1NA

Congleton, CW12 1PG

Stockport, SK12 1RB

Omagh, BT78 1HL DERBYSHIRE

DERBY ON BOARD GAMES Derby, DE1 1QH

SUNDAY NIGHT BOARD GAMING AT THE OLD KINGS HEAD BELPER Belper, DE56 1NP DEVON

BARNSTAPLE SLAYERS GAMING CLUB Barnstaple, EX32 8LS

EAST DEVON TABLETOP & RPG GROUP Honiton, EX14 1HR

EXMOUTH IMPERIAL WARGAMES CLUB Exmouth, EX8 4SW

GAME NIGHT @ CARPE Plymouth, PL4 8EU

PLYMOUTH ASSOCIATION OF WARGAMERS

EDINBURGH

CHINEHAM BOARD GAMERS

Edinburgh, EH7 5EA

DARK WORLDS GAMING SOCIETY

EDINBURGH LEAGUE OF GAMERS ESSEX

BASILDON WARBOYZ Basildon, SS16 4NW

COLCHESTER WARGAMES ASSOCIATION Colchester, CO3 5RH

ESSEX WARRIORS

Chelmsford, CM1 3DU

SOUTHEND-ON-SEA ROLEPLAYING SOCIETY

EAST NEUK TABLETOP GAMES Anstruther, KY10 3DJ

KIRKCALDY MEEPLE CLUB

TORQUAY BOARD GAME CLUB

FLINTSHIRE

DORSET

Kirkcaldy, KY2 6LF

DEESIDE DEFENDERS Chester, CH4 0DR

Warrington, WA1 2SX

WESSEX WYVERNS WARGAMES CLUB

GLASGOW

ANTONINE BOARD GAMERS

WINSFORD WARHAWKS WARGAMING CLUB

WORLDS AWAY

GLASGOW GAMES ROOM

DUMFRIESSHIRE

UNPLUGGED GAMES CLUB

Stockport, SK4 3BS

WARRINGTON BOARD GAMES CLUB

Winsford, CW7 4AT CLEVELAND

Bournemouth, BH6 3AA

Ferndown, BH22 9AN Bournemouth, BH2 5RQ

Bryn-y-Baal, CH7 6SZ

Glasgow, G64 4EN Glasgow, G20 7QE

REDCAR IRONBEARDS

ANNAN GAMING CLUB

CO ANTRIM

DRAGONSLAYERS

THE FIVE ARCHES GAMING CLUB

GLOUCESTERSHIRE GAMES BUNKER

CO DURHAM

DUNBARTONSHIRE

PORK CHOP GAMING

Redcar, TS10 1RH

Belfast, BT7 1NN

Annan, DG12 6EF

Dumfries, DG1 3JR

DARLINGTON`S DOGS OF WAR

DUMBARTON WARGAMES CLUB

DURHAM RAIDERS

EAST SUSSEX

Darlington, DL3 7LX Croxdale, DH6 5HJ

Dumbarton, G82 1QQ

1066 WARGAMING CLUB

GAMERS@HART

St. Leonards-on-Sea, TN38 8BL

CO LONDONDERRY

EASTBOURNE ELEMENTAL

Hartlepool, TS26 9DE

THE SIEGE BUNKER

Londonderry, BT48 7JL CORNWALL

THE GAMES TABLE

WEDNESDAY NIGHT GAMING

Bude, EX23 9BL

Redruth, TR15 3QY CONTY TYRONE

Eastbourne, BN21 3XQ

FAMOUS COLLECTABLES Bexhill-on-Sea, TN40 1DU

EAST YORKSHIRE

WOLDS WARGAMERS Driffield, YO25 6SS

FIRESTORM CARDS OPEN GAMING NIGHT

POTTERS BAR GAMES CLUB

Basingstoke, RG24 8FB

Glasgow, G41 3AB

GLOUCESTERSHIRE

Cheltenham, GL51 4XA Cheltenham, GL50 3HA GREATER MANCHESTER

TABLETOP MANCHESTER Manchester, M15 4ST

Waltham Cross, EN8 9AJ Potters Bar, EN6 5BT

FORDINGBRIDGE GAMING CLUB

ST ALBANS BOARD GAME CLUB

PORTSMOUTH ON BOARD

THOR`S HAMMER GAMING CLUB

Fordingbridge, SP6 1AS Portsmouth, PO1 1PT

SOUTHAMPTON SLUGGAZ

Dunfermline, KY12 7DS

Hitchin, SG5 1XL

NORTH LONDON WARGAMES CLUB

FIFE

DUNFERMLINE WARGAMING AND ROLEPLAYING FELLOWSHIP

NORTH HERTFORDSHIRE WARGAMES CLUB

Fareham, PO15 6TL

SOLENT WARGAMERS CLUB

Plymouth, PL3 5TB

Torquay, TQ2 7AD

Basingstoke, RG24 8LT

Southend-on-Sea, SS1 1BD

FGC FLINTSHIRE GAMING CLUB

THE DICE AND DAGGER GAMING CLUB

Cambridge, CB24 4RP

OMAGH WARGAMES CLUB

SOUTHBOURNE TABLETOP & BOARDGAMERS

ROLL WITH IT!

Huntingdon, PE29 3TF

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CARMARTHENSHIRE

CARMARTHEN OLD GUARD

Portsmouth, PO1 1PT

Southampton, SO17 2JZ

THE SOUTHAMPTON GUILD OF ROLEPLAYERS

Southampton, SO14 0LH

THE THIRD COALITION WARGAMES CLUB

New Milton, BH25 5BT

WATERLOO TABLE TOP GAMERS

Waterlooville, PO8 8RG

WESSEX WARGAMES WINCHESTER

Winchester, SO22 4QB

WESSEX WYVERNS GAMING CLUB

Ringwood, BH24 2NP HEREFORDSHIRE

DICE AND DECKS Ross-on-Wye, HR9 5HR

HEREFORDSHIRE BOARDGAMERS

Hereford, HR4 9EA HERTFORDSHIRE

BLACK WOLF WARGAMES CLUB Hitchin, SG5 1XL

CALAMITY COMICS HATFIELD Hatfield, AL10 0JJ

FINCHLEY GAMES CLUB London, N12 7JE

St. Albans, AL3 5PE

Hertford, WD6 5PR

WATFORD WARGAMES CLUB Watford, WD17 4PN ISLE OF MAN

KB TABLETOP GAMING Isle of Man, IM4 4LA KENT

ALL AROUND THE BOARD

Westgate-on-Sea, CT8 8RE

ASHFORD (KENT) BOARDGAMES CLUB Ashford, TN24 9AJ

BEXLEY REAPERS WARGAMING CLUB Bexley, DA5 1AA

CANTERBURY CRUSADERS Canterbury, CT1 1RT

GRAVESHAM WARGAMING AND TABLETOP GAMING CLUB Gravesend, DA11 9EU

GREENWICH & BLACKHEATH BOARD GAMES AND BEER CLUB London, SE3 7JQ

MAIDSTONE WARGAMES SOCIETY

Maidstone, ME17 4AW

MEDWAY AREA BOARDGAMERS

Maidstone, ME14 1ED

MILTON HUNDRED WARGAMES CLUB

Sittingbourne, ME10 4BX

GWENT REAVERS TABLETOP GAMING CLUB

HEMEL HEMPSTEAD GAMES CLUB

SEVENOAKS & TONBRIDGE ASSOCIATION OF GAMERS (STAG)

GWYNEDD

HEMEL HEMPSTEAD WARGAMING CLUB

TUNBRIDGE WELLS WARGAMES SOCIETY

ARBBL

HERTFORD BEER & BOARDGAMES

WHITSTABLETOP

BLACK HOLE WARGAMERS

HITCHIN HERETICS

LANARKSHIRE GAMERS

GWENT

Abertillery, NP13 3DJ

CONWY WARGAMES CLUB Llandudno, LL30 3LB HAMPSHIRE

Andover, SP10 1DQ Petersfield, GU32 3HS

Hemel Hempstead, HP2 6BJ

Hemel Hempstead, HP1 1LD

Hertford, SG14 1HH Hitchin, SG5 1XL

Sevenoaks, TN15 9HA

Tunbridge Wells, TN3 0PR Whitstable, CT5 1DA LANARKSHIRE

Motherwell, ML1 1BS

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LANCASHIRE

BLACK TOWER WARGAMING

Blackpool, FY4 4ND

BURNEY WARGAMES CLUB Burnley, BB10 3EU

BURNLEY BOARDGAMERS Burnley, BB10 3LF

DICED TEA

Oldham, OL1 2DB

DUNGEONS & FLAGONS Manchester, M1 7HL

HOUSE LANCASTER GAMING GROUP

Lancaster, LA1 1EE

PRESTON BOARD GAMERS Preston, PR1 7DP

STAFFORDSHIRE WARGAMING GUILD

AFTERNOON PLAY

THE PHOENIX GAMES CLUB

AMBROSDEN GAMING CLUB

TAMWORTH GAMES CLUB Tamworth, B79 7DJ

BOARD GAME CAFE SUMMERFIELD

NORTH OXFORDSHIRE WARGAMING CLUB

TAMWORTH LIBERATORS GAMING CLUB

BRAVO ONE GAMING

OXFORD GAMING CLUB

THE VINE INN GAMERS

OXFORD ON BOARD

STIRLINGSHIRE

London, E11 3DB London, E13

THE ROLE PLAY HAVEN

London, E15 2HU/SE13 6LH MERSEYSIDE

FORGEMASTERS GAMING CLUB

Wirral, CH63 6HD

LIVERPOOL LION BOARDGAMERS

Liverpool, L3 9NS

SOUTHPORT BOARD GAMES GROUP

Southport, PR8 1NH MID GLAMORGAN

CASTLE GAMERS BRIDGEND

THE HUNGRY DRAGON GAMES NIGHT

BATTLEUX WARGAMES CLUB

Manchester, M21 0AE

THE LIVERPOOL WARGAMES ASSOCIATION (LWA) Liverpool, L1 6HB

THURSDAY SCYTHE BOARD GAMERS Liverpool, L3 8HE

LEICESTERSHIRE

LEICESTER ALL SCARS Leicester, LE1 3JR

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

GRIMSBY WARGAMES SOCIETY Grimsby, DN32 9HT

LINCOLN BOARD GAME GROUP Lincoln, LN1 3BJ LONDON

CROSS GAMING CLUB London, SE1 1DX

SELWG

London, SE6 2TS

WARWICKSHIRE

ABINGDON WARGAMES CLUB

SALFORD AND MANCHESTER GAMING HAVEN Salford, M8 0TW

OXFORDSHIRE

TANELORN WAR GAMING CLUB

Bridgend, CF35 6AU MIDDLESEX

Uxbridge, UB10 0RY

DICE CLUB

Uxbridge, UB10 0RY

Abingdon, OX14 5AG Bicester, OX25 2LZ

Banbury, OX16 9AF Oxford, OX2 7DP Oxford, OX4 1EA

OXFORD OUTRIDERS Oxford, OX1 4AG SHROPSHIRE

BIG ORBIT GAMES SHREWSBURY

Shrewsbury, SY1 1PH

King’s Lynn, PE30 4DN

NORWICH BOARD GAMERS Norwich, NR2 4AL

NORTH YORKSHIRE

YORK GARRISON WARGAMING CLUB York, YO32 4AQ

NORTHAMPTONSHIRE

BATTLEFIELD HOBBIES Daventry, NN11 8RB

Telford, TF1 2BW SOMERSET

Bath, BA2 6AA

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

THE BRACKLEY & DISTRICT GAMERS (AKA THE BAD GAMERS)

SOUTH YORKSHIRE

THE PIT GAMING CLUB

Wellingborough, NN9 5TU NOTTINGHAMSHIRE

K.I.A GAMES CLUB

Nottingham, NG17 8LA

WAR & PEACE GAMES CLUB Nottingham, NG10 5BD

WILDSIDE GAMING

Newark, NG24 1ER

BURY ST EDMUNDS BOARD GAMING GROUP

Bury St. Edmunds, IP30 9LH

IPSWICH COUNTY LIBRARY BOARD GAMES LIBRARY

WSM BOARD GAMING CLUB

Brackley, NN13 6LF

SUFFOLK

TELFORD BOARDGAMERS CLUB

Shrewsbury, SY1 2DT

PHOENIX GAMING CLUB Rushden, NN10 9YE

Grangemouth, FK3 8QR

IPSWICH BOARD GAMERS

MID SOMERSET WARGAMES CLUB

KINGS LYNN RPG & WARGAMES CLUB

FALKIRK DISTRICT WARGAMES CLUB

GAMES @ THE BIRD

Shrewsbury, SY1 2DT

NORFOLK

Norwich, NR3 4HX

Rugeley, WS15 2AT

HAVERHILL WAR GAMES CLUB

BATH GAMING GROUP

AFTERMATH GAMING CLUB

Tamworth, B77 3AE

E-COLLECTICA GAMES

TABLETOP TUESDAYS London, N16 8BX

Stone, ST15 8TG

Weston-super-Mare, BS22 8PD

BROTHERHOOD OF THE DICE Barnsley, S75 1JR

STEEL CITY WARGAMING Sheffield, S13 7LL

ZONE OUT GAMES CLUB Doncaster, DN1 2PX

STAFFORDSHIRE

Haverhill, CB9 9JE Ipswich, IP3 0FS

Birmingham, B1 1QP

Ipswich, IP2 0RG SURREY

CROYDON BOARD GAMERS Croydon, CR0 1DP

EAGLE GAMING CLUB Londonv, SW18 2PT

HAMPTON COURT GAMERS East Molesey, KT8 0BT

SOUTH LONDON WARLORDS London, SE21 7BT

STAINES WARGAMES ASSOCIATION Egham, TW20 0QT

Devizes, SN10 5AD

GRANGE LIVE GAMING

WEDNESDAY KNIGHT GAMERS

Birmingham, B1 1QP

NUNEATON ALTERNATIVE GAMES ASSOCIATION OCTOBER WARGAMES ASSOCIATION

DRAGOON’S DEN

Birmingham, B16 8SY

THE WOKING WEIRD BOYZ Woking, GU22 7TA

LICHFIELD GAMERS AND RPG

SUSSEX

Chessington, KT9 1PF

BRIGHTON WARLORDS Brighton, BN1 1UB

Birmingham, B13 9EA

POSTAL ORDER GEEK MEET

WEST MIDLANDS

REDDITCH WARGAMING SOCIETY

Coventry, CV3 5GT

Birmingham, B13 9EA Solihull, B90 3GG

Worcester, WR1 1DN

Redditch, B97 5YE

WYRE FOREST GAMERS

Kidderminster, DY10 1RP YORKSHIRE

WEST SUSSEX

AIREBOROUGH COMMUNITY GAMERS

Bognor Regis, PO21 5EU

BEYOND MONOPOLY

BOGNOR REGIS GAMING ASSOCIATION

BOGNOR REGIS MILITARY MODELLING AND WARGAMING SOCIETY Bognor Regis, PO21 5SB

CRAWLEY GAMING CLUB Crawley, RH10 5DF

Leeds, LS19 6AS York, YO24 1AQ

HEADINGLEY GAMES CLUB Leeds, LS6 3HN

HOLMFIRTH GAMING CENTRE Holmfirth, HD9 7HP

CRAWLEY WARGAMES CLUB

HULL’S ANGELS

Crawley, RH11 9BQ

Hull, HU1 3HG

DUNGEON CRAWL-EY GAMES CLUB

LEEDS GAMING

Crawley, RH11 7QG

WEST YORKSHIRE

London, SE1 2TF

Bromsgrove, B60 2DZ

SCIMITAR WARGAMES GROUP

SURREY GIRL GAMERS SWIGGERS

WORCESTERSHIRE

Nuneaton, CV10 8LJ

STAY ON TARGET

Woking, GU21 4AL

Salisbury, SP1 3TA

BROMSGROVE BOARD GAMERS

SOUTH DOWNS SIEGEBREAKERS

Woking, GU21 5BG

Chippenham, SN15 3WL

Coventry, CV6 4FE

PLAY MORE GAMES!

WHITE EAGLES WARGAMES CLUB

CHIPPENHAM BOARD GAMES CLUB DEVIZES & DISTRICT WARGAMES GROUP

MID SUFFOLK GAMING CLUB

Stowmarket, IP14 4SH

Salisbury, SP4 7LN

DREAMDEALERS GAMING CLUB

Ipswich, IP1 3DE

TOLWORTH 1ST FOUNDING

Lichfield, WS13 6EB

Birmingham, B16 0EZ

BIRMINGHAM WARGAMES AND BOARDGAMES CLUB AKA DRAGOON’S DEN

CHASE WARGAMES CLUB Burntwood, WS7 0JL

Birmingham, B15 1AY

WILTSHIRE

BOSCOMBE DOWN & AMESBURY WARGAMES CLUB

Pulborough, RH20 4DR

BOARD IN THE VILLAGE Bradford, BD14 6RF

GAMING CLUB BRADFORD

Leeds, LS1 3DL

LEEDS NIGHT OWLS Leeds, LS6 1LJ

SHEFFIELD AND ROTHERHAM WARGAMES CLUB Sheffield, S2 2TP

SHEFFIELD BOARD GAMES Sheffield, S3 7HG

Bradford, BD1 2DX

HALIFAX BOARD GAMERS Halifax, HX1 1SJ

KEIGHLEY TABLETOP COMBAT Keighley, BD20 6EB

OTLEY BOARD GAMERS Otley, LS21 2AU

LIST YOUR CLUB FOR FREE AND SEE FULL CLUB DETAILS ONLINE AT tabletopgam ing.co.uk/clubs

tabletopgaming.co.uk

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We are always inspired by our customers and forever grateful for their loyalty and business. They have helped us to build upon a dream that without them would not have been possible.

SHOP SPOTLIGHT

ROCHESTER GAMES, MODELS & RAILWAYS

What are your future plans for Rochester Games, Models & Railways for the rest of 2018 and beyond? Rochester Games, Models & Railways will always be expanding. Eventually we would like other stores across the county, but for the time being we will always be bringing in new ranges and expanding those we already stock.

Victoria Stuck chats about the Kentish store’s love of miniatures and its recent in-store gaming days Interview by Matt Jarvis When did Rochester Games, Models & Railways first open? How’s the shop changed since then? The shop first opened in 2011 in Rochester High Street. We had a small shop which was five times smaller than the one we have now. Your name suggests a focus on more traditional areas of the tabletop hobby, such as wargaming. Why is this such an interesting area for you? Our name – Rochester Games, Models and Railways – says it all. We sell everything for all three hobbies. Do you stock many non-wargame board games? How has your selection of games changed over the years? We stock a big range of board games, from Connect Four to Poison Explosion and Firefly. Which games have been proving particularly popular recently? The Walking Dead: All Out War has been huge for us, as has Flames of War and Team Yankee. What upcoming releases are you looking forward to this year? Star Wars: Legion is certainly one to watch this year.

January 2018

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You recently held an in-store gaming day for Mantic – the first the publisher has held outside of its own HQ. How did the event go? What did you do on the day? Our Mantic Games day was massive. It was one of the best events we have ever held instore, with lots of demo games and exclusive goodies available. What other events and gaming meetups for local players do you organise? We have weekly gaming nights on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. We play everything from Star Wars and Warhammer 40,000 to The Walking Dead and Munchkin. In January we have a Wild West Exodus day coming up, and in February Warlord Games will be joining us for a games day. What’s the local gaming communuty like in Rochester? The local gaming community is huge. As our gaming evenings are growing, so is the local interest in gaming generally. Many of our regulars have become close friends and we are very lucky to have such a great group of customers.

tabletopgaming.co.uk

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13/12/2017 14:55

SHOP DIRECTORY

GUERNSEY

30 Roneo Corner, Hornchurch Essex, RM12 4TN • Tel: 01708 475051 • Email: [emailprotected]

All your wargaming needs available through us! GW, Flames of War, Malifaux, X-Wing, Warmachine/ Hordes, Warlord Games, Army Painter, Vallejo, KR Multicase, Battlefoam, Mantic Games, Magic: The Gathering, Frostgrave, 4 Ground, Knight’s Models, Scribor, Guild Ball, Bushido, Board Games & Living Card Games, Chessex Dice, Perry Miniatures, Micro Art Studio’s, Quality Neodymium Magnets, Airbrushes, Tools, Scenery, Resin bases plus many more brands and products.

A new and exciting centre for many different types of gaming in Guernsey. Come and discover for yourself what’s in store and join in many events and activities! Stockists of Board, Card, Computer, RPG & Video Games. 1 Church Square, St. Peter Port, Guernsey, GY1 2LD Tel: 01481 712240 Facebook: Facebook.com/JustGamesGsy

www.justgamesgsy.co.uk ONLINE

an ideal accessory for a DM

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The Gallery Level, The Market Hall, Shrewsbury, SY1 1HX

Tel: 07804 687884

[emailprotected] www.e-collecticagames.co.uk @ecollecticagame

Friendly Local Table Top Game Store specialising in Pokemon, Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Games Workshop and Board Games based in Rhyl North Wales. Small but well stocked and friendly atmosphere! Visit us on 6 Russell Road, Rhyl, LL18 3BU just off the High Street Phone: 01745 360415 Email: [emailprotected] Find us on Facebook for more details

12/12/2017 13:33

ONLINE

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LET’S DO LUNCH!

et’s Do Lunch! is a board game with a very tenuous connection to cannibalism –not something I would have expected to see coming from a large game publisher, in this case Hasbro, in the year 2000. The game itself is actually quite good fun; it’s one of those games that entices you in with simple rules and then as you play forces you to develop some strategy and start thinking more carefully about piece placement. The box is colourful, the plastic miniatures are all nicely detailed and the board looks good. This is a game that plays well and has high production values. From a social anthropology point of view, Let’s Do Lunch! is certainly an interesting item. Firstly, we need to dispose of the idea that the theme of cannibalism in some way enhances the game. The game could have been themed in many different ways – in fact, there is a digital game for the PC called Flower Power that is essentially the same game with the same rules but a different theme. Actually, the process of planting flowers in Flower Power makes even more sense with regards to the rules than that of placing cannibals on the board; the cannibalism element has no relationship or effect on the game other than as an attempt to create something unusual for marketing purposes. The cover of the box shows two characters from opposing tribes: one in the cooking pot being boiled for the other’s lunch. The character in the pot has a ring though his nose and the chef has a bone tied in her hair.

The earliest record of this imagery I know of is from an 1872 publication called All the Year Round, which presented a story of a young white sailor coming into contact with native islanders with “a brass ring through his hideous nose” and “the thigh-bone of a man stuck horizontally through his matted hair”. These ideas are designed to present an image of the uncivilised savage and would have been a fairly typical scene of distant island stereotypes in the 1800s, but as a marketing theme in the year 2000 it’s a more unusual move. The theme continues inside the box; the game’s components are all miniatures of tribal savages in a similar vein, some with what appears to be dreadlocked hair and others with tribal spears. While there is evidence of cannibalism throughout several historical cultures, no single culture fits the stereotype of boiling missionaries in a pot on some far-off South Pacific island. There’s a reason you don’t see this picture of cannibalism in popular media today. The ideas of cannibalism that were presented and accepted until the 1970s are a damaging stereotype that borrows from different tribal styles and practices and blends them into a narrative of the uncivilised native. Unfortunately this narrative does exactly what it was supposed to do: skew the worldview and place Western civilisation as a superior culture by creating a fictional lens through which we can alienate other cultures.

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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tabletopgaming.co.uk

11/12/2017 17:22

IN FEBRUARY’S ISSUE

ON S AL E JAN UARY 30 T H

BATMAN THE BOARD GAME Holy board game, Batman! The makers of Conan are back in black with their action-packed take on the Dark Knight – and we’ve got a first look

HOW MINIS ARE MADE

Following the fascinating process that produces high-quality models for the tabletop from start to finish

MASKS OF NYARLATHOTEP One of the greatest roleplaying campaigns ever written returns

FREE GIFT

Grab your exclusive promo card and do battle in Arena: For the Gods!

HEARTHSTONE: MAGIC’S DIGITAL RIVAL PLAYS ITS CARDS tabletopgaming.co.uk 99 EDUCATING WITH EVOLUTION | VALENTINE GAMES TO LOVE 099_nextMonth_v3 MJ.indd 99

11/12/2017 17:24

Game of Thrones Catan - Tabletop Gaming.indd 1 p100.indd 1

01/12/2017 13:23:27 04/12/2017 15:52

Tabletop Gaming #014 (Jan 2018) - PDFCOFFEE.COM (2024)

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