Sommaire pour Issue 91 de Tabletop Gaming

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Picture the scene. You’ve picked up your ticket to your very first AireCon, turned the corner from the desk and headed into the hall… to immediately be confronted by a Greek statue, a huge banner and stand with an epic monster scene depicted, and people on the stand dressed in Greek togas. Or, how about, you head to UKGE where instead they’re Centurions, complete with Roman helmet and plume… Maybe one convention, there’s a giant blow up panda suit with a grinning, game loving demonstrator inside on hand to teach you a game. Sound fun? Think it would make you smile? Well, that’s Hachette Board Games UK to a ‘T. Hachette don’t make their own games and aren’t publishers. Instead, they distribute games from Europe, predominantly from France, whilst utilising…

Humans are hardwired for success whether it’s getting good exam results or guessing Wordle in one. Every so often, some smug billionaire will be quoted on social media about failure being fine… as long as you don’t give up. Playing games follows the same script. Of course, there are cognitive and creative benefits, but ultimately, you’re there to be the best. The master of the meeple. Anything else would make you a bad sport, a deviant who broke the contract about being competitive. Wouldn’t it? Are there actually times when it’s acceptable – advisable, even – to lose on purpose? Yes. And no. Perhaps you’ve dabbled before but felt uncertain about the ethics. Read on and clear your conscience with this handy tear-and-keep guide: SCENARIO 1: AN ARGUMENT LINGERS Broadly…

Designer: Johan Benvenuto | Publisher: Libellud There’s a trend recently encouraging a swing towards so-called cosy games. Generally, they’re small games, rarely overly competitive, and usually with some absolutely stunning art or colours. Constructing a quilt? Perfect. Making the perfect home for cats? Brilliant. Setting up a village of artisan dragons? Who wouldn’t want that. So when Harmonies came about, a small tile laying game from Libellud, the creators of quick to learn games with beautiful artwork (see: Dixit, Mysterium), I had high hopes… and delightfully, Harmonies met and exceeded all my expectations. We’ll start with how it looks – and the short answer is: gorgeous. It’s a really distinctive art style that prioritises colour, with stylised versions of the animals on each of the cards. It’s almost tricky not…

Designer: Emmanuel Gauvain | Publisher: Scorpion Masqué Picture the scene: two teams, each with a blindfolded driver are guided by a fully aware co-pilot. The racing all happens on a track with the pilot utilising a dry erase marker to trace the car’s route. The navigator grips the driver’s thumb, using it as a joystick to provide directional guidance. A player will know from that elevator pitch whether they want in or not, as the game is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a ridiculous experience. As a driver, you have someone yelling at you while yanking your thumb back and forth. You try to feel out the process as your other hand slowly–or perhaps furiously–traces a route along the track. It’s beguiling at times as it’s easy to run…

Designer: Whitney Loraine, Joshua Camden, Patrick Logan | Publisher: Skybound Tabletop Fans of the Amazon Original show, or the comic book series from Image Comics, will have likely already heard of the board game spinoff of the Invincible franchise. The show itself depicts a young superhero, who has to come to terms with the reality that his father isn’t who the world thought he was. Along the way, there are plenty of coming-of-age moments and sci-fi twists for Mark Grayson to contend with. The very basic premise of Escape From Mars picks up on one of those sub-plots, which saw the titular planet infested with a race of parasites known as the Sequids. With the ability to take control of a person’s mind, the board game pivots around that tension…

Designer: Jeremy Geenen, Ethan Janssen, Matt Rayford | Publisher: Sophisticated Cerberus Games Hidden movement games do a wonderful job of conveying tension. Typically, one player secretly tracks their position on a separate map or pad of paper, while the rest of the group scours a board in search of the intruder. The Stifling Dark wields this format to craft a terrifying horror game where the hidden entity is a supernatural foe, intent on hunting down and eviscerating a group of investigators that have wandered into their domain. It’s full of atmosphere and utilises this style of game wonderfully. While the general story is that a group of investigators are searching for confirmation of the villain, the details are actually more varied. There are 14 different investigators, each with their own…

Designer: Dan Halstad, Tristan Halstad | Publisher: Sidekick Games AQUA: Biodiversity in the Oceans is a lovely story. Dan and Tristan Halstad make a formidable father and son design team, their lightweight tile layer coming to life by the hand of Vincent Dutrait. The aesthetic is wonderful and perhaps the game’s strongest asset. Players are tasked with crafting burgeoning coral reefs in order to attract sea life. The reefs are composed of tiles that sprout off in various directions, each portion illuminated in a different colour. It’s a very smooth and fascinating palette that brightens the table and is extraordinarily welcoming. This trendy nature setting is a large selling point of the design. Besides the impressive visuals, the act of laying tiles to grow the reef is very pleasant and…

Designer: Chris Birch | Publisher: Modiphius Entertainment It’s rare to come across a title that’s as all-encompassing, ambitious, and deep as Dreams and Machines. That doesn’t just extend to the gameplay mechanics. Every single element of this roleplaying title has been carefully crafted to empower the players and gamemasters to build a new world, full of possibilities. The books themselves are gorgeous collector’s pieces and truly capture the tone that Modiphius Entertainment is looking for. As a relatively new title on the market, Dreams and Machines had to leave a lasting impression and it has done so with flair. Not only are these guidebooks going to jump from the shelf, but they are there to be poured over after purchase, with fans sure to find something new on each page.…

Designer: Richard Baker, Eytan Bernstein, Makenzie De Armas, Amanda Hamon, Ron Lundeen & Christopher Perkins | Publisher: Wizards Of The Coast Dungeons & Dragons fans will likely welcome a return to Phandelver, and more specifically Phandalin, a small town on the Northern Sword Coast, between Neverwinter Wood and the Sword Mountains. The Shattered Obelisk boasts some familiar locations because it acts as a reimagining and expansion of a campaign that players have likely experienced before. The D&D Starter Set released in 2014 included The Lost Mine of Phandelver, which was specifically designed as a great point of introduction for newcomers, but had the versatility to be customised by Dungeon Masters to appeal to veterans. The Shattered Obelisk includes that very same narrative, albeit with a few changes. This is almost…

Designer: Mat Hart, Sherwin Matthews & others | Publisher: Steamforged Games Monster Hunter World: Ancient Forest is a game about plucky heroes, hunting unrealistically large monsters. It’s based on the popular computer game series of the same name. The first thing you’ll note is that Monster Hunter World comes in a gargantuan behemoth of a box. Seriously, it’s enormous! The majority of that space is for containing four deliciously chunky monsters. For some of you, that may be enough on its own - I have several friends who’ve seen the massive winged Rathalos beast and said “I want this game”. Aside from the petrochemical pests, and an excellent vacuum moulded storage solution for all the components, inside the box is a game primarily composed of two halves; a “gathering” phase…

Welcome adventurers! You are cordially invited to our Ultimate Game Night issue, and I’m so glad you could attend. We all know that getting everyone together on a regular basis can be a tricky venture in this day and age, so we’ve got tips on making it all the more special – whether it’s your first game night, or your thousandth! Which games should you pick? What food and drink, and even music pairs well? What if you’ve a low player count? Should you ever throw a game? What’re the best cosy (although we’ve gone with cozy in honour of its writer!) games to play? All this and much more. Excitingly, you may be reading this at UK Games Expo, one of the biggest events on the gaming calendar. If…

When you think of game nights, you think of a big group of people getting together, contributing their own titles to the play pile, and bringing an array of snacks to munch on throughout the session. But not everyone wants such an extravagant evening full of so many players. Sometimes, a quieter night in can be just as much fun, with the right person. Whether it’s with a friend, partner, or family member, duet and duel games can help to shape a perfect game night for two. WHAT ARE DUET & DUEL GAMES? In their simplest forms, duet and duel games are any titles designed for two people to play. That therefore doesn’t include games that were created with more players in mind but are also accessible to a duo.…

Open Drafting Definition: A game mechanic where you select from a visible, communal pool. ‘No, you can’t take that. That’s the one I needed!’ It’s the all too familiar catchphrase of open drafting. And yes, sometimes you did pick that piece on purpose because they wanted it. Sometimes it was just the one that fitted your own plans. On occasion, you were even trying to be nice. Not that anyone ever believes that. While drafting itself is a strategic mechanic, usually the pool of cards or resources you’re drawing from gets populated by luck. To counter this, many games include balancing mechanics that complement open drafting. Maybe you get to go first next turn if you draft something usually less desirable, or maybe you have to draft last next time…

This month we’re off to Switzerland; home to mountainous hiking trails, skiing, and those ubiquitous pocket knives so well suited to slicing the cellophane from all our favourite board games. But what about their games? As a landlocked country in Europe, Switzerland has, unsurprisingly, been subject to the same transference of ideas and cultural products as its neighbours. Consequently, games such as chess and nine-mens-morris have been long present in the region. By the late eighteenth-century, though, a more identifiably Swiss game rose to prominence after its introduction by Protestant mercenaries. Jass is a trick-taking card game, typically played by teams of two, utilising the traditional Swiss-German-suited thirty-six card deck. The name, Jass, is more of an umbrella term for the game’s seventy-plus variants, the most popular of which being…

When we think about playing a roleplaying game, it’s tempting to think that you have to commit to hours and hours of epic questing. However, there are many great RPGs where you can start and finish an adventure in just one sitting. Commonly known as one-shots, these games can make a great edition to your games night for folks who just want an evening at the Prancing Pony rather than a trek all the way to Mordor. LASERS & FEELINGS Lasers & Feelings is a sci-fi game praised for having one of the most simple and intuitive rule systems of any RPG. You can create a character simply by answering four questions and putting them on a numeric scale between lasers and feelings. Characters closer to lasers on this scale are…

Designer: David Cicurel | Publisher: Lucky Duck Kids I love a good walk in the forest. I find trees, and particularly the oak, to, at some subconscious level, act as a portal of sorts to our past, younger selves. Back then it was a fortress, a climbing frame, whilst now it evokes a different sort of awe: an awe towards its longevity, its role in folklore, the vast ecosystem of over 2,300 species nestled amongst its branches, and the ‘wood-wide-web’ writhing beneath. With Kids Chronicles: The Old Oak Prophecy, Lucky Duck Kids have used the venerable oak’s awe-inspiring reputation as a centrepoint for an arboreal adventure story - one aimed at children yet designed in a way so as not to alienate adults. The titular tree here is a slumbering,…

Designer: Florian Boué, Laurène Brosseau | Publisher: Aspic Games Ready to go to jail? Go directly to jail? Not like that other game, don’t worry! In Brigands, you can take on either the role of the Prince, hoarding wealth and sending your soldiers to police the city, or as a Brigand, a wily thief trying to get one over on the ruling class. Gameplay takes place over a handful rounds, each in two phases. Firstly, all players secretly choose which locations they will send their workers to, along with an action token if they want a bonus effect. After the location cards have been revealed and meeples have been placed, each space on the board is resolved in sequence either leading to the brigand players stealing some money, or the…

Designer: Gustaf Sundström | Publisher: Artipia Games Ceres is a dwarf planet somewhere between Mars and Jupiter, but Ceres by Artipia Games is a large box somewhere on my shelf of good eurogames. In Ceres, each player takes the role of a faction commander, trying to send out mining probes from the planet’s surface into the nearby asteroid belt to farm the asteroids of their valuable resources and victory points. There are a lot of overlapping systems in Ceres but the fundamentals are pretty straightforward for a worker placement game. On your turn, choose whether you want to place one of your command tokens onto the board to activate a location’s power or take one of the primary-coloured worker meeples from the shared supply to place onto your own player…

Designer: Dillon Morton | Publisher: Mirage Merchant So, you borrowed money from the Syndicate, did you? That was a silly idea - it’s loan repayment day tomorrow. You don’t want to miss a repayment now, do you? The Syndicate tend to remove limbs if people are late with the readies. So, how are you going to raise that much money in just twenty four hours? Time to head into Ghoulmorrah and bet your last coins on the pit fights, I reckon. Who knows - maybe you’ll be lucky. In Bloodsport Gambler, players begin with a small pile of coins and a large pile of due loan payments. They then set up three pairs of combatants, each with visible stats for Strength, Dexterity and Life. Players aren’t shown which weapon each…

Designer: Sam & Will Tempest When it comes to fantastical settings, you can’t beat a vast metropolis teeming with magic and corruption and riven with potentially apocalyptic class divides. It’s the formula (more or less) for Melvyn Peak’s Gormenghast saga and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels – to say nothing of such classic RPG backdrops as AD&D’s City of Greyhawk (ask an old person). But now the genre has been reborn for a new generation of tabletop gaming in the form of the wonderfully icky and febrile The Flood Bell Tolls in Saint Magnus. This system-neutral campaign book is an intriguing slab of gothic world-making that combines the dark surrealism of China Miéville’s New Crobuzon series with the noir-ish flavourings of the video game Disco Elysium (topped off with a name…

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You’ve almost certainly seen a Big Potato game around. Not least because they’re a comfortable sight on shelves from supermarkets to Waterstones, but also because their social media videos have a habit of going viral. Even Nick Jonas gave their games a shout-out – leading to a Nick Jonas variant of the game being published – but we wanted to know a little more about what sits behind those bundles of fun, and importantly – what’s next? PLANTING It began with Linkee – a trivia game where you connect the answers to a series of questions to a theme, which headed to Dragons Den. They emerged with an offer of £50,000 from Duncan Bannatyne, for 40% of the company, 4x what they had offered… and declined it. The story could…

Boost energy: Harder Than You Think, Public Enemy Relieve tension: Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong Lessen a harsh loss: Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, Monty Python Gloat about a winning score: Victory Dance, Ezra Collective Drop a hint the night’s over: Goodbye, Spice Girls * Some content may not be suitable for impressionable ears or work nights, so please exercise your own judgement before loading up the tape deck.…

SING TOGETHER Since the very first Disney Lorcana set, we have been able to use our characters to sing songs. Song cards are like every other action card in that you can pay the cost printed in the top left corner of the card to resolve the effect of the card. What makes them different is that you can instead rest one of your characters with a cost equal to or greater than the song cost to play it for free. Of course, it’s not really free. You’re giving up the opportunity to quest or challenge with that character, but it means not using resources you could use to play a new character and that’s very much worth it. In Ursula’s Return we see a new version of this mechanic;…

Designer: Yohan Goh, Hope S. Hwang, Gary Kim | Publisher: Helvetiq Originally planned to be entitled Valhalla, Odin is a tiny, deceptively simple card game designed to be like sending your Viking warriors off into battle. Each numbered card has its own caricature of a Viking, standing tall in an outfit of that suit’s colour. They have a certain charm about them that welcomes you into the game, and makes you stick with it through the initial confusion I’ve seen from everyone I’ve tried to teach it to so far. Look out specifically for some of the fantastic fur boots and the Viking sneakily dressed as a tree. It starts out as a familiar concept to those who play card games. Take turns to lay cards, you must play a…

Designer: Maxime Rambourg, Théo Rivière | Publisher: Repos Production If you’ve ever worked in hospitality, or education, you’ll recognise the scene immediately. The elves will only sit happily on tables with other elves. Dwarves want to be the only dwarf at the table, surrounded by other interesting folk and will tip badly unless this need is met. This seating plan is getting complicated already. The romantics will only ever be satisfied in pairs, the witches want to be with other witches, but the nobles are offended if they’re not the most important person in the room. Don’t ask about the goblins. There are so many things to draw you into Little Tavern. That the playing area is an assortment of pub tables laid out on your own gaming table is…

Designer: Marco Canetta, Stefania Niccolini | Publisher: Sorry We Are French I have a theory that games on the heavier end of the spectrum rely on a kind of delayed-gratification approach to their themes. Unlike campaign games, or even light, whimsical euros, these are the games that, perhaps, fail to viscerally tell stories or recount events during play, instead laying down subtle threads of theme best pursued with our post-game brains. Conveniently - and without a hint of bias - Zhanguo: The First Empire (a seemingly dry simulation of Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi’s unification of China’s Warring States by way of hand management, area-control, and engine-building), demonstrated my theory perfectly: I had minimal knowledge of Chinese history, mostly just a sense of awe towards marvels like The Great Wall and…

Designer: Nils Hitnze | Publisher: Free League Winter is coming in Seasons Of Mystery, an atmospheric expansion for folk horror-adjacent RPG Vaesen. So, too, are spring, summer and autumn as Free League delves deeper into the spooky, quasi-steampunk world of Vaesen with four thematically linked adventures revolving around the changing of the seasons. Vaesen is a game of exploration and deduction set largely in a fantastical 19th-century Scandinavia. Here, otherworldly supernatural beings (“vaesen” – a sort of Nordic equivalent of Japanese yokai) weave mischief on the margins of society. To these Midsommar trappings, the game adds a delicious cosy crime component. A typical scenario will require the players to unpick a tricky mystery and work out whodunit and why. Seasons of Mystery doesn’t bring anything radical to that formula.…

Designer: Peter Ayres & Felipe Thomaz | Publisher: Neurocraft Studios The future is AI, according to CodeBlade, a bring-your-own-miniatures cyberpunk skirmish game, set in a computer-controlled future, one where humans compete daily for elusive “Honour” tokens. Now, I need to get some negatives out of the way first. The creators of CodeBlade have leant heavily into AI, with hundreds of vibey but non-matching generated images, and some weighty slabs of not-very-good writing. Maybe the prose is machine-generated, maybe it desperately needs an edit; but the effect is underwhelming. There’s an abundance of overlong paragraphs, peppered with jargon and terms. For example, page 5 warns of “particular locations where deprecating AI will issue unmonitored Honour-bound requests”. I can’t tell you what that actually means, and I’ve read the whole book. We’ve…