🌱 New Year, All-New Amazing Projects

5 unique tabletop campaigns, a look at recent indie arrivals, and a journey through the tunnel of love

What’s inside: This week’s roundup traverses everything from desperate escapes through 18th-century monasteries and high-stakes sword duels to gaslamp power struggles in a sprawling Victorian fantasy city…

1. The Stone of Madness - Dicefall

Upcoming Page | No one escapes the Inquisition

Based on the highly praised Steam game, The Stone of Madness - Dicefall is a variant on the original, repurposed for a board game. Five prisoners will need to pool their skills and resources to face their phobias, stave off insanity, uncover the mysteries of the Monastery, and find a way to escape. Set within an 18th century monastery, maps will shift and no two nights will unfold the same way with the game offering variable objectives, modular monastery tiles and branching outcomes.

2. Knave!

Live Page | En garde!

Knave! is a fast-paced reflex-based duelling card game for two players that simulates the frantic and sudden nature of swordfighting. Available for as little as £8 for a physical version, the game revolves around two players creating winning positions, damaging their opposition, and blocking key attacks.

3. Hospice: Tunnel of Love - A Haunted Horror Comic

Upcoming Page | Let’s have some fun, this beat is sick, I wanna take a ride on your…

Created by Jonathan Hedrick, Hospice: Tunnel of Love is inspired by The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, and sees 15-year-old Dick and Margaret go on a date through the tunnel of love. Unsurprisingly, it goes horribly wrong… Set in 1955, it’s beautifully drawn, with what looks to be a collection of unique cover pieces by three brilliant artists: Gabriel Ibarra, Francesco Iaquinta and Eranga Devasurendra. Having previously created 18 successful Kickstarter projects, it’s a good one to back.

4. Chaos: The Card Game

Live Page | Everyone wants the Forbidden Fruit

If you tell me that a card game is super fast, I’m usually first in line to buy it. Chaos: The Card Game does just that, describing itself as “a superfast, overaggressive, hyperchaotic strategy game.” It’s already exceeded its original funding goal of £6,700, having reached £44,000 in almost a month. Developed by Andrea Chiarvesio and produced and illustrated by Giovanni Meroni (over 30 successful Kickstarter campaigns).

• A “lane battler” for 2–4 players that revolves around hidden deployment and high-stakes bluffing.

• Players represent rival factions, such as The Depths or Tartarus

• You’re competing for the “Forbidden Fruit” by winning a series of skirmishes.

The game’s signature mechanic is the Chaos Value, where every card features a standard strength and a much higher “Chaos” strength. During a round, you’ll place three cards face-down in rows. If you win the two outer battles (Left and Right), your center card “goes Chaos,” activating its maximum power to crush the opponent’s center and score double points. This creates a tense “risk vs. reward” dynamic where the weakest cards can become the most powerful if you can successfully protect their flanks. It sounds neat and you can read the full rules here.

5. The One Ring™ Hands of the White Wizard

Pre-order Page | Fly, you fools!

Free League Publishing are amazing. Their catalogue of work is incredible and having met many of the team at SPIEL Essen last year, they’re a lovely bunch. Their latest delivery, The One Ring™ Hands of the White Wizard, has opened pre-orders. It’s 438 Swedish krona, which is around £38 for the book, and having held and looked through their Lord of the Rings roleplaying collection, the quality is absolutely amazing. Just be aware that it may not be available in your region just yet, so keep an eye out on when it is. Absolutely worth grabbing.

6. Gateway

Upcoming Page | Power is seized in the flicker of a gas lamp

I played Gateway last year at SPIEL Essen and there are two things that were immediately apparent. The first is that the production quality is off the charts, the second is that as a game, it’s surprisingly small in play surface, but grand in its scope and depth.

• Created and illustrated by the very brilliant Sean Andrew Murray

• 2–4 players compete for dominance in a Victorian fantasy city by blending deck-building with worker placement mechanics.

• You play by recruiting a crew of diverse characters to your deck and deploying them to various districts

• The core strategy involves managing your hand to trigger card synergies, outmaneuvering rivals to conquer guarded sectors, and increasing your infamy to ultimately tip the city’s balance of power in your favor.

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Just Landed

Shred of Redemption and PAYBACK have just arrived at my house and having taken both for a spin, I have to say I’m incredibly impressed. Super cheap to pick up when I backed them last year, they’re both quick to play but with a fair amount of depth. I’d highly recommend grabbing both if you can find them. I’ll have full reviews in the next issue.

Final Turn

Ambition is taking late pledges over on Gamefound and despite being backed by just 200 people, I think it looks one of the best TTRPG’s I’ve seen in a while. Describing itself as a “psychological daoist tarot fantasy tactics TTRPG” it offers something fairly unique.

• Set in the world of Imbrier, fate is represented by a river, while the game draws heavy influence from Daoism and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven.

• You’ll play as the Ambitious dreamers and outcasts who refuse to accept their destiny and instead seek to “carve” the world into the image of their personal Ambitions.

• The GM, known as The River, plays a unique role, acting not just as a narrator but as the “living subconscious” of the players, roleplaying their internal “Voices”.

✅ Lingo check: Daoism is a Chinese philosophy of natural practice structured around a normative focus on dào (道 path, way). This naturalist philosophical project treated dào as a structure of natural possibility for living beings.

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