If you’ve read any of my articles, you’ll know I love a skirmish game. I haven’t played a full game ofWarhammer 40Kin years, butKill Team fulfils everything I want out of a battlein the 41st millennium. I firmly believe that theMiddle-earth Strategy Battle Game is the best system Games Workshop has producedsince 2000, and I really hope it doesn’t mess it all up with the new edition.
So it tracks that I was incredibly excited to get stuck into Fallout Factions: Battle for Nuka-World. A skirmish game, set in theFalloutuniverse, from the mind ofGames Workshop veteran James Hewitt(who created great games like Adeptus Titanicus, Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower, and the new editions of Blood Bowl and Necromunda)? Sign me right up. What I found inside the heavy box was unexpected – a game that was not only fun to play, but arrived at the perfect time to capture a year of Fallout fandom.
A skirmish game is a tabletop wargame where you control individual models rather than units. They tend to be smaller, more focused affairs.
But first, the game itself. In the starter set, you get a thin paperback rulebook, one sheet of tokens, three sheets of push-fit cardboard terrain, two team rosters, and a flimsy paper board to play on. And the miniatures, of course. I’ll take on each of these in turn.
The rulebook is small and light. I’ve really been selling Factions so far, but this is perfect. I’m fed up of carrying enormous hardback tomes to play my games, so a condensed, focused ruleset in a paperback book is exactly what I need, the antidote to many modern tabletop games. I’m not a great fan of games with too many tokens, but Factions’ aren’t too egregious. There’s a lot to remember in this game with all the stimpaks and chems you can take, so a little counter to remind yourself of any model’s current status is really helpful.
The cardboard terrain and paper board felt a bit makeshift at first, but they grew on me too. I’m used to Kill Team boxes with Games Workshop’s excellent plastic terrain, played on a custom board. But you have to take into account the cost. You can find the Fallout Factions starter set for about £65, half the price of Kill Team Hivestorm’s eye-watering £145 ticket. And, for that, I applaud it; the cardboard buildings don’t look as good as the custom-made terrain showcased in adverts and YouTube let’s plays for the game, but they’re good enough to immerse you in the action.
Then we get to the miniatures. They’re slightly smaller than I expected (I’m used to Games Workshop’s scale), but the detail is crisp and mould lines are practically non-existent. They’re a little finicky to build – especially as there’s no instruction booklet included – but look great once assembled, and you can quickly get into a game.
I realised after the fact that Modiphius uploadsdigital instruction bookletsto its website. While I appreciate the effort to save the environment, this could have been better signposted in the box itself.
I’ve covered basic overviews of the rules before, as have many others, including publisher Modiphius itself, and the only thing left to say is that it’s great fun. I’m a sucker for any game that allows you to level up your little dudes and dudettes between skirmishes, which brings a little bit of Mordheim spice to the post-apocalypse.
But my favourite thing about the game is how it implements chems. In the video games, I’m always wary of the buffs because I worry about becoming addicted and suffering the consequences, but I decided to try a different tack on the tabletop. My raiders are probablyalreadyaddicted to the stuff, I justified to myself. Who am I to deny them their fix, especially when it gives me such a necessary power boost in battle?
I’d have liked an additional rule on chems to represent the chances of getting hooked on the powerful go-go juice, but I appreciate Factions’ simplicity in this regard. The buffs in question represent their video game counterparts well, with Psycho granting you bonus attack dice or Jet recovering fatigue, and they fit perfectly within the skirmish game, too. My personal favourite is whiskey, which gives you a boost to your strength or endurance for a single test; I can just picture my savage raider taking a swig of his dusty bottle of bourbon to pluck up the Dutch courage for a particularly brazen move.
While I’ve played a few games of Fallout Factions and it all seems balanced and, more importantly, fun, the thing that struck me the most was how it increased my Fallout fandom to a fervour. I like the series a lot – New Vegas is in my top five RPGs of all time – and I thought the show was okay, but I didn’t expect to get so caught up in the ragtag gang warfare of Factions.
This is a game without Power Armour, without nukes, without Deathclaws. And yet it captures the spirit of Fallout so well. The rulebook has that signature Modiphius flair, filled with retrofuturistic designs both new and borrowed from existing iconography. But the game itself, the act of manoeuvring a group of raiders around rusting buses and decaying shops,feelsFallout without overly relying on the iconography Bethesda heavily pushes everywhere else despite not being a huge part of early games.
This comes from the miniature design, sure, but also from the rules themselves. Both the constraints and the opportunities for attack help you to channel your inner raider, to the point where you end up hoping that Fallout 5 allows us to play as one of the scummy NPCs instead of a power-armoured hero.
It’s been a great year for Fallout media, and fans of the franchise shouldn’t sleep on its latest tabletop iteration. There’s even a box of models that represent Lucy, Maximus, and The Ghoul you’re able to add to this box if you want that full TV show experience. That’s next on my list as soon as it comes back in stock, if only to finally paint some power armour.
