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Board game publishers may be lamenting the end of the tabletop boom—the golden age of board gaming that has filled my weeknights with games like The Quacks of Quedlinburg and Darktide—but I don’t expect the industry to topple overnight. Middle-class Catan bros will choke down a lot of price hikes to get their cardboard fix, and Kickstarters for expensive boxes of fancy plastic are probably here to stay for a while yet.
Like, for example, the upcoming board game Tomb Raider: The Crypt of Chronos, launching on Kickstarter next month. In this game for one or more players, renowned animal-murderer Lara Croft searches the island of Kairos for “an artifact said to hold the reins of time” that will definitely not unleash a supernatural disaster when uncovered.
It sounds kind of like Citizen Sleeper in that Lara has a pool of dice that can be assigned to different actions each turn, like exploration and crafting. How does crafting work in a board game? I assume it’s as abstract as it is in most videogames. Maybe you have to kill and skin the bear to make Lara’s sweet bomber jacket.
The bear is apparently a boss enemy that is able to regenerate, while the standard enemies are gun-toting mercenaries sent by Natla Tech who are after the artifact for nefarious ends. Also, there’s Roman legionnaires and Lara’s ancient enemy, some dogs.
All are represented in lovingly detailed plastic, though they’re standing on too many tactical rocks for my liking. Almost every base seems to include a fallen pillar and/or a small mine’s worth of ore so the character can dramatically pose with one leg raised.
Apparently Tomb Raider: The Crypt of Chronos will have two modes of play, with Adventure Book Mode as a series of 20–60-minute story missions while Campaign Mode is a kind of open-world free roam through random locations, a full campaign of which will take roughly three hours to complete.
This isn’t the first Tomb Raider board game, with Tomb Raider Legends pitting four classic-look Laras against each other several years ago. That was published by Square Enix, however, while Tomb Raider: The Crypt of Chronos is the work of licensee Iconiq Studios, previously responsible for tabletop games based on They Live and Saw, as well as a line of figurines based on characters from Silent Hill 2, Street Fighter 5, and so on. It’ll go live on Kickstarter on May 27.
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Kurt Indovina
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