Gears Of War: The Turn-Based Strategy Game
Sort of! You'll forgive me pulling a very small amount of wool over your eyes there, but the idea of the world's most absurdly macho action videogame embracing turn-based strategy, as Gears of War: The Boardgame does, is a wonderfully strange one. And also a fine confluence of RPS's farther-flung interests - the original Gears was released on PC (though the second was a sad casualty of Epic doing a frightened little piracy-wee) and of course we're prone to a healthy spot of boardgame coverage now and again.
Thus, I have duly advised Rab Florence of Gears of War: The Boardgame's existence, and hope that he soon elects to dissect its 200 cards, 75 tokens and 30 plastic figures for us. My initial urge was to sneer, but it actually sounds rather fine - a four-player co-op game centred around random missions, and reimagining Gears' more meat-headed features such as Roadie Running and chainsawing enemies in half as carefully-deployed tactic cards.
It's out next month from Fantasy Flight Games (but distributed by Esdevium Games), and its lead designer is Corey Konieczka. That guy has some extremely impressive boardgame credentials behind him - Mansions of Madness, Space Hulk: Death Angel, Descent and the StarCraft boardgame. This very strongly suggests this won't be a cynical cash-in, but instead something extremely thoughtful, faithful and, hopefully, ace.
