A tactical cooperative tower defense game!
Tabula Games have made some great games – and the original world that is the backdrop of both Mysthea and Icaion is evocative – but their latest heads in a different direction by adapting a popular tower defence computer game called The Last Spell. Personally, I prefer the wild originality of the former games, but I also understand that licensing a computer game can be a smart way to reach an established audience. But will that audience shift over to board games, and what will they be looking for when they do?
These questions are particularly relevant because The Last Spell: The Board Game seems to cleave as closely as possible to the computer game, even down to using its nostalgic pixellated art. This is a relatively complex, tactical cooperative tower defence game (Tabula claim RPG elements too, though this just means you can equip your hero characters with items and perks), in which your fantasy heroes defend a town from waves of undead creatures over a period of three nights (and three different towns, if you play the entire campaign). During the day phase, you’ll upgrade your heroes and build buildings and defences; and during the night, you’ll hold off the nasties as they emerge from the purple mist surrounding the town and try to destroy the magic circle at its centre. And on the third night, there’s the classic computer game trope of a final boss to defeat.
Because it’s a computer game in board game form, The Last Spell: The Board Game is very visually busy, and to me, the artwork didn’t wholly successfully make the transition from brightly coloured RGB art (created on and for a backlit computer screen) to CMYK printing inks. The X-shaped standees are sometimes hard to read from particular angles, so I highly recommend the version with (very nice) plastic miniatures, which are a vast improvement over the monster standees of the standard set.
There’s a lot to keep track of here, and the game is complicated by different final bosses with special rules, and even several expansions if you want to add more complexity. Yes, you’ll find lots of cooperative decisions to make about which resources to go for to build what structures, and how to kit out your heroes, but when it comes time to kill the bad guys in the night phase, players will largely be doing their own thing slaying monsters in different sectors of the board in an attempt to make it through to another night.
I haven’t played the computer game at all, and I freely admit I didn’t play The Last Spell: The Board Game enough to discover all its complexities, because it just didn’t hit the mark for me. In an attempt to stay so true to its source, it just made me wonder why I was doing all this busywork to do things that a computer could do far more easily for me. As a fan of board games because they’re not computer games, I didn’t quite see the reason this game exists. But I can also see that there’s a lot of intricate moving parts here that some players will very much enjoy having fun with – probably players who are excited by the whole genre of tower defence computer games and this style of art, and want to recreate that excitement in board game form with their friends. For them, this game should hit the spot.
Tabula didn’t make it easy by supplying a couple of half-baked rulebooks (one each for the Day and Night phases) that make the game seem a lot more complicated than it is. I spent some time trying to make the rules more accessible in this rule summary and reference (which includes the expansions) – enjoy!
