I was one of the fortunate five to win a free copy of Asmodee USA’s new fantasy board game “Claustrophobia” on TGN this past Holiday season, and I thought I’d post a series of small articles about the game as I delve into it. Being a newcomer to the company, I’ve got no expectations or agendas, so hopefully this will be informative and relatively unbiased.
ARTICLE ONE - THE BOX
Density. My first impression as I heft the package. There’s lots of stuff inside this game and this is good. Being free, it’s even better.
Slicing the shrink wrap and lifting the lid, I’m not disappointed. There’s full color game tiles (36, IIRC), pre-painted miniatures, (Demons and Humans) Rule book, Statcards, plastic trays, Wound Markers, Tokens, Dice (D6 and D10) and Ability Cards. I’ll give a review of the Rules and Game play later, but for now, I’m impressed by the quality of the components. The tokens, stat cards, and tiles are made from thick cardstock and should hold up well to moderate use. The Ability cards are standard quality, full color. Very nice. The black plastic recessed trays hold the Human Stat Cards come with holes for the red plastic Wound markers. Nice idea. My only reservation is that they seem a bit flimsy and might need a bit more attention to ensure they last.
The miniatures are plastic Pre-paints. There are 17 total: 11 little demons, 1 large fiend, 1 human leader, 2 large bodyguard types and 2 swordsmen. Similar to Rackham Confrontation plastics, the paint jobs are acceptable and could be easily improved with an ink wash and some detailing. I suspect they’d take primer if someone were inclined to re-paint them altogether.
The tiles feature some very cool artwork and they’re almost begging for 3D versions. There are room and corridor tiles that can be arranged in any configuration, making for good re-play potential even with the same mission. There appear to be regular passageway tiles, a couple rooms, some turn and junction tiles, and special passages that appear to have traps, hindrances, or the possibility of special events when encountered. I’ll give specifics in the next article after I’ve given the rules a once over.
So far, I’d say Claustrophobia is shaping up to have excellent Dungeon Crawl potential. I’m looking forward to calling up a couple gaming buddies and running through a couple missions.
More to follow…
