News: Vampire Survivors The Board Game - Be the bullet hell

 

Vampire Survivors, the hugely entertaining roguelike shoot-em-up video game published by Poncle, is set to get it's own board game adaptation through collaboration with Grey Fox Games.

Very little information is currently available as to what this will look like, but the video game was a new take on the "bullet hell" genre of games, in which your character levels up to become the bullet hell of the game. How this will translate to the table top setting is anyone's guess but the website is promising the ability to choose from a roster of "beloved" characters (I couldn't tell you any of their names despite having played the video game to death - I just play as the old man who smells of garlic), face an "endless swarm" of relentlessly spawning enemies, and to use and evolve signature weapons to "cut a path through the darkness" (honestly, it'll be a crime if they leave the stinky garlic out of the mix).

In the video game, the Red Death was the final enemy of any level. Unbeatable, unstoppable, and unavoidably final. If the scant amount of information pre-Kickstarter campaign is to be believed, it will be making an appearance in the board game version.

The Kickstarter is set to go live this autumn but those keen to get project updates before then can donate $1 on the Grey Fox Games Vampire Survivors website and unlock a free deck box should they then back it on Kickstarter.

I am a big fan of the video game, which is deliciously moreish, so I'm keen to see what shape the table top adaptation will take and whether it will capture the frantic WTF energy of the early game and the almost godlike power-trip of a well-leveled character. The history of video game tabletop adaptations is one of mixed success but I would love to see Vampire Survivors become a Stardew Valley: The Board Game, rather than a Borderlands: Mister Torgue's Arena of Badassery.

Canterbury Halloween Board Game Club Announcement

 

We are very excited to announce that following our hugely successful Canterbury Pride Board Game Club, we will be hosting another event: Canterbury Halloween Board Game Club, on Saturday 25th October 2025! The event will run from 10:00-16:00, so that's 6 hours of gaming!

This time we're putting our efforts into making a Halloween themed event that is fun for adults and children in a calm and relaxed setting. We'll have a great selection of board games available for people to play. Some scary, others less so, so there'll be something for everyone to enjoy.

Halloween events are more often than not aimed entirely at children, or if they are for adults, they involve heavy drinking and loud pubs. We thought it would be nice to have something a bit more chill. Somewhere to come and soak up some spooky vibes and gain the benefits of table top gaming.

Once again we are very lucky to have access to the Fruitworks Coffee Shop event space, which we loved hosting in for our last event and we will have stalls available from local businesses. So far we have confirmed Board at Home, Ramsgates FLGS, Drawn and Quartered tattoo studio, and Kitsch Flamingo Designs, who ran our hugely successful tombola at our Pride event.

We will also be using this event to launch the Hand Limit Go Fund Me, which we will be using to help raise funds to get Hand Limit set up as a Community Interest Company. It is our goal to expand the reach of our activities and use our resources to support local community groups and schools through the positive effects of table top gaming. However, in order to get there we first need some funding to get ourselves set up.

Review: Tribes of the Wind - Does anyone else smell Ghibli?

 

We recently got a chance to play Tribes of the Wind by Joachim Thome, published by La Boite De Jeu, at Canterbury Gaming Festival, and if you read our roundup of day 1 you'll know that we didn't get past the first turn before throwing in the towel.

Well, I got home and I found that I couldn't stop thinking about the game. The artwork, the pieces, the promise of a satisfying tile-laying, worker placement, strategy game with all the colour, charm, and theme of post-apocalyptic environmentalism, reminiscent of studio Ghibli's Nausicaa: Valley of the Wind (I mean, seriously, someone on the production of this game must have been a fan of that phenomenal film). Plus I was left with the feeling of disappointment at not having understood a game that had such a small instruction booklet for the amount of game that was in the box. 

All of these things left me wanted to take another run at the game. I said to a fellow Hand Limit Collective member that I really felt that given half an hour in a quiet, temperature controlled space, I would make sense of the rules (which didn't seem that complicated, it was definitely a skill issue on my part). Therefore, it was with great delight on Day 2 that I found a copy for sale at Board At Home's "pay what you roll" stand at the event. I rolled a D20 and came away with a copy for £16. I was so sure that I would like Tribes of the Wind if given another opportunity, I was happy to spend the money.

Sure enough, once I got it home and could sit and properly digest the rule book I almost felt foolish that it had bested me a couple of days before. The premise is simple, clear away pollution in order to lay forest tiles on your player map, rewilding the barren landscape, and then populate those tiles with people (known as Wind Riders) to construct villages. As soon as one player constructs their fifth village an additional round is played and the game ends.

Combining a bit of card drafting, a bit of worker placement, and a bit of set collecting, the game (for 2-5 players) plays very smoothly with straight forward actions available on each turn. Players must choose between playing an action card from their hand, placing a temple at the cost of three action cards, or building a village on a populated forest tile. The challenge is collecting sets of cards that allow you to play these action cards. Each card has a specific element associated with it and the requirements to play need certain sets of these elements to work. For example, in order to play a card that would allow you to clear pollution or place a forest tile, you may need one of every element in your hand, or for you to have more water element cards than both of your neighbours.

Victory points are earned in a variety of different ways. The most prominent is through completing objectives on village cards, which are earned whenever you construct a village. These will have specifications such as tiles in certain configurations or temples built in certain locations. Points are also scored for removing as much pollution as you can, and placing all your temples (you are limited to 4).

Working out the best order to play your cards adds a real puzzle element to an otherwise simple game, but it carries it off very well. There's very little downtime between turns and during that time you will find that you are focused on deciding what card to play next to maximise efficiency. While the game is primarily built around constructing villages on your own individual maps, there's a bit of player interaction when it comes to using your neighbour's cards to complete card requirements, and drawing new cards from the same marketplace. This gives scope for working together, or working against each other, depending on who you're playing with.

Despite the straightforward nature of the actions, there's a lot going on in this game that gives it a moderately crunchy feeling but it feels great when you manage to pull off the strategy you had planned. There are a lot of pieces to this game and it's satisfying to get to place them around your board. Generally the game has a very nice feel to it and the quality of the assets is clear.

The only downside we encountered was especially notable at the start of the game. It's very easy to be dealt a starting hand that cannot be used because you've not had a chance to build any sets yet. In this instance it's possible to spend three of the cards to build a temple. However, it does feel like it would be possible to be backed into a corner as only one temple can be placed per tile, and you only start with a single tile. This is frustrating early game, when it feels like your agency is taken away from you, but as the game progresses and sets of cards are accumulated, it becomes easier to fulfill the action card requirements.

In a recent review of Trickerion as part of our Canterbury Gaming Convention Day 2 roundup, I bemoaned the game's chaining of requirements, which made meeting a simple objective feel like a cumbersome task. To an extent this game operates in the same way. Players need to decide what they want to achieve and then slowly work backwards to plan out how they will get there. However, Tribes of the Wind manages to make it feel less clunky and there is more often than not a clear path from point A to B. I do feel that the estimated play time of 20 minutes per player to be a bit unrealistic. For a 3 player game we easily made it last 2 hours, though some allowance must be made for it being our first game.

Overall, Tribes of the Wind is a lovely game that offers an engrossing experience, boosted by some truly lovely artwork and a cohesive theme that works well with the mechanics at play. If you're a fan of worker placement games, then this is a must try.

Last Week of Summer Goes Live on Kickstarter

 

If you've been keeping up with our coverage of Canterbury Gaming Convention you will have seen that we fell in love with the preview of Last Week of Summer, a game all about an 80s summer after graduating high school and your attempts to make the last week of it the most incredible of your life.

As of today, Last Week of Summer, by Allies or Enemies, is live on Kickstarter.

Their campaign page has all the details on why you should be backing this wonderful game but just know that it comes with the Hand Limit seal of approval!

If you want us to try and sell it to you further, drop a comment below!

Finally Played: Uno

Continuing our current series of big name games that remarkably I've never played, we return with the classic card game and cause of family arguments everywhere, Uno!

It seems everyone I talk to has played Uno at least once so it's strange that I've gone this long and have never picked up a deck. If I'm totally honest from what I picked up about the game second-hand, there wasn't much of a draw to play it. It seemed like a very basic game without much going for it.

When I told my eleven year old daughter that I had never played it, however, she wanted to put that right straight away. As luck would have it I was gifted a set of Pokemon Uno cards last Christmas so I got the deck out and asked her to teach me how to play.

I went into the game with an open mind but there was a part of me that was expecting to dislike it. Try as I might though, I couldn't bring myself to form a negative opinion about the game. This wasn't due to the game itself, which on the face of it was on the boring side, but instead was thanks to the way in which I was taught.

It was clear from the start that Uno is a very special game for my daughter and it was a privilege to be taught by someone who cared so deeply for the game. It is the first time that my daughter has taught me the rules to anything so it made me quite emotional as she carefully lead me through the different rules and what actions the different cards did. It is a game that she was clearly passionate about and this was infectious, I found myself really enjoying our game despite it being far more basic than what I usually like.

As she was teaching me, she spoke at length about how this game was important to her as during the Covid-19 pandemic, when she was being home-schooled, she would play it most evenings with her mother. This was a difficult time for her, as it was for everyone, being separated from her friends and the routine of the school day, so it was really touching to hear her talk about Uno as something that gave her joy. It was a little bit of routine to her day that kept some feeling of normality during a deeply troubling time.

We played board games as a family during the lockdown but Uno was something my daughter had with just her mother and it was clear to me as she taught me how to play what a special place the game held for her. She talked at length about the rules that she and her mother used, and how these differed from the rules that each of her step siblings played, and that her step father had a different set of rules still. We laughed that these home-brewed rules didn't help them win at all and talked about how she felt the rules she played with her mum are the correct ones.

Regardless of how I feel about the core game of Uno, it occurred to me that this was the perfect example of how games can bring us closer together and how they are sometimes worth more than the sum of their parts. I don't often like giving bad reviews. I prefer to give recommendations for games than go into the negatives. However, this experience gave me a better appreciation that all games, no matter the objective quality, have the power to improve our bonds with each other and strengthen our community. Uno is a popular game, and it must be so for a reason.

Is it a game I would play with just anyone? No, probably not. Will I play it with my daughter again? Almost certainly.

Games on Location: Episode 2 - Anarchy in the Arctic

 It's been a hot minute since we wrote our last Games on Location article (we took Fungi out into the woods), but today we have an extra special edition. You may remember that last year we previewed the fantastic Arctic Anarchy and interviewed its creators Ricky Baker and Lydia Vadgama. Well, during this interview I suggested that they take a copy of their game with them to play while in the arctic circle to do a special Games on Location for us. At the end of June 2025, Ricky and Lydia voyaged to Iceland's capital Reykjavik and further north to Grundarfjörður, Ísafjörður and Akureyri. They then continued on to Alesund in Norway.

The rest of the article is provided to us by Ricky who made some notes on their experiences travelling north with a copy of Arctic Anarchy in their possession.

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Arctic Anarchy on location in Iceland and Norway

The route of our journey meant that we crossed the Arctic Circle when going around Iceland in a North easterly direction, and again when heading towards Norway going South easterly. Naturally it was only fitting that we brought our creation with us. Whilst we did this in the comfort of a cruise ship, our journey did in some ways help us scope out what we might encounter when we embark on our Arctic Quest voyage in Svalbard and give us inspiration for the possibility of an expansion to our game.

No nighttime and folklore inspire possibilities of expansions

Between May and July is known to those in Iceland and Norway as "Period of Midnight Sun", during which the sun does not truly set, but rather sits on the horizon only to rise again after a few short hours. At 6pm the position of the sun makes it seem like midday, and midnight seems like early evening time.

Icelandic and Norwegian folklore is filled with stories of trolls. Much of the landscape tell the stories of these trolls, including "Naustahvilft" (The Troll Seat) located in Ísafjörður.

Thinking about an expansion for Arctic Anarchy, we knew that we would want to introduce and additional dimension to game play for the more experienced board gamers to enjoy. The period of midnight sun and the legends of the Trolls have inspired the idea of adding a "Trolls" card to the events deck. When drawn, the sight of the trolls cause the animals on the iceberg to go into hiding. This manifests itself in the game play as the players having to turn over the animal cards on the iceberg so that the faces are hidden. Any future cards drawn to replace those taken from the iceberg must also be placed face down. As a result, players will be adding animals to their raft blind, until the next event or another troll card is played, (we are yet to decide how the troll card will be cancelled).

Rainbows in Rekjavik and Wildlife icons

Animal cards within Arctic Anarchy are based on native mammal species within the region of Svalbard. Currently the game comprises of Polar Bears (the symbol of Arctic Quest 26), Arctic Foxes, Reindeer, Arctic Hares, Seals, and Whales.

We were lucky enough to see two of these animals in their natural habitat, having spotted a harbour seal off the beaches in Grundarfjörður and a Whale fin whilst at sea.

Another Icelandic icon is the Puffin, with many tourist excursions available to see these in the wild. If that doesn't float your boat, you can visit "Rainbow Street" in Rekjavik, where the cobbles have been painted in stripes of rainbow colour. The street has been decorated in this way as a sign of joy and support for diversity. The initiative is organised by the city of Rekjavik in cooperation with Rekjavik Pride. The street has become an attraction for many visiting the city, and of course there are many shops along the way filled with all manner of puffin themed souvenirs. The puffin, with its colourful beak, seems right at home in this part of the city, and would be a welcomed addition as a new animal type in the Arctic Anarchy game.

For us as creators, the addition of a rainbow puffin card to our game would symbolise the inclusiveness that scouting strives to provide for all its members. It would also reflect our own personal morals and desire for Arctic Anarchy to be a game that can be played by all.

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Hand Limit loves Arctic Anarchy and strongly recommend checking it out  wherever and whenever you can. Get in touch with Ricky and Lydia via the Arctic Quest 26 website to pick up a copy or head over to the Gilwell Reunion 2025, Gilwell Park Campsite, London from 29th to 31st August. This is a festival for adults scouting volunteers, where the wider Arctic Quest team will be promoting and raising funds for their expedition.

Stay tuned for more updates on this fantastic game and the journey of the Arctic Quest 26 team.

Preview: Last Week of Summer - Make It Rad

 

We all remember the long Summers of our youth. Days that stretch endlessly away from us, so much promise and possibility. Plans to see friends, to hang out, spend time belonging to no one but yourself. But there's always tomorrow to be active, today why not spend some more time in front of the TV?

Then all of a sudden you look at the date and realise that you only have one week left before real life comes screaming back into focus. Perhaps you're moving on to University or College, perhaps you will be getting into the world of work. No matter what's waiting for you, you are suddenly faced with only a week left before responsibility catches up with you.

What is there to do other than make sure that last week of Summer is as memorable and awesome as possible? It's time to get off the sofa and make those memories. 

That is the premise of Last Week of Summer from Allies or Enemies. It's the summer of 1986, you just graduated high school and you have one more week of summer before it's time to head off into the real world.

We came across Last Week of Summer at Canterbury Gaming Convention and we were pulled in by the absolutely gorgeous 80s vaporwave aesthetic. After playing it on Day 2 we all agreed that it was by far the standout game of the whole convention. The game play is smooth and well thought out, offering an engaging and smooth experience that neatly marries the mechanics and the theme. And I can't stress this enough, it is such a visually appealing game that caught the eye of everyone passing by the table.

Last Week of Summer combines worker placement with modular locations that represent different attractions in your town, from the arcade, to the skatepark, to the video rental store. Each location has it's own mechanic as well making the game feel varied and entertaining. The skatepark, for example, involves collecting tetrominoes and compiling them to learn tricks, the fast food joint is a push-your-luck mechanic where you try to eat the most food you can, the arcade is a dice-rolling mini game where you try to complete rows of identical dice. Successfully completing these mini-games awards cassette tokens which act as victory points at the end of the game.

Combining worker placement with so many other mechanics was a big swing from the designer, Shawn Hoult, as handled poorly it could easily have been a messy experience, but the game absolutely hits a home run. Getting a chance to play each mini-game is a real draw to encourage players to spend as much time as possible at each location, rather than just camping out at one.

There's one catch to your plans to having the most amazing last week of summer, and that's money. In order to make the most of your week you're going to need cash, and in order to get that cash you need to take on shifts at the aforementioned businesses. When working shifts you don't get to participate in the mini-games but there are rewards beyond money. If you have a slow shift (if no other players choose to attend the business) you get bonuses towards earning cassettes, such as renting a free video from the video rental, or taking a small tetromino from the skatepark as you practice your skateboard tricks. 

The game takes place over 7 rounds, representing a full week, and each player plans out their days (morning, afternoon, evening) by playing action cards in front of them at the start of each round. Each period of the day is then resolved in the order that the locations are placed around the central board. Additionally, there are cool kids roaming town that score you bonuses if you attend businesses at the same time as them.

At the end of each day is a party and those who had the most impressive day get an invite, scoring them extra cassette tapes.

Overall we were incredibly impressed with the quality and quantity of game play that Last Week of Summer provides, and we are very excited for the launch of its Kickstarter campaign on 19th August.

Keep an eye on our Instagram for an upcoming reel that really shows what a beautiful game this is and give Allies or Enemies a follow to keep up to date on its development. While you're waiting for the game to come out, why not give this playlist of 80s bangers a listen on Spotify, put together by Allies or Enemies to complement their incredible game.