Abaddon: Shattered Command

Some ways back I wrote a mini-review of Richard Borg's Abaddon:

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Abaddon

review copy provided by the publisher

Extremely Short Summary:

What we have here is your standard “giant robot armies skirmishing on the surface of a valuable but forbidding planet” scenario – filtered through a fog-of-war command system designed by Richard Borg that is a cousin to the Command & Colors system.

Thumbs Up:

• very nice minis
• options for play with 2, 3 or 4 players – all of which work well
• variety of scenarios (with different objectives)

Thumbs Down:

• the rules could use a polish (though I appreciate the willingness of Toy Vault to include an errata page when the game was published)
• as in almost all multi-scenario battle games, the introductory/teaching scenarios do a lousy job of showing off how the good the system can be when it’s firing on all cylinders

The Verdict (a year later):

When I played Abaddon on a pre-production copy last year (4 times in a week!), I was delighted by the awesome miniatures and the fast & furious game play. I understood why some gamers didn’t like it – it is more chaotic due to the use of both dice & cards for command than any of Richard Borg’s C&C games. At the same time, I could see it really appealing to my elementary age boys.

Two other observations from a year ago:

• Mike Gray (from Hasbro) passed by the table while we were playing and remarked that Richard had shown him this game as a prototype a number of years ago.
• I was given the opportunity to play one of the first “web” scenarios – and both the reorientation of the board and the interesting choices that both players are forced to make from the beginning gave me great hope for Abaddon.

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We've continued to play Abaddon - I still think it's a lot of fun and enjoy bringing it down for some rough & tumble battling.

So imagine my excitement when I saw that Toy Vault is launching a Kickstarter to expand Abaddon... with Abaddon: Shattered Command!

The expansion will add Command Bunker tokens (minis if they get enough $$ pledged), Unit Upgrades, rules for building scenarios and entering terrain... and, of course, more scenarios.

The expansion is $15 in the U.S. - and if you missed getting the base game, you can do that with the expansion for just $40. (That's an excellent deal, btw.)

The Kickstarter goes through mid-December - but you should jump on now.

Note: I am not being paid or reimbursed for this blog post. I was given a review copy of the game right after it was released... but I just found out about this new expansion project thanks to the folks at BGG.