The Hunters A.D. 2114

The Hunters A.D. 2114 arrives with the usual campaign-game confidence: a mass of cards, miniatures, token sheets and counters, all determined to occupy every practical inch of the table. It is not a casual box. It is an installation. Fortunately, the material earns that footprint early on. There is plenty to read, but it is proper thematic writing rather than the generic connective tissue that so often passes for narrative in this category. Better still, none of it is handed over to a phone app; I would rather read the world at the table than have a handset narrate it to me.

Its exploration framework recalls FFG's Fallout, though the map is replaced by a shifting arrangement of location and sub-location cards. Those establish the available parts of the world for a given phase, while other cards placed around them introduce events and special circumstances. The interesting decision is how to spend time and resources, because the campaign gives little room for repetitive grinding before the next problem arrives.

Alongside that sits a base-development board: rooms are added gradually and unlock further options, in a structure recognisably close to XCOM 2. Levelling and crafting belong to that same broader economy of progress. Combat is less persuasive. It is serviceable, but after a long stretch of play it begins to feel tepid beside the campaign's narrative movement. Scaling is the more consequential flaw: side missions do not adjust enemies adequately for the player count, and a two-character game loses much of the resource-management game besides.

That produces a slightly unusual recommendation, but not an equivocal one. This is not a sword-and-sorcery campaign in which each fight is the evening's centrepiece; it is a pseudo-sandbox built around well-written narrative, costly choices and a base that demands forward planning. The storytelling reaches the standard of a substantial computer RPG, somewhere in the Wasteland 2/3 neighbourhood, and it does enough heavy lifting to make the thinner combat tolerable.

Updated session

Later sessions clarified rather than reversed the first impression. Running four characters, with two controlled by each player, changes the game markedly: bookkeeping increases and battles become more cumbersome, but both the scaling and, especially, the resource game finally make sense. Around the campaign's midpoint, the crafting and combat have started to wear a little, yet the narrative and the pressure of its decisions remain strong enough to keep the whole undertaking impressively effective. At two characters it is half a game; at four, it is a bold and substantially successful one.