First Look: Tannhäuser

We managed a couple of games of Tannhäuser by Fantasy Flight Games at the weekend. It's a board game with pre painted plastic miniatures set in an alternative 1949 where the Great War never ended. This alternate world looks a lot like some alternative WW2 settings but obviously avoids the swastikas which would preclude the game from being sold in some European countries.

The board is double sided and is laid out with paths marked in different colours. These colours allow the line of sight rules to function amongst other things.

The 10 miniatures are plastic and painted to a decent standard (equivalent to Heroclix). They each come with a character card and a number of tokens which allow you to customise them in terms of equipment, skills and the like. The components are relatively language independent but it didn't take too much effort to work out the meaning of the various icons.

The rulebook is of the usual Fantasy Flight type but still relatively easy to understand and we were up and running pretty quickly. In broad brush terms the game pits the Federated States of the Union (the Allies) against the Reich's forces which is a battle generally between technology and magic. On the face of it some of the characters look very powerful but actually our games were pretty well balanced. Once you've mastered the basic concepts it's a fun game.

I believe more figures and expansions are on the way and this one will get some more outings that's for sure.