HYPERTELLURIANS

DMottokrosh Machinations espite its name, fantasy roleplaying can be a bit predictable, cultists, old gods, pointy eared people with a superior affect. Orcs. It’s one of the reasons we like it, but when you’re offered a smattering of starting characters who are unusually undead, altered and alien, or strangely beastly you’re usually going to start listening. Hypertellurians is a light-ish RPG rulebook that packs a cosmically aligned punch.

A great deal of the book is given over to character archetypes with loads of weird and wonderful powers. All of this leads to a player-focused roleplaying experience, where the story is really driven by what players are, as much as what they’re doing or where they’re headed.

‘Wonder’ is the name of the game however. It is the currency of advancement, and generally getting out of tricky situations. It’s dished out by the GM like sweets for experiencing or observing cool stuff. See a giant fall and burst into a teeming, living, forest as it expires? That’s some wonder. Players can spend their shared wonder to reroll, achieve unusually tricky actions, or even just get a bit of ‘inspiration’ from the GM.

As a tool for a GM this is where the system leverages itself best, as it’s all well and good to say ‘you’re a cursed skeleton that’s half fish and has to drag itself around noisily’, but getting players into a situation where they

20m 2-4 13+ £40

located. As the board fills up, you might find that you can’t play the cards in your hand, at which time you may choose to surrender a card in order to place a single colour down, or climb to the level above.

It would be a fun but not overly exciting game on a single level, but it gets even more competitive once you ascend. You cannot drop back down when you raise a level, but now when you lay down your colour tokens, if the same square on the level below it is free, the colour token will ‘fall’ and take up that space, giving you the opportunity to fill even more of the board below. Tactically, that’s both great, and awful – on the one hand, you’re maximising your presence on the board, meaning you’ll be less likely to have tokens left over at the end, but on the other, part of the scoring system is a single point for colour tokens on the bottom, two for the second level, three for the third, and so sometimes it’s best to keep those tokens as high as possible.

Suddenly your thoughts are multilevelled, you’re trying to lay Tetris blocks of colour across not just one layer, but three, as if it’s some epic version of 3D chess. However, with lots to look at, it encourages you to stay engaged as a result. When you add in the opportunity to take a direct hit on your opponent for an extra point, or begin to gather sweets or other tokens, there’s a lot to consider, preventing the inevitable reach for the phone for a quick scroll through facebook while you wait.

It would have been easy to make this game less complex, and just rely on how it looks to see it through, and I’m so pleased that instead, it’s both. There are a number of options and rules, but it succeeds in condensing these in a manner that many can’t, making it super quick to pick up and really easy to teach to others. Plus, once you’ve got the hang of it and started getting really competitive over it, it adds in rivalry cards, to spice things up a little more, meaning the games are different each time you play.

PLAY IT?

❚ YES

A really fun and bright game. The only real regret I had in playing, was that I never had the opportunity to actually throw anything – though admittedly, my hoover approved.

TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED UBONGO…

This is a fellow shape based game, but levelled up, grown up, and skyscraper-ed up in comparison.