Bored? Game! – Assassin’s Creed Arena

With a history of top-selling games and another sequel on the way, Assassin’s Creed is one of the most popular video game series of past and present generations. The world of the series has been fleshed out in animated movies, books, and now tabletop board games. With such a popular series to work from, can the lore of Assassin’s Creed translate into tabletop games as well as Lovecraftian or Discworld fiction?

Assassin’s Creed Arena sees 2 to 4 players taking on the roles of Templar agents assassinating targets around Constantinople. The premise is that Abstergo, the most evil fictional company since LexCorp, is having its employees play out a contest of assassination in order to help build new video games. Despite this, the game lacks any prominent plot elements. Each character has a beautifully decorated profile card complete with a back story, but no unique game characteristics. It’s an equal and fair, yet disappointingly bland, backdrop to a deep series like Assassin’s Creed, and is rather more like a tabletop version of a Deathmatch than a fully fleshed out addition to the timeline of the games.

 It’s an equal and fair yet disappointingly bland backdrop of an addition to a deep series like Assassin’s Creed

Constantinople is separated into white, blue and red regions, with guards patrolling the spaces between. Your characters have the goal of reaching targets set up on different spaces and claiming their tokens. The nature of each token is only revealed once a character lands on their space, and so you must be prepared to take down an assassination target, claim a treasure token and retreat to your spawn point or, if need be, contest the token with another player in the vicinity. The game lends itself mainly to a run-and-gun strategy: though a player will be penalised for being inadequately prepared, they will be respawned on the very next turn, and as long as they took their target down they can keep any points they earned.

Health and attack power come from the ‘action cards’ that make up each player’s hand. The number of cards in your hand indicates your health, which can be reduced by crossing a guard’s line of sight or being attacked by another player. Action cards indicate your ability to move or attack based on the number of daggers each card represents, though players can also save action cards that trigger special events, such as ‘smoke bombs’ to help them escape guards. At the start of each turn an ‘Event Card’ is drawn, which can spawn targets, move guards around the board or allow players to make unique moves.

The structure of gameplay is not too complex for those who are less familiar with tabletop games to get into, and there is a decent amount of breathing room for the average strategist to make a plan. There is no great variety in action or event cards, and so it is highly unlikely that a single player will be granted any unfair advantages. An issue some may find is that the maximum number of players is merely 4, though with the size of the board and the simplicity of the gameplay this number keeps the experience from getting too complicated, and keeps the game going at an enjoyable pace.

However, the game does little to further develop the universe of Assassin’s Creed. I would not usually have a problem with this but I suspect that, like other franchise-themed board games, Assassin’s Creed Arena is primarily for the fans of the main series. What they are getting is by no means a bad or boring game, but with no memorable characters to play as or even a story beyond Templars chasing their targets, some fans may be left disappointed.

Overall, Assassin’s Creed Arena is a competently made, easy-to-get-into table-top board game. Though with a more intricate story there could have been something more substantial here in relation to the universe of Assassin’s Creed, the game remains enjoyable. Fans of the series attempting to learn more about the story behind the main games may be left disappointed, but unbiased fans of table-top games will find an enjoyable experience here.

Designer: Matt Hyra
Publisher: Cryptozoic Entertainment
Mechanic: Strategy, Hand Management, Pick up and Deliver
Players: 2 to 4
Game length: 30-60 minutes
Complexity: Light