MIGHTY MINIATURES: FALLOUT: FACTIONS

Is this the game to make you a skirmish gamer? We sit with James M. Hewitt, designer of Fallout: Factions, to find out just why this one is different

Written by Charlie Pettit

James M. Hewitt is one busy designer, with an enviable gaming CV. His work with Games Workshop included Necromunda, Adeptus Titanicus, Blood Bowl, and Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower. With Mantic Games, it was Dreadball. His own company, Needy Cat Games, co-owned with Sophie Williams, offered board game consultancy, and also worked on Devil May Cry: The Board Game, and Hellboy: The Board Game. If you didn’t think him busy enough, we were delighted to find him over at Modiphius, working on Fallout: Factions.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF THE WORLD

The alarms have rung, the sky is on fire, and you’ve had no choice but to descend into an underground bunker to survive the nuclear destruction that’s long been feared. What awaits you when you open the door to the outside world? Some things will never be the same, and that includes the wasteland and mutations outside. With a PIP-boy to help you – a fancy watch – and your own desire to survive, each Fallout game centres on that curiosity of what’s outside, and the lawlessness that dwells.

Whilst the Fallout history is longer than the current popular iteration of games suggests, it’s also not entirely well known that it has significant foundations in TTRPGs, having once relied on GURPS (the Generic Universal Roleplaying System, created by Steve Jackson), before a dispute that IGN reported being around the level of violence in the game. Fallout pivoted to use S.P.E.C.I.A.L. (Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck), as it still uses to this day.

With our own hobby acting as the foundation then, is it any surprise it’s been embraced back on tabletop?

“Modiphius have been making games based on the Fallout video games for a few years now.” Hewitt says of it. Indeed, not only have they created Fallout: The Roleplaying Game, bring post-atomic roleplaying back full circle, but also a popular wargame in Fallout: Wasteland Warfare. This is somewhat of a crunchy wargame, enjoyed by those familiar to wargames looking for something to sink their teeth into, but perhaps not the most welcoming to those less comfortable.