There are few indicators of greatness better than prior success. Below are a selection of neat pre-orders for upcoming games from publishers and designers that have already proved their awesome abilities, and you can grab any of them now. A Noble Knight pre-order lets you reserve a copy and bundle it with other items (including other pre-orders) to save on shipping costs, while letting you bypass the byzantine fees and bundle insanity so often found in crowdfunding.
Or, and I do this quite a bit, you can simply add the pre-order to your want list, getting a friendly email when the game’s actually arrived in stock at NKG. It’s a great way to track what’s coming, without taking on the risk a project doesn’t fulfill. That’s why our list below has great games you can enjoy now, coupled with awesome pre-orders for the future.
Black Rose Wars → Blood or Requiem of Magic
Ludus Magnus is not an understated studio. These masters of adventure make big games, monsters that devour tables with crunchy, fun, and often over-the-top gameplay. DEI, Nova Aetas, and Runar all have much to offer, but their biggest draw to date is the Harry Potter Deathmatch Black Rose Wars.
In BRW you and your pals play wizards in a shifting castle, planning out rounds by preparing spells, summoning monsters, and claiming rooms to reap their benefits. Slaughter your friends or imprison them, cackle like a madman, and then set up a new configuration and go again. Heaps of expansions mean you’ll never be bored.
If you’d prefer a wizard’s duel, the recent (and appropriately named) Black Rose Wars: Duel, narrows the conflict into a magical knife fight. The map shrinks, meaning there’s fewer places to hide from fireballs or hellhounds. And with the solo-friendly Avatar system, you can enjoy magical mayhem any time you like.
That same design philosophy – endless options, diabolical conflict – permeates their next two titles, Blood, a Dracula-driven boss-battler and Requiem: Downfall of Magic, a narrative campaign similar in style to their Nova Aetas: Renaissance adventure. Both are cooperative, both will have dozens of miniatures, incredible art, and replay value. These are showcase games, perfect next big stars for your collection – and both are aiming to be out by the end of the year.
Fallout → Wasteland Warfare Starter Set
Did you know Fallout started as a video game series? It’s true! But, even if its digital versions have languished, one of the best post-apocalyptic worlds ever created has found a home in tabletop gaming (and, it must be said, on your TV). While Fantasy Flight’s initial version, an adventure best enjoyed at two, is long out of print, the excellent Wasteland Warfare miniatures skirmish game is rollicking.
WW takes a different look at the skirmish space, focusing instead on cooperative campaigns and solo modes (there’s versus too!). The original core game held an entire narrative arc, plus plenty of side missions, where rewards, like finding loot or completing objectives, carry with you, letting your scrappy band grow into, well, a scrappier band. With super mutants!
Coming later this year, and now available for pre-order, is a new starter set and a bevy of bundles for Wasteland Warfare, perfect packages for gifting to your favorite Fallout fan. Or, you know, yourself. As with any miniatures game, you’re getting multiple hobbies in one here: assembly, painting, and playing, with plenty of options to expand further once the Wasteland gets its grubby hooks into you.
Undaunted Stalingrad → Callisto 2200 Revolution
A few years back, Osprey tilted its Undaunted series from disconnected scenarios into a broad, branching campaign with a surprisingly affecting narrative. Undaunted: Stalingrad maintained the tactical, deck-building combat that makes the series so juicy and coupled it with dynamic maps and real stakes: units lost in battle could vanish from your campaign forever. It’s an amazing game, and if you’re an Undaunted fan that hasn’t taken it for a spin… what are you waiting for?
Undaunted: Callisto, the recent sci-fi entry, gets a big standalone expansion this year that takes a page from Stalingrad’s book. 2200: Revolution spins in yet another intriguing direction, offering campaigns, yes, but shorter ones. Four scenarios in a run instead of fifteen. Those four scenarios branch, though, keeping every trek through original.
Somehow, too, designers David Thompson and Trevor Benjamin keep finding ways to inject real novelty into Undaunted’s mature mechanics – this time, air and ground are truly present on the same battlefield, and you’ll have greater choice over which and what to bring to the fight. For folks looking for a fast, furious, and friendly-for-beginners war gaming series, Undaunted remains a standout.
Great Battles of the American Revolution → The Battle of Cowpens
Among the various Revolutionary War series out there, GMT’s Battles of the American Revolution is one of the best (at least if we’re talking traditional hex-and-counter, as opposed to Card-driven games like Washington’s War). These games, often available in convenient and cost-effective tri-packs, are a simpler way to dive into war gaming than their more modern-era counterparts (stripping away air power and mechanized units keeps things easier), but sacrifice nothing in the way of fun.
Take Brandywine, the 2nd game in the series. It’s a big battle, with Howe’s bold flank aptly captured in a sweeping wash of counters. A creek runs through the lush map, posing tactical problems and opportunities for either side. The tactics chits, which give a chance for both players to throw a little surprise into a fight, are a neat bit of flair to what is otherwise a competent mix of familiar mechanics. These are put to great use in a battle playable from start to finish in an afternoon (several hours or so) – among so many monsters that seek to devour weeks, focused efforts like these are refreshing.
Which is why the coming Battle of Cowpens, kicking off the Small Battles of the American Revolution series for GMT, is so compelling. Its bigger cousin’s rules have received a pruning, while abstracted elements (like musket fire) see precise action. The scale is also zoomed in, giving you plenty of units to play with and enhancing devastating artillery fire. Cavalry speed is more pronounced as the size of each hex, relatively, is much reduced. It’s an enticing tactical setup, and retains the in-an-afternoon playtime. For Battles of the American Revolution veterans and newcomers seeking an approachable war gaming adventure, The Battle of Cowpens is worth a close look.
Metal Gear Solid → Earth Under Siege: Flashpoint 2nd Printing
Stealth games continue their resurgence (Sniper Elite just had a big expansion, for one) and one of the best in recent years was CMON’s Metal Gear Solid take. A narrative campaign following the video game, Metal Gear Solid is a solo gamer’s dream, with an AI system designed to be unpredictable without feeling broken. 
Almost every mechanic you can think of from the video game is included here in a way that feels complete without being overly complicated (though Metal Gear is definitely not a lightweight game). Given that the game offers multiple paths through the missions, and the option to play with multiple characters (or in co-op), plus bonus and fan-created missions, Metal Gear gives you tons of game for its price. Just be aware that the rarer Integral Edition comes with a complete graphic novel fleshing out the story, so if that’s important for you, don’t miss it.
There’s no shortage of big narrative campaigns out there – we’ve covered some of them recently! One of the better ones, and certainly unique in its style, to come out in recent years is Earth Under Siege: Flashpoint. With a hard focus on stealth action, Flashpoint casts players as unique members of Earth’s resistance as it, uh, is under siege by aliens and sympathetic humans alike. A branching narrative campaign offers choices between missions for how to upgrade your tools, and items found during missions can stick with you too, giving a real feel of growth beyond an arbitrary level. And since many missions come in response to the choices you took previously, including how those choices impacted your off-screen allies, Flashpoint’s campaign feels more like X:COM than anything I’ve played yet.
With its 2nd printing, Flashpoint gets a bunch of new expansions and updates, offering you the most complete entry into its adventure. It’s accessible, too – with rules that are neither monstrous nor so dead simple as to leave experienced players bored. Missions themselves are tense, but operate less on a gamey timer and more on your own actions – go in guns blazing and you can expect a commensurate response. Play sneaky, sabotaging cameras and taking out enemies before they see you, and you might get out clean – though it’s certainly harder to do.
All told, Flashpoint is about as sure a thing as a pre-order gets. A game with established success gets better. If you’re hunting for a new campaign for your group, don’t let this one slip away.
