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I've been rolling dice my whole life. Sometimes in a metaphorical sense, like that time on the Catford to Bromley bus when I sat next to the skittish chap jangling a carrier-bag of cutlery (3+4: "safe, nothing happens"). More frequently, though, it's been accompanied by the satisfying clickety-clack of polished polyhedrons tumbling across a tabletop. Through the years I've repelled the frenzied mass of tooth and claw with a sole surviving Terminator, hacked apart gigantic spiders in an underground lair and, on more than occasion, fallen asleep drunk in the corner of a tavern ("miss 1 turn"). This is how legends are born.While nothing can replace the tangible pleasure of gathering with friends to finger quality card-stock, coo over myriad counters and revel in one another's misadventure, it's not always easy to find the time to do so. It's here, in the downtime between campaigns, that Games Workshop's willingness to embrace the digital licensing of its tabletop products can help see you through to that next weekend earmarked for questing. Much like the dice rolls on which many of its games are predicated, the digital representations of these licences can be hit and miss affairs. But a concerted attempt to capture the spirit of the board game experience always counts for a lot in my book. With this in mind, the recent efforts of Rodeo Games, Full Control and Nomad Games have prompted me to coax from them the story of their own stab at glory with Warhammer Quest, Space Hulk and Talisman.
Fittingly, there is a degree of serendipity in the manner that each of the teams came to be custodians of their respective projects. A quirk of seating assignment saw two of Rodeo's number sat adjacent to Jon Gillard, Games Workshop's licensing director, on a plane to E3. The fact that Gillard happened to be playing Rodeo's own Hunters on his iPad gave the pair the perfect means of introduction. Unsurprisingly, the team's creative director Ben Murch remembers it as "pretty much the best meeting we had all week." A similar chance meeting befell Full Control CEO Thomas Lund at GDC. A chance encounter with a conference delegate in a hotel lobby turned out to be particularly fortuitous when the gentleman later introduced himself as Games Workshop co-founder, Ian Livingstone. With the then Warhammer 40K licence-holder THQ soon to be slain by pernicious market forces, the path before Lund opened-up. Full Control wasn't the only developer to emerge from the wreckage of THQ with a Games Workshop licence. Before forming Nomad Games, key members of the team worked at THQ Digital on the Warhammer 40K Kill Team licence but were cut loose soon after completing of the project as the beleaguered publisher scrambled to salvage its core business. Jon Gillard asked if members of the team would be interested in any other Games Workshop licences and when Nomad discovered it had a resident Talisman expert in its midst the team set its sights on a digital recreation of the 30 year-old board game.
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