Blackstone Fortress

In 2018, Games Workshop released the Warhammer Quest: Blackstone Fortress. A combination between a dungeon crawl, a roleplaying game, and a wargame, Blackstone Fortress is a campaign-based game with varied mechanics and an emerging storyline. I bought the game 4 years after its release, and it's been one of my favourites ever since. This is my review of the game, with no spoilers.

To a casual observer, Blackstone Fortress probably looks like a common co-operative board game. Cardboard map for player tokens to move around on, dice gets rolled for certain tasks, the game world fights back. It's an easy game to pick up, and requires no prior knowledge of Warhammer 40,000 or wargaming or roleplaying or anything of that sort. It's "just" a board game.

That's a strength of the game, because once you start playing the game you start to realise that it's actually so much more than just a board game. It's a board game with both wargaming and roleplaying elements, and it can be played either as a stand-alone game or you can play several sessions of it to form a complete campaign with a cohesive story and conclusion.

Exploration and missions

The premise of Blackstone Fortress is that a floating space castle (the titular Blackstone Fortress) has been discovered, and rumours have it that it contains untold wonders (and wealth). You play as a retinue of rogue traders willing to risk life and limb to plunder the mysterious fortress.

When you choose to delve into the fortress, you draw 8 cards from the Exploration deck. Each card contains either a map that tells you how to layout the game board, or a challenge or puzzle to solve as a group.

The challenges are often push-your-luck gambles that can result in damage or in rewards, but they're a lot of fun both as a solo player and as a group. They're quick minigames, though, and they serve as a respite from the traditional board game play imposed by the map cards.

When you play an Encounter (that's a map card), you lay out the pieces of the game board, place enemy tokens, and then send in your player characters for a dungeon crawl. Your mission is invariably to pick up clues and spare parts (called archeotech), in your attempt to both upgrade your character with improved gear and to learn the path to the vault hidden somewhere within the fortress.

The cost of bravery

Of course, exploring the depths of a floating space fortress isn't easy. Enemies lurk behind every corner, and so while you're trying to gather treasure you must also kill or be killed.

Enemies and characters each have a character card listing lots of special abilities, but each ability has a cost. At the start of each round, you roll 4 die, which provides you with the "currency" you have to spend on your various abilities. Pretty much everything has a cost, including movement, so strategising with the rest of your crew is important, and it leads to some of the most satisfying moments in the game. There's nothing like identifying each character's strength, and then working together to ensure that the right character is set up for success at the right moment.

Of course, there are always trade-offs and gambles to be made, as well. Sometimes rolling dice in hopes of holding off the enemy works, othere times you're better off setting traps, and still other times it's best to cut your losses and head back to your ship to recover.

Leveling up in Blackstone Fortress

Between each Exploration sequence, you return to a space station called Precipice. Here, you can cash in the treasure you've collected in exchange for upgrades to your character. There are loads of upgrades available, which allows you to play your character in a variety of different ways. I wouldn't say there are many upgrades that are "obviously" for a specific character. You get to choose what your skill tree looks like by choosing whatever upgrade allows you to play the way you find most fun.

Precipice is sort of a step that happens between games, so if you enjoy theorycrafting different possible paths for your character's future, then this phase was designed for you. There have been times that I've left upgrade cards sitting on my desk for days as a reminder to myself to imagine my character with one feature or the other, and to think through the ramifications of choosing one or the other.

It's fun, and as with the rest of the game, you can choose whether you want to upgrade based on your character's personality or on your own pragmatism. I do both, depending on the upgrade and on my mood. Sometimes I choose an upgrade because my character "wants" it, and other times I choose an upgrade and then adapt my character's personality to suit. Who's to say that a character that rushed headfirst at the enemy in the previous Encounter hasn't learned to value a little stealth after spending some time reflecting in Precipice?

Game saves and progress

I've brought out Blackstone Fortress as a stand-alone game with friends, and I've played it as a campaign as a solo player. The game has innovative technology (OK, it's a zip-lock bag) to help you save your game state and character progression, so you don't have to keep the game eternally set up on your gaming table. You can play a few Encounters, put everything away, and then come back to make more progress.

The more you explore, the closer you get to the hidden vault (which is, in fact, a sealed envelope included in the Blackstone Fortress box). To reach it, you have to fight a few mini-bosses, and you're likely to go through a few player characters. It's an experience that rivals a good book or a TV series, though, because once you start seeing the player character personalities emerge over the course of several games, you become truly invested in their success. You want to progress, to find more treasure, to gain more clues, and to finally reach the vault.

Gateway to the hobby

Blackstone Fortress is a dangerous place for the player characters, but it's also a dangerous game for you as a player. If you want it to be, it can be a gateway into a whole new hobby. Being a game from Games Workshop, Blackstone Fortress happens to contain 40 amazing plastic miniatures. You can use the miniatures, obviously, for other miniature games, including Warhammer 40,000 (official profiles are actually provided for each miniature) or Kill Team (no official profiles, but it's not hard to invent them for yourself).

When I purchased Blackstone Fortress, it was the biggest collection of miniatures I'd yet acquired, and easily the highest quality of any miniature I'd owned. It's probably a big reason I finally got interested in miniature gaming, which I'd been hovering around since I started playing tabletop RPG, ages ago.

Blackstone Fortress miniatures are easy to build because most only have two pieces (the front half and the back half), and they just push together. You don't even need glue. Of course, you can take the extra time to remove mould lines, and then cut off the pegs and glue the halves together, and then undercoat them with spray paint, and then paint each one. That's what I did, and I think they look great.

They're beautiful models (except when they're horrifically ugly, but there's a beauty to that), and it's a great way to start painting miniatures.

But that's not all!

Design your own expansions

Blackstone Fortress isn't just a game, it's a setting and rule set. This game extends farther than the limits of its box. There's an excellent book about Blackstone Fortress from Black Library that takes you through background on the fortress For me, there's nothing like going out and buying a cool miniature, like an Enginseer of the Adeptus Mechanicus, or Inquisitor Greyfax, and spending a few days building and painting it, and then spending a few evenings designing my own special rules for it. I take that miniature with its custom profile, and drop it into Blackstone Fortress to see what happens. Sure, sometimes I've gotten a rule wrong and designed an over-powered character that's boring to play, and other times it goes too far in the other direction. Either way, it's fun to come up with new characters and special abilities, run them through a few encounters, and then revise as needed, and then go again. It's endlessly entertaining.