13 Nov 2019
We haven’t really talked about Fallout Shelter in a while, even though it’s one of the more benign free-to-play experiences out there. As of E3 2019 it had surpassed 150 million downloads, making it a pretty popular and successful game as well. Success doesn’t always equate to coverage, mind – a game can be really popular but also just ticking away in the background.
I actually tried to get back into it recently – I say ‘tried’, I downloaded it and did the tutorial. Then for some reason I stopped and I haven’t gone back to it. I know.
Out of all the reasons to be writing about Fallout Shelter, today’s news post is certainly not one that would have been my first guess – thanks to Fantasy Flight Games, the Vault Management simulator is getting it’s own table-top board game.
Fallout Shelter: The Board Game is a worker placement game for 2 – 4 players. Each player represents an ‘Officer’ of the vault who’s competing to become the new Overseer, as the old one died (because of course they did). Each ‘Officer’ controls two worker pieces (to start with), and they can be assigned to various tasks around the Vault. The main aim is to generate ‘Happiness’, and the Officer with the most at the end has won the Overseer election and the game.
There’s an extra dimension in the sense that each player also has their own ‘level’ of the Vault that they can develop by constructing new rooms. The top level looks to be a more communal space usable by everyone, but then there are additional levels below that depending on how many players there are. As far as we can tell, a player can only build on their own level.
This is more of an FYI more than anything you can actually use. Being based on a mobile game to begin with, it’s not like Asmodee Digital (part of Asmodee, who own Fantasy Flight Games now) is going to suddenly announce Fallout Shelter: The Board Game Digital Edition or anything like that. Still, this seemed relevant to our interests here, so I thought I’d write it up.
You can read more about the new game on FFG’s announcement post. Fallout Shelter: The Board Game is due to release in Q1 2020.
https://www.sickgaming.net/blog/2019/11/...oard-game/