War. War never changes.

But Wargames have seen a big shift, with lots of companies now focusing on small skirmish games that can be played on a dining room table over the course of an hour or so, rather than sprawling multiple hour games involving hundreds of models.

Fallout Factions, available to order now, is the latest Fallout game from Modiphius Entertainment releasing alongside their existing Wasteland Warfare. And where the older game is more of a crunchy and detailed experience with roleplaying elements, Fallout Factions is a rapid fire skirmish game that still captures the feeling of the Fallout universe and all the fun of campaign games.

In this review and unboxing we’ll be taking a look at the awesome new Battle For Nuka-World Starter Set, checking out the miniatures, delving into the rules and seeing if this is a box worth picking up for both existing wargamers and people new to tabletop miniatures games.

Massive thanks to Modiphius for sending us a free review copy to check out on the site. If you would like to support the site then why not order your copy through our affiliate Element Games and save some money too?

We’ve also filmed a full unboxing which you can see just below or over on YouTube

So gather your gang, it’s time to head into Nuka-World…

Fallout Factions Battle for Nuka-World Starter Set Unboxing & Review

We’ve been looking forward to Fallout Factions for a long time! It was originally meant to be released alongside the Fallout Amazon Prime TV show in the height of Fallout mania earlier this year, however due to global shipping issues it’s been pushed back a couple of times sadly. The good news is over it’s finally landed in the UK and is out very soon (12th August)

The first thing that took me when I picked up the box was how big, sturdy and heavy it was! No cheap and flimsy packaging here, this is a box that will stand up to rigorous use and will fit nicely alongside other boardgames. What’s really nice is that the box is also deep enough to hold the miniatures standing up, alongside all the tokens and paper materials (You’ll have to find a home for the scenery however!)

The box is jam packed full of goodies, starting with 4 sheets of tokens and terrain. This is printed on very thick and sturdy card which is a massive upgrade compared to the quality of card terrain I’ve seen elsewhere, and it slotted together really easily. One thing to note here is that most of these pieces are double sided with a different design on each side, so if you manage to pick up a second set you can have a nice collection of varied pieces. I did find I had to glue some of the components to make them a little sturdier, but I was surprised at how good it looked when finished!

It looks really good when built up too – it’s never going to compare to resin or plastic terrain, but I was very impressed in what came in the box and terrain is often something missing in boxes that claim to have everything you need to start playing

You also get a surface to play on in the box, with is double sided with a nice Fallout Nuka-World poster on the reverse. It’s not too glossy and would work perfectly for someone who does not already have a gaming surface to play on. Personally I’ll probably upgrade to a neoprene mat, as personally I find that a nicer gaming experience and models and dice move really nicely on them, but again the great thing about this mat in the box is that you have your battlefield and terrain good to go out of the box. For those wanting to upgrade, the mat is 2 foot x 3 foot, and lots of companies do a range of mats that would work well!

One thing that did surprise me were the two glossy printed roster sheets – I suspect these will work well with dry wipe markers (Or could at least laminate them to make sure), and feel a big upgrade over paper roster sheets

Another nice touch is a Fallout branded tape measure. Very often in these kind of sets you get a basic ruler, but to have a little tape measure in there makes it so much easier to start playing straight away if all you have is this box. Stuff like this makes the experience so much better for new players, and I’m surprised we don’t see it more often.

You also get a stack of dice – 8 regular and 4 “lucky” these are standard D10s in red and blue, with Nuka-World symbols on the 1s (Cappy on the regular dice and a bottle of Nuka Cola on the blue)

Also included are enough plastic bases for all the models in the box

Speaking of models, the real star of the show are the miniatures. You get 4 different sprues, 2 making up the Pack and another 2 for the Operators. I was expecting to see duplicated sprues with shared poses, but the fact you get 2 unique frames for each faction means that each and every model in the box has their own unique pose. There’s no duplication here, and that leads to some really nice models that are easy to distinguish from each other.

While filming the unboxing, my initial thoughts were that with two similar looking gangs of humans it might be hard to tell the two gangs apart from each other, especially when unpainted, but on building the models this is not true at all. The Pack have a more scavenged look, with helmets with the appearance of animals tying them all together, while The Operators have a more high tech and stylish look to them.

The variety in the gangs will also make them much more interesting to paint up, with lots of nice different textures, weapons and silhouettes to them

One thing to note is that there are no assembly instructions in the box – these are all found online(with handy QR codes in the book and on the card components) but I have to say I’d much rather a paper insert in the box with these on, call me old school, but I like to have the assembly instructions on the table while building them!

Now, one of my negative points about the game is the fact that it is actually possible to build model options that are not actually legal in this game. I suspect these kits are built to support both Factions and Wasteland Warfare, and the instructions do warn you of this fact, but there are quite a few options you can build that have no valid weapon loadout in Factions. If you build the models based on what looks cool before you read the gang lists within the book, then it’s possible you will build models you are unable to send to Nuka-World. One example of this is the missile launcher for The Pack – the assembly instruction show you how to build it, but the gang is not able to take one at all. The same happens across quite a few models, meaning I had to check the gang lists while building to make sure I can actually use them! We’ll chat more about this when we get to gang creation, but I do think this is a rare miss-step in what is otherwise a very newbie friendly product.

Finally in the box we get the Starter Set Rulebook, a 76 page softback book that details everything you need in order to play the game, from the basic rules, gang lists, scenarios and a decent reference section – Let’s take a look through what’s in here.

If you have played other skirmish games such as Necromunda you’ll feel a lot of shared DNA here, but this is a game that is stripped of a lot of bloat and complexities in order to make something that is accessable to both new and experienced players. The Necromunda connection I suppose is no surprise when you learn that the designer of Fallout Factions is James Hewitt, who was responsible for the recent resurrection of Necromunda when the Specialist Games Studio was brought back at Games Workshop.

I mentioned that a lot of the bloat often seen in skirmish games is gone, and a good example of that is how terrain works. There’s no save modifiers or accuracy degrades for shooting into terrain, instead Factions flips that on it’s head and instead has a model gain an additional bonus dice when shooting a model in the open – being obscured just removes this bonus. Equally, if a friendly unit is standing in front of a target, the player being shot at can simply say the shot hits the model in the way – the shooting player can then choose to either complete the shot against the new target, or pick a different valid target. I really like this compared to how messy some terrain and cover systems get, and it’s a real breath of fresh air compared to complex rules for terrain interaction.

The main mechanic in Fallout Factions is through Skill Checks – each fighter in the game as a SPECIAL profile – Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck as per the stats from the Fallout video games, with each of these stats aiding with a different type of action. Perception for example is used when shooting rifles, but Strength when using melee weapons. When performing a test there will be a a number and a letter, and this signifies how many dice you get to use and what stat you are checking against.

So for example, firing a gun might have a test of 4P – this means you get 4 dice and you are testing against your Perception. Roll equal or under to your perception and it’s a success. What’s cool here is that your initial dice pool is first made up of a number of Luck dice (equal to your Luck score) with the remaining dice being normal dice. So for example you might have a luck stat of 2 – this means that earlier test of 4P would be made up of 2 blue luck dice (As that is your luck stat) with the remaining 2 dice being red standard ones. Luck dice work a little differently to regular dice – if you get a success with one you immediately get to roll an additional red dice, and you also trigger the critical effect of the weapon if it has one. This makes for the potential to have some suitably cinematic moments when against all the odds you get a few lucky hits with the luck dice, and the bonus dice manage to swing the odds in your favour.

This makes tests really easy to learn how to do, and makes the game run quickly too with little downtime.

Activations work in a similar way to Necromunda, but with a twist – Players still alternate activating fighters, and there’s still the potential to be able to activate multiple fighters at once due to a well timed shout from a champion, but rather than have a ready token that is flipped over, models have a 2 stage fatigue token that shows how tired they are. Do an action with them and they become weary, do another and they are exhausted and cannot activate again. Due to this you can actually split activations – perhaps activate a fighter to move, and then later in the turn shoot with them. Or do both actions one after the other. Or perhaps issue a supporting fire action from a fighter to add their firepower to an attack, then later move them. Without having to do all your actions within a single activation it opens up lots of fun stuff you can do, and makes it really easy to identify who on the battlefield could still do something and may still be a threat.

Damage is also simplified – basically if your damage is high enough you simply kill the target (This is unlikely, but could happen with lucky streaks with bonus dice) – more often than not you’ll be applying Injuries (The equivalent of “wounds”) which slay a target once their life stat is reached, or Harm which gradually degrade a target and start to inflict injuries when a larger amount is accrued. Again, this is really easy to follow in game, and there’s lots of things that can interact with these tokens to remove them, adding an element of resource management.

Building gangs is the one thing that I feel is a little too light. Unlike Necromunda where you buy a ganger and then pay credits for all their equipment and weapons (Which gives you lots of customisation options and future tweaking potential) in Fallout Factions models are bought with a weapon loadout – these will be listed on the profile and have set costs. So a fighter with a shotgun might be 20 caps, but a fighter with a pistol and a sledgehammer might be 28 caps. There’s no picking and choosing loadouts to spend spare points and optimise your gang, you are stuck with picking from a handful of fixed loadouts. Now if those loadouts just corresponded to the models you can built in the box then I would understand that, but theres both models that you can build that do not have a loadout you can take, and loadouts you can take that do not have model assembly options, which just seems really odd. I’m a firm believer that if you can build a model then you should be able to use it in game, even if its a sub-par choice, but the fact that there’s some very cool weapons on the sprue that you can’t even take makes me scratch my head a little.

On top of this, there’s no equivalent of the Trading Post in the game – One of the fun things to do in Necromunda, and in the Fallout videogames is to pick up new weapons and change what you are armed with – In Factions this is not possible. You are able to upgrade your weapons, which is cool – but if your fighter is armed with a shotgun then they are armed with that for the entire campaign without being able to swap it for something else. This also leaves caps as just being something you use to hire new fighters and to buy limited use chems with, which loses some of the magic of your gang scrapping together enough cash to buy that awesome new weapon they have their eye on.

I do wonder if we will get a future expansion that allows players to do this, as without it I think it just loses that little bit of magic that comes with campaign style games like this.

3 different Faction Lists are included in the book, both of the gangs in the box, plus the Disciples, who are also available as a plastic kit. I really hope we see some other factions from Fallout introduced through supplements – this game setting is very much in Nuka-World, with the control of the various areas of the park being a key mechanic, but it wouldn’t surprise me if we saw expansion into other parts of the Fallout map along with other factions who may have ventured into Nuka-World looking for caps and glory.

On the campaign front, we do get an interesting new mechanic that represents the long and short term goals of the gang and represents a way of tracking their progress and ability without just tying it to how powerful they are. Goals are picked from a list in your Faction List and are essentially “achievements” you are trying to complete in order to progress further – so for example “Display Dominance” might need you to win a game on your home turf, play the Land Grab scenario twice and incapacitate a model with a melee attack 6 times. Once these have been complete your gang moves on to the next rank, which increases the number of upgrades your fighters can take and the number of champions they can have. Complete rank 3 and your gang has achieved their long term goals and settle down to retirement. I really like this system as it gives you something to aim for, even if the games are perhaps not going your way. You can have the “weakest” gang, but still feel like you are making progress through your personal goals.

All of the usual elements such as gaining experience which can be spent on increasing stats and gaining new perks exists, and this feels as fun as it does in other games – with the added balancing factor of the weaker side getting a bonus in the number of Ploys they can use (Think Command Abilities in Age of Sigmar, but limited to being used a small number of times a game) Players can also upgrade their weapons in order to increase their stats and traits.

Summary

Fallout Factions Battle for Nuka-World Starter Set, does a lot of things right and is a brilliant example of a self contained “Starter Set” – Even if you have zero experience in playing tabletop miniatures games, you can pick this up and have everything you need to play, right down to the playing surface, terrain and tape measure.

At £85 (£76.50 from Element Games) it’s also a very reasonable set and feels worth the money with 20 unique miniatures, a full set of terrain and the core rules, all housed in a good quality box.

While brand new players will get a great experience with this and it’s more streamlined approach to skirmish wargaming, veteran players will also have lots to get their teeth into here, with lots of tactical play at work, interesting mechanics and fun longer term things such as the goal system and weapon upgrading.

My only real criticisms are the fact that if someone starts building the models before they understand gang construction then they may be left disappointed when their model cannot be reflected in the game, and that for experienced players the fixed loadouts of gangers feels a little less exciting than the ability to construct your own heroes, picking their weapons and equipment and making them feel special.

That aside, Fallout Factions is looking to be a fun new skirmish game that not only feels like Fallout, but also does it in such a way that allows for quick and exciting games with very little book keeping or looking up complex rules, and I’m really excited to see what the future holds for it.

Fallout Factions is released on Monday 12th August

Modiphius Entertainment provided Sprues & Brews with a free copy for review purposes.

Published by Matt Crowther

View all posts by Matt Crowther