An Australian company with a history in comics and RPGs, Pendlespear Gaming is making the leap into miniature games with their new board game, 'Splatisphere.'

'Hang on a second... Who are these people?' you ask... You can find out all about Pendlespear here.

Splatisphere

Splatisphere is a board game of gladiatorial combat, based around a future universe in which the alien Krypht rule supreme. The carnage and mayhem of the arena provide the Krypht's main form of entertainment, as they force the lesser slave races to battle for their amusement.

Designed for play with 28mm miniatures, the game combines elements of role-playing games and standard miniature wargaming to provide an action-packed, nerve-racking, tactically challenging simulation.

The Contents

Rather than the usual chunky box, Splatisphere comes packaged in a heavy-duty cardboard wallet, just perfect for carrying around to the gaming club or fellow bloodthirsty gamer's house.

Inside you'll find three pages of cardboard cut-outs, the game-board, and the rulebook.

The Cutouts

These include all the markers required for the game: flame markers which represent pillars of fire for the fire arena, explosions, and swamp and water tiles for changing the arena layout, all printed in colour.

You'll also find a page and a half of black-&-white character cut-outs, for those who don't have miniatures to use. There are 33 characters to choose from, with representatives of all 7 available character types, and plastic bases supplied to field 2 full teams of 4 characters each.

No perforations, so you'll need to cut these all out by hand. Personally, I prefer that: After all those years of die-cut cardboard inserts in White Dwarf magazines, I've become incredibly proficient at ripping cards in half while trying to separate them from the sheets. Cutting along the lines seems so much safer.

The Board

The game board is a little disappointing, being printed on thick glossy paper rather than cardboard. This was apparently a production-cost issue, since the solid boards are prohibitively expensive for small operations, so hopefully later editions will see a cardboard board added. For now, I'd recommend laminating or gluing to a piece of board or card.

The artwork though is nicely done; Simple, but effective, with some nice little details scattered around for the keen eye. The actual play area is a hex-grid, drawn over a sand and stone hexagonal arena. In each corner is a small room to place your team in between fights, or when they are taken out of action.

The Rulebook

The rulebook is a staple-bound, 66-page softcover. The format is easy to read, with everything clearly indexed, a glossary of terms included at the start, and two pages with all the important tables at the back of the book.

Included at the front of the book is a background of the Splatisphere, and scattered through the book you'll find various little snippets with famous Gladiators, memorable moments and the like, all adding a little light-hearted colour to the game setting.

The Game

Luke Payne, the creator of Splatisphere, was kind enough to take time out to run me through a couple of demo games, so I could get a bit of a feel for the game... as a result, I'm hooked!

Splatisphere is played with 1 to 4 teams, each containing 1 to 4 warriors. Although each warrior on a team is intended to be controlled by the same player, there's no reason you couldn't take a warrior per person if you have a larger group wanting to play. Warriors can be recruited from 7 different types: The goblin-esque Crelin; the bulky, Ogre-like Draal; the serpentine Trogun; the human Vestage; and the Krypht: elf-like overlords of the Galaxy. The Krypht sport three different types of fighters: Outcasts, who are renegades shunned by society; Criminals, sentenced to fight in the arena for their crimes; and Braves: Krypht who enter the arena by choice and seek to make a name for themselves.

The basic game mechanics are quite simple. Your warriors have a movement stat which equates to the number of hexes they can move in a turn, attack and defence stats to resolve combat and ranged attacks, and an Initiative score to determine turn order and number of actions that they can carry out each turn. Actions and attacks are resolved with dice, with the system being predominantly designed around the D10 (10-sided die) but with other dice being used for damage and character creation.

Initiative is randomly generated each turn with a die roll adding to your Initiative score, with the lowest Initiative warrior moving first and attacking last. This adds a tactical element to the game, as you have to choose your moves well to avoid being outmaneuvered by faster opponents. Once you add in multiple warriors on each team, the action starts getting quite intense, as each warrior tries to out-smart their opponents while backing up their own team-mates.

From there, the game is fleshed out with special abilities and skills which your warriors can be trained with as they develop experience over the course of their battles. These skills can make your warriors faster or stronger, give them magical attacks or defences, or make them proficient in the fine art of insulting their opponents. The huge list of skills and equipment, combined with the 7 available warrior types, should ensure that every warrior is different.

Games can be played in several different arenas, from the standard sand and rock floor, to a water or swamp arena, a wind-tunnel of spiky death, or the deadly Fire Flash, in which random floor tiles erupt into pillars of flame over the course of the game.

The game mechanics were put together with real-world fighting techniques and styles in mind, combined with Luke's experience with RPGs and miniature games, resulting in a game that is gritty and realistic, while keeping a light-hearted feel. Those who want a light and fun game can have as much fun with Splatisphere as those looking for something tactical and thinky.

The Future

Luke already has several expansions planned for Splatisphere, which will add extra arenas, different warrior types, beasts, and of course, more miniatures to the game.

The Miniatures

So far, there are 14 miniatures available for the game, with 2 (one male, one female) for each warrior type. I have several of these sitting on my painting table at the moment, ready for a separate review, but in the meantime, you can see the currently available miniatures on the Pendlespear website here.