It’s hardly a secret anymore that I love board games. I’ve mentioned it enough times by now that everyone and their mother knows, but it’s true, I do. However, as with anything in life, I don’t just love ALL board games (believe it or not) or even all board game studios.
However, Awaken Realms, the studio behind one of my all-time favourite games, Nemesis, are working on a board game based on the Stalker universe – and honestly, I couldn’t be more excited.
Awaken Realms promises to deliver the same rich atmosphere that video game fans have come to expect. Once again, if you look at what they were able to do with Nemesis, I do not doubt their ability to pull this off. While announcing the game, Awaken Realms also released a trailer, and it’s everything a Stalker fan like myself could want and need.
Awaken Realms has stated that the game is still in the very early stages of development but will be a cooperative zone-crawling story-driven game based on stories from the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone.
Each of these stories will consist of two to four scenarios for the player to play through, and each scenario takes about two hours to complete. Although if you’re not familiar with board games, this time approximation is about as arbitrary as it comes. In reality, it could take anywhere from 4-6 hours to complete if history is anything to go by.
Alongside the announcement and the trailer, Awaken Realms also showed off a few pre-renders of the game components that players can expect, from cards to tokens and even a few miniatures. So far, we know that the miniatures will include Stalkers, a soldier, a gas-masked Snork, a tentacle-faced Bloodsucker, and a Pseudogiant.
