Tabletop Tavern Review — Miniature War (Gaming?)

You’re a small-time lord in a dour fantasy setting. Constant warfare puts the safety of your hold at risk, with the threat of an attack from undead hordes or rampaging goblins never far from your mind. Your people barely manage to scrape by, and the army of hastily armed peasants you’ve formed constantly fights starvation, disease, and desertion long before they get to the actual battle. Times are tough, and the difficult choices you make can be the difference between a hefty sacrifice and the complete annihilation of entire villages under your protection. Why not take the edge off with a tabletop game night at the local tavern?

Tabletop Tavern is an incredibly interesting combination of genres, combining the RTS warfare of games like Total War with the ever-appealing roguelike structure. With a procedurally generated campaign highly reminiscent of Slay the Spire, you go from area to area, unlocking troops, upgrades, and items as you engage in multiple battles, trying to strengthen and keep your army alive until you can reach the final battle and prove yourself supreme over your enemies.

Simply coming up with such a unique concept is an impressive feat in itself, and making such a game would likely be difficult to pull off, even for a large development team. It’s all the more impressive, then, that the game was created by a solo developer, who continues to work on the title with major updates planned for the future. Even as I point out my criticisms of the game, please keep that in mind: flaws and all, what we did get is very impressive.

I did a pretty good job of explaining the gameplay loop of Tabletop Tavern in the second paragraph of this review. It really is just a Slay the Spire-like campaign with Total War battles. The latter is more than a hollow comparison, as the game is heavily inspired by Total War‘s RTS mechanics, to the point that you could simply call them Total War-lite. To make the game playable with so many battles done in quick succession, the RTS mechanics are greatly simplified, and the battles are shortened to the point where none should take you more than three to five minutes to complete.

They are simplified to a fault, however, with many of the intricacies from the franchise that inspired the game missing. Line of sight feels virtually nonexistent, arrows don’t fire into the backs of friendly units, and formations mean next to nothing in the grand scheme of things. The enemy AI isn’t incredibly clever, either, and I won almost every battle with a simple hammer-and-anvil technique when I wasn’t auto-resolving. As the difficulty increases, it mostly shows itself in the form of straight stat buffs to enemy units, a system I felt was pretty cheap in Total War games as well.

There is a lot of nuance missing from your ability to control your own units or in the game’s deeper strategic interactions. Unfortunately, what should be one of the biggest choices in the game, the faction that you play, amounts to nothing more than a cosmetic choice paired with the unique buffs your leader gives you. The factions are cosmetically very interesting but provide incredibly little when it comes to strategic depth, as essentially all of their unit rosters are the same or similar and vary very little statistically.

This is, thankfully, one of the areas that the developer has said he’s working on, albeit somewhat indirectly, with the future introduction of mages and spellcasting units promising to add some much-needed depth and variety to the roster. I do believe, however, that each faction’s roster needs to be addressed and improved to strengthen their strategic identities further. Too many battles were won, even at later difficulties, just by having my melee units tank the enemy while I flanked with archers or cavalry.

One small quality-of-life feature I would like to see added is access to every difficulty, or at least a slightly harder one, at the start of the game. You must beat a campaign on each level of difficulty before you can unlock the next, and early on, this is such a simple task that you can get through an entire campaign with auto-resolves. It’s sort of a pointless gate to keep, and it made my first twenty or so minutes with the game much less interesting than the hours to follow.

As far as bugs go, the game is pretty stable, but I did have a few issues. The game notably felt like a large memory hog, and I had a few crashes to desktop in the middle of very important battles, most notably the last battle of the final campaign I played before writing this review. It’s not terribly unstable, but it could use a pass on performance in upcoming patches.

Tabletop Tavern is not a terrible game. In fact, I would say it’s a pretty good game with an incredibly unique idea and a strong identity, representing an impressive work for a solo developer. However, in its current state, it grows old pretty fast, as you realize there isn’t much depth to the gameplay, and the difficulty is simply giving the enemy higher numbers to kill you with. Strategic variety across the roster, arguably the most important thing for a game like this, is more or less missing, and it makes the game feel very stale.

It’s a shame that the developer proudly states that the game is not in Early Access, as I believe it very much feels like an EA title. It needs work on its core systems, and the consistent effort the developer is putting into it suggests the current build is anything but stable. Because of that, I would say the game is Early Access, with the promise of continued updates, but it just feels odd to call what is currently available a full build.

Try Hard Guides reviewed Tabletop Tavern on the PC. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Tabletop Tavern is available on Steam.