We played Tannhauser!

Tannhauser is a board game first released out of the Fantasy Flight stable in 2007. It was probably designed to be a collectible miniatures game, with a core set expanded with new boards and units. Since then FFG has of course acquired the Star Wars license, leading to Star Wars Imperial Assault and Star Wars Legion which have booth been indubitably successful for the company.

Tannhauser seems to have fallen by the wayside and is no longer being actively supported. I only have the base set and wanted to see how it played, with a view to either keeping it in my collection or selling it on.

The game uses an alternative history setting where the Great War has dragged on into the late 1940s. This means the Kaiser is very much in charge in Germany, and the game does not need to dabble in unpleasant topics like the Nazis. Tannhauser has a strong 'pulp' feel for its background.

The core scenarios see a generic team of Allied commandos (all Americans) versus a German occult team that is equipped with, among other threats, a powerful sorcerer and demon-possessed soldiers, not to mention the obligatory Prussian blonde with a whip. The art work is very good.

The game is your basic skirmish battle with two teams of five soldiers, split between heroes and grunts, fighting to achieve objectives in the basement of a castle in Poland. Equipment selection in advance of the mission is very important, and I think I fell down here, with none of my troops going into battle with close combat weapons (note that revolvers are considered close combat weapons, with a very limited range).

Tannhauser uses something called the Pathfinder system. This is NOT the Fantasy Flight RPG of the same name, but a very innovative system of colour coding which governs line of sight and some ranges in the game (e.g. grenades and area effect weapons including some magic). Areas of the field have different colours which makes it easy to determine who can see who in the middle of the skirmish.

The colours can be hard to distinguish at times, and if you are colour blind, this game is likely unplayable.

The rules are d10 based and play very smoothly. Each character has its own special equipment and intrinsic abilities which it brings to the party. Having only five people on your team means you need to think hard about where you send them, as losing a couple can quickly leave you on the back foot. The rules allow for one or two grunts to come on as reinforcements, but the heroes are irreplaceable.

So what did I think?

Tannhauser is very entertaining and we learned some valuable tactical lessons on the way through. We play quite a lot of skirmish level games, and need to see them completed in an evening, which Tannhauser does well. 

Given we are already playing Stargrave Stargrave and The Doomed at the moment, it is questionable how much of a look in Tannhauser will get in the future, as it scratches a similar itch. But Tannhauser fits the bill of a swift and relatively simple skirmish game you can set up without worrying about having too many miniatures or terrain, and get done in an evening. It could be quite interesting with two teams of people playing different characters. I think it could manage up to four a side, with one player running the grunts for each side.

For the time being Tannhauser remains on my shelves. I've looked at the expansions on the open market, but predictably they are outrageously priced. If I see second hand copies at a show which are reasonably priced, I may pick them up.