Tabletop Tavern transforms Total War's tactical skirmishes into a fast-paced indie roguelike

Tabletop Tavern embraces the tactical skirmishes of the Total War series and places them in a much more approachable setting. Tossing out the idea of grand, bloated campaigns, it instead dots battle after battle through a familiar roguelike structure, akin to that of Slay the Spire 2 or Into the Breach. If you’ve got a hankering for some fantasy strategizing in a more bite-size format, solo indie dev ‘TJ’ is here to answer the call. Out now, with an introductory sale and a free demo, Tabletop Tavern has already won my heart, and its creator is plotting more additions and multiplayer for the future.

I’ll start with a confession: when I first began playing Total War in its earliest days, I almost exclusively fought in one-off skirmishes. With the advent of Rome, however, I fell deep into the campaign, and quickly started to only manually manage battles if I thought they were on a knife’s edge. These days, I auto-resolve most of my encounters, and honestly, I miss the fundamentals of a good scrap. Tabletop Tavern tosses out that grand, campaign-level complexity to focus on the actual fights, and that puts a big smile on my face.

Your adventures here follow a branching path of battlefields, events, and other encounters, much in the vein of Slay the Spire or FTL. Victory in battle gives you rewards, which typically include the ability to recruit a new unit, along with potential other actions like ransoming captives for gold, looting gear from the remnants, or conscripting some of the survivors into your army. Your squads each replenish a small number of their troops after a fight, but should they all be lost, that group is gone for good.

If you’re familiar with Total War or other similar strategy games, you’ll know what to expect once a battle begins, from the deployment phase through to the actual clashing of steel. Don’t fear if you’re new to the format, however, as it’s all relatively self-explanatory, and the compact scale of each map keeps every fight contained in a space that’s easy to follow, even as the unit count ramps up into the hundreds. Also rather pleasing is that the whole thing takes place on a literal tabletop, located inside a medieval-style tavern.

Tabletop Tavern deals primarily in fantasy, with plenty of factions to choose from. The Elves specialize in mobility and speed, while the Orcs lean on the might of giants and trolls, and the elite infantry of the Vikings remains steadfast and resilient. All of the core tenets of combat are present and correct, nevertheless: lines of spearmen will serve you well to fend off cavalry, archers can pelt closely packed infantry but are vulnerable to flanking attacks, and careful use of terrain will often hand you the advantage that swings the fight.

It’s not all action, however. Events typically grant you several choices, and each has a difficulty level along with the consequences of success and failure – your outcome ultimately being determined with the roll of a 20-sided die. Shops will present you with Balatro-style card packs containing a random unit selection at a given tier, as well as potions to rank up your troops or reroll bad dice outcomes.

On top of all that, if you’re a real numbers fiend like I am, Tabletop Tavern gives you some tasty tutorials to dig into exactly how mechanics work. It explains exactly how your stats factor into the likes of hit chance, the way damage mitigation from armor is calculated, and so on. If you’d rather just click away and watch your little guys slam into one another, you can of course do that – there’s even an auto-resolve option for fights, though I can’t imagine making use of it here unless I’m supremely confident in my success.

Tabletop Tavern is out now on Steam, with a 25% launch discount meaning you can buy it for $14.99 / £12.74 until Thursday June 18. Expect to pay $19.99 / £16.99 once the sale ends. There’s even a free demo you can download if you want to try it out first. Developer TJ promises “one purchase, the whole game – never paid DLC.”

TJ already has several updates in the work, starting with update 1.1, The Rift of Magic, which is loosely scheduled for the fall. This will introduce mages as well as player spell casting. After that, two more factions are set to join in update 1.2, Banners of War: the first, the Olympian Phalanx, has already been chosen by the community, and the second will be picked by vote too. Multiplayer battles are planned for update 1.3, which will release “when it’s ready.” I’m already rather taken by what’s there, so I’ll be watching this one closely.