A tabletop take on Assassin’s Creed has drawn 2,828 backers and £274,425 in pledges for Mantic Games, and the first boxes leave the warehouse this October.
Those figures belong to Assassin’s Creed® Animus – The Board Game, which is running now on Kickstarter. It supports one to four players, comes loaded with miniatures, and sells itself with language that could have come straight from Ubisoft’s marketing department by way of a TTRPG rulebook: “step into the shadows as legendary Assassins. Explore the past, strike down targets, and race to make your mark on history.”
You’re not cooperating, you’re competing
This is the design choice that sets Animus apart from the licensed board games that simply paint a familiar brand onto a dungeon crawl. Rivalry sits at the centre of the whole thing.
“Assassin’s Creed: Animus is a game of adventure and rivalry, where each player enters the memories of a legendary assassin with unique abilities and goals,” the official description reads. “You’ll choose a character with their own era, skills, equipment, and playstyle that shapes your experience.”
The result: you’re reliving an ancestor’s memories, stalking a target, and simultaneously trying to reach master Assassin status before anyone else at the table does. Movement across the board costs actions. Special locations reward investigation with secrets. And you need to track down your enemies before a rival tracks down theirs.
The miniatures pull from a wider net than you’d expect
Characters are drawn from across the series, stretching from the very first Assassin’s Creed all the way to Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. Assassin’s Creed Liberations makes the cut too, a game that stays painfully underrated and almost never earns this sort of shelf space.
The breadth is the point. When a licensed game sticks to the greatest hits, it’s essentially a poster. When it digs into the back catalog, you know the people behind it actually played the back catalog.
Why now, and why a board game
Since 2007, Ubisoft’s franchise has been a permanent feature of the video game landscape. Across fourteen mainline entries, plenty of us came of age alongside the action-adventure series and its centuries-long grudge between the Assassin Brotherhood and the Templar Order.
The hit rate hasn’t been perfect. A handful are frequently counted among the best video games ever made, and the series handed us Ezio, Connor and Edward.
The recent release of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag Resynced has turned attention toward whatever Ubisoft does next. The prevailing expectation is that Assassin’s Creed Hexe will serve as the next mainline game, set in the 16th century Holy Roman Empire.
That one is still some way off. Animus, by contrast, is near enough that backers can measure the wait in weeks rather than years.