Carnevale; or starter boxes can be good, actually.

Carnevale, for those who don't know, is a skirmish wargame set in 1780's Venice, where rents have opened in both the sky and the earth, weeping strange and dire energies into the world. Monsters and madness reign supreme, and society collapses in on itself while ancient evils rise to the fore. Its vile, frenetic, and absolutely aesthetic... and I couldn't be happier to be neck-deep in Carnevale's blood filled canals.

Having eyed it since late last year, I finally had time to pull the trigger on their $15 core rules, and immediately was smitten with how much was poured into the 48 page smorgasborg. The ruleset was tight, and left room for a quick-to-reference ability glossary and enough lore to remind you why you're playing this instead of Malifaux. 

Carnevale is a system where you have a wide spread of avaliable actions, that generally ask you to roll dice one of three distinct ways, making learning the actions intuitive enough once you grok the general proceedure. Gang customization can be done through their webportal, and there you can also find digital versions of the rules with the addition of a spell list for your models who are magically inclined. Many of these assets are kept digital so that they can be updated with rules balancing as new models and campaigns are introduced into the game.1

Enchanted by the rules, I was able to get some Escape from San Canciano starter sets and beginning gangs into the shop, snagging a copy for myself along with an Ostrich Racing!? kit because I'm delighted by doomsday cults and bizarre model silhouettes. If I can't say my log-line without cracking a smile, you know I'm in trouble.2

 

Because I care deeply about the quality of starter kits, I set about dissecting the one I got, and found it to be a fairly solid introduction to the game. Having four models aside means that you won't get bogged in any game lasting too long, and since the guild (regular joe humans) and the rashaar (sip of cthonic anyone?) have fairly distinct playstyles, the experience changes depending on which side of the tentacle you're on. The models are also all single piece castings, meaning that you can pop them in their bases and play immediately with the array of paper terrain and playmats provided. I'll admit, the buildings weren't my taste, and I'll end up replacing them someday, but folding the papercraft structures was perhaps the most skill intensive part of the entire experience. 

San Canciano also has measuring tools and dice that are handily marked to pick out aces (7's and higher on a d10,) and a pair of starter scenarios that do a great job of introducing the core mechanics of the game without sacrificing the tactical puzzle elements. I've demoed these scenarios a few times to new players and old hands, and no one felt like they were being talked down to, or given obvious routes to victory, and do a good job of staggering information so that concepts can be built upon eachother (you know, the way that teaching does it.) Its really nice to play games that respect your time and intelligence, and I think that's part of the reason it's catching on in my neck of the woods. That and its sub-50 dollar price tag (at time of writing,) making it one of the more affordable games on the market.

I think my only complaint was that while magic is covered in the rulebook (which is more than some games manage in their first or fifth outing,) there isn't an implementation of that in the games playable from this box, nor are there examples of spells with which the players can process the rules. It looks as though this is touched on in the larger two-player starter set, but that was not the one I got, and so perhaps that will be my next adventure into Venice. Excitingly though, the two starters do not share any of their models, so you (or I) won't have any obnoxious dupes running around when I'm trying to harpoon cultists or eat souls or anything.

Another pertinent note is that the book contained herein is no longer the most up-to-date rules, being usurped by Blood on the Water, but this is less of an issue for me as the game plays more than fine without rules for reactions, but it does mean that newer content may not be backwards compatible depending on how much future releases lean into that design space.

That said, once I flesh out my Guild, Rashaar, and Pulcinellas (who are also guild but shush,) I don't know how many more mainline models I'll be getting for myself to play Carnevale. This is largely because I realized that Carnevale uses the same basing sizes/conventions as another game I want to play lots of; Burrows and Badgers. Inspired by Redwall, and the like,3 B&B is a skirmish game of anthropomorphic woodland critters from Osprey Games, that uses differently sized dice to balance a raw power vs crit probability system. Honestly its delightful, and just as woefully laid out as most Osprey games are, so you know its in good company. 

I've done a little work concocting lists to use a set of models in both systems, since B&B has enough anachronism that it could easily play in Carnevale's period and theming. At present, I've doodled up a handful of designs that I'd like to sculpt at some point this year to help realize this vision. I'm particularly excited by the Pulcinellas as previously mentioned, the doomsday cult that sometimes rides ostriches, and no doubt it'll be an adventure, figuring out what a mouse rides instead of a large flightless bird. Maybe a millipede? I don't know, but that's half the fun of it!

 Stay sane out there nerds, and don't forget your sunscreen!

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1. I would have loved to have something like a Ravening Hordes book, which offers all of the model stats and the magic spells at a fixed point in the game, but I understand that's not an undertaking every company can do. I only grump when companies that can do books offer expensive bundles of index cards instead. 

2. "Carnevale is a game where you do parkour to punch Cthulhu and Dracula in the dick."

3. Dungeon is a comic I'm going to reread for inspiration. Its weird and good and French, or it was 8 years ago when I read it the first time. I mean, its still French probably, but you know what I mean.