Recently launched on crowd-funding platform GameFound, Berserk is a fully licenced boardgame from Monolith, the team responsible for Conan, the Mythic Battles series, and the the Batman: Gotham City Chronicles boardgames, amongst others.
The game itself is essentially a dungeon crawler, where 1-5 players will take control of Guts and his small band of allies as they play through the events of the Millennium Falcon Arc of the manga, with finely detailed 32mm-scaled miniatures of our heroes in both Standard and Inspired forms, as well as a bevy of villains for them to face off against. Everything from hordes of grunts to hulking, monstrous Apostles, all taking place on high-quality, double-sided game boards and using the risk/reward fatigue "gem" system that has done Monolith proud with the Conan line.
Now I have some experience with Monolith, as I've been a backer of their Conan line since the first Kickstarter back in the day, as well as having both Mythic Battles: Pantheon and Mythic Battles: Ragnarok in my collection, and I can attest to the fact that, after some initial teething issues with their early campaigns (mostly down to poor translation and playtesting, two things they have resolved admirably), the quality of the miniatures & boards they put out is astonishingly good. You *do* pay for this however, as their titles are not what could be described as cheap, and they take up not-inconsiderate amounts of space. This does mean that the base buy-in for Berserk is nearly 200 Euros, spread across two boxes, with a third box - The Black Swordsman expansion - costing a further 100 Euros. Somewhat a bitter pill, especially as this box contains the Build Your Own Adventure rules for the game. It *does* at least come with another bevy of very nice looking minis to expand options and the scenarios you can play/devise.
The steep buy-in does not appear to have disuaded folks however, as (at time of writing) the campaign has raised nearly one and a half million Euros, with an initial funding goal of one hundred and fifty thousand Euros. Not too shabby, and there are still 14 days of the campaign to go, withe the project closing on the 27th of October.
