UK-based game design studio Modiphius has revealed the full contents of Fallout Factions: Battle for Boston, a brand new starter set for its Fallout warband skirmish game. It's going to have everything you'll need to play, including a full rulebook, cardboard terrain, and two warbands of plastic miniatures, the dauntless paladins of the Brotherhood of Steel and the subtle synths of the Institute. Lead designer Evie Moriarty spoke to Wargamer about what fans should expect: "it genuinely is a whole game in the box".
I reviewed the Nuka World starter set back in August 2024, and I rated the core rules and the box set itself very highly: it's one of my favorite warband games in years, and the box set really did live up to its claim of providing a complete campaign in a box. But sales of Nuka World were hampered by a delayed launch, and the choice of Nuka World as the setting - as it only shows up in some optional Fallout 4 DLC, neither the Nuka World theme park nor the themed raider gangs that inhabit it are that famous. Battle for Boston is something of a do-over, leading front and centre with two iconic factions from the most popular Fallout videogame.
Moriarty says: "One of the critiques that people had of the original Nuka World Box was, the gangs are fun, they do play differently, but they're just kind of… guys". Early in the design for Battle for Boston, Moriarty decided that "Every single crew has to feel completely different". The Brotherhood of Steel are "Like this anvil, slow plodding anvil of power armor and firepower dominance".
They're matched up in the starter set with the Institute, who play by "Throwing disposable synths in waves upon waves and shifting you off objectives and moving you into space you don't want to be". Two more new crews have rules in the box, the Railroad and the Minutemen, with new plastic kits surely not far away.
The Institute "Have a new critical effect called Flush Out that lets you move enemy models hit by it a few inches, so, you can shift them off objectives or force them into combat or out into the open, there's a lot of manipulation of enemy positioning you can do there". "One of the weapon options for your leader gives you a synth relay grenade, which allows you to put Gen One synths that have been killed back on the tabletop" for constant pressure.
Moriarty adds that "The Institute kit has, I think, the most models we ever put in a single plastic set" - you can fit a lot of skinny robots onto a sprue. All told the set will contain 12 new Institute models: a Courser, an armored eradicator, a couple of scientists, a couple of infiltrators, a couple of Gen Two synths, and four skinny Gen One synths. The Brotherhood kit coming in the Boston Box is already available, and contains a chunky Knight and Paladin in power armor, two field scribes, and four regular Brotherhood members.
The Battle for Boston Box is slightly more packed than its Nuka World big brother. "I would say there wasn't quite enough terrain in the box for it to feel a really fleshed out complex battlefield", Moriarty admits, this time "There is twice as much terrain in the Battle for Boston box". It's a mixture of "Ruined buildings and barricades and all very usable, quite vertical terrain, so you can make some seriously dense little battlefields out of what's in there". Nuka World used good quality card stock for its terrain, as well as a complete set of tokens - hopefully that continues here.
The box will also contain dice and a 102 page rulebook, which has everything needed to play a campaign. Like Nuka World, "This is a campaign that you don't need to have a consistent group for, you don't need to have scheduled play sessions for, you can just pick up and play whenever you like" - something I praised in my original review, since the need for an administrator is often the biggest hurdle to setting up a campaign.
In fact much of the campaign system remains intact, "obviously with the new locations" from Boston rather than the soft-drink themed theme park. But "We've made a few tweaks". In Nuka World, players could accrue Control over areas of the park, which was mostly a ticker towards victory: now "It unlocks special rules for your crew, and if you get to five in an area, you get to unlock a Legend of the Wasteland who you exclusively can hire into your warband".
Fallout Factions' core rules already allow for upgrading characters with experience, giving them new perks, and upgrading their weapons: Battle for Boston adds rules for modifying and upgrading armor. "What that does is grant specific armor perks that are a new kind of perk we've created for this".
Power armor is already represented by a collection of perks for the model that make it harder to kill and resistant to radiation: "We now have a way for you to spend parts to slowly outfit your crew members in power armor and then upgrade your power armor with special plating, and shielding, and boosters, and various things". Fallout 4 made power-armor tinkering a major factor of play, so it's a thematic addition to this set.
Battle for Boston will retail for $135 / £100. It's up for pre-order on the Modiphius website now, and expected to ship in May. If you've played either of the Fallout miniature wargames - or haven't, and want to learn more - I'd love to chat in the Wargamer Discord community. For a weekly roundup of all our best stories, make sure you're signed up to the Wargamer newsletter!