On Tuesday, UK based games design studio Modiphius announced that it is developing an XCOM miniatures game in partnership with Take-Two Interactive. The studio has a good track record of developing games based on videogame licenses, not to mention plenty of other miniature games to judge by, and we can glean one bit of information about it already - it's going to be cooperative.
Modiphius specializes in co-operative and solo-first 'adventure' wargames, particularly the Five X series that began with Five Leagues from the Borderlands and now includes sci-fi games and a spin off from the RPG Paranoia. While there are no real details about the XCOM Miniatures Game on the Modiphius webstore, the name appears under the Five X heading.
Frankly, it feels like a good fit. XCOM is a two faction setting, and that really doesn't vibe with competitive wargames, which struggle with anything less than four. The Five X games have a campaign systems to allow your units to acquire new gear, gain skills, suffer injuries or casualties, which is pure XCOM. Those systems do appear in some competitive wargames, but when they do they're applied equally to any faction. And it really wouldn't fit for the aliens in XCOM to end up as the brow-beaten underdogs after a string of bad defeats.
We don't yet know what models plans to make, but I expect them to be completely accurate to the videogames. Modiphius has made model ranges based on Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, and even a few characters from Mass Effect, and they are completely spot on to their digital inspirations. Just about every recognizable Bethesda Fallout character or monster has a mini; we're talking Swan, the cult of the Mothman, Brahmin two-headed cows, the nuke-chucking war robot Liberty Prime. There are even 3D printer files to make a crashed Zetan UFO…
In recent years Modiphius has begun to produce hard plastic kits with multiple options for weapon loadouts, and the iconic XCOM troopers would work great like that. But some are all of the range could be detailed, delicate, and expensive resin models. It's a matter of costs: plastic kits require a lot of capital investment and so are reserved for models that will sell in huge numbers. Modiphius also releases some miniatures purely as digital STLs, but whether it does this for XCOM will depend on its agreement with Take-Two Interactive.
The unanswered questions are tantalizing. Will this game focus on the original XCOM: Enemy Unknown, with the fully funded XCOM project facing off against the aliens for the first time, the guerrilla warfare of XCOM 2, or even dip into Chimaera Squad? How large will battlefields be? Will there be rules for destructible terrain? How will base management work? Post your predictions in the Wargamer Discord community.