George TsagkarakisMantic Games has 2,828 backers and £274,425 in pledges for a tabletop Assassin’s Creed, and the boxes start shipping this October.
That’s the headline number for Assassin’s Creed® Animus – The Board Game, currently live as a Kickstarter campaign. One to four players, a stack of miniatures, and a pitch that reads like Ubisoft’s own marketing copy filtered through 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
Here’s the part that separates this from every licensed board game that just reskins a dungeon crawl. Animus is built around rivalry.
“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.”
So you’re inside your ancestor’s memories, hunting a target, and racing the other people at your table to master Assassin status. Actions get spent moving across the board. Special locations get investigated for their secrets. And your enemies have to be found before someone else finds theirs.
The miniatures pull from a wider net than you’d expect
The character lineup spans from the original Assassin’s Creed through Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. It also includes Assassin’s Creed Liberations, which remains painfully underrated and rarely gets this kind of shelf space.
That range matters. A licensed game that only pulls from the greatest hits is a poster. One that reaches into the back catalog is made by people who played the back catalog.
Why now, and why a board game
Ubisoft’s franchise has been a fixture of the video game world since 2007. Fourteen mainline entries later, a lot of us grew up with the action-adventure series and its history-spanning feud between the Assassin Brotherhood and the Templar Order.
Not every entry landed. Some are widely regarded as among the best video games ever made, and they gave us Ezio, Connor and Edward.
Ubisoft just put out Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag Resynced, which has pushed the conversation toward what comes next. Many believe Assassin’s Creed Hexe will be the next mainline entry, taking players to the 16th century Holy Roman Empire.
That’s still ahead. The Animus box is close enough that backers can start counting weeks instead of years.
