How many times have you been playing a really good first-person shooter and thought: “Man…this would make for a great board game? If your answer is “never”, then join the club. The immersion, urgency, and immediacy of a FPS are pretty much at complete and total odds with the measured, structured pace of a board game. There was an attempt a couple of years back to bring together the twitch-style gameplay of the FPS with cardboard and dice called FRAG but the less said about it, the better. Seriously, leave it alone and let us never speak of it again. Fantasy Flight Games stepped up to the dubious challenge with their board game rendition of DOOM but the result was pretty much an old-fashioned dungeon crawl gussied up with Hellknights and BFGs. So now we have Tannhauser, a game that’s been available in Europe for quite some time and is now ready stateside thanks to Fantasy Flight and shockingly, against all odds…it almost completely matches the FPS experience to a board game setting.

Of course, there are fundamental differences that we’ve discussed here in this column between electronic and board games so don’t come into Tannhauser expecting to spend an hour or so looking at a hand with a gun and a HUD. Yet, when you play the game it’s hard not to imagine it as a multiplayer PC game interrupted by some dice rolls and manual tracking of damage. There are even some crates for players to bust to pick up some extra ammo or health. I was really amused reading through the rules because they outline what very well could have been a PC game— there’s even various “difficulty” settings and four different play modes. See if these sound familiar: Story, Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, and Domination.

Rules-wise, Tannhauser is fairly light despite a lot of hidden complexity in terms of special abilities and interactions; it relies on a stats-based dice pool system that provides a number of d10s to roll against target numbers, counting successes to arrive at an overall damage or defense score. Moving and identifying line-of-sight on the two maps included in the game is a breeze thanks to the ingenious “Pathfinding” system. To sum it up, the spaces on the board are circles and if your target is in a circle that has the same color as the one your firing unit is in, then you have line of sight. No rubber bands, no measuring, no dispute.

The game ships with ten characters and all have several pieces of equipment ranging from mundane firearms to completely badass combat skills to exploding crystal skulls. My favorite piece of equipment though has got to be this demonic Luger named Doom. It fires ghost bullets that seek out their targets- even around corners or into smoke. Totally lethal. The items and character abilities add a lot of flavor to the game as well as a Counterstrike-like emphasis on having the right characters do the right things, and it’s already become pretty common in our games for players to request “Nazi Dominatrix Lady” or “Big-ass Machine Gun Guy”, since no one’s bothered to learn their names yet.

For me, a good FPS is only as good as its setting, atmosphere, and story and the distinct characters are a part of that. I’m definitely a bigger fan of games like Half-Life and BioShock that wed the gun slinging to a great narrative. Tannhauser comes out of the gate swinging with one of the coolest, if not the most original, back stories I’ve seen in a board game in quite a while. The concept is that World War I never ended and the pseudo-Nazi “Reich” wound up getting involved in all this black magic, founding a shadowy agency called the Obscura Korps to dabble in all sorts of diablerie.

So leave it to the good guys to pilfer the Roswell crash to reverse-engineer alien technology to come up with some wicked weaponry of their own to fight fire with fire so to speak. Throw in plenty of fluff text, detailed character bios, and some really fantastic character design and the result is a fully realized, fleshed out game world that is definitely in deep debt to Hellboy, the Wolfenstein games, and the old Michael Mann picture The Keep from some thirty years ago.

Yet somehow, all of this great background material fails to really solidify in the actual gameplay itself. In the so-called “Story mode”, the idea is to activate these objective circles by spending an action next to them with a character with the appropriate skill (or spending a victory point if you don’t have it). The rulebook offers some thematic suggestions for what the skills and combinations of skills required might represent, but ultimately it doesn’t really mean anything other than you got the right character over to the right place and they sat there for a turn. It doesn’t have the narrative feel of an actual scenario; in future expansions I believe it would be wise for the designers to provide specific details for scenario setup and campaign development—the great story behind the game really deserves to be illuminated in the play of the game itself, not just in the fluff text in the rulebook.