The Tomb Raider board game will let you shoot dogs while sitting around the kitchen table at last

The Tomb Raider: The Crypt of Chronos board game

(Image credit: Iconiq Studios/Crystal Dynamics)

Board game publishers may be lamenting the end of the tabletop boom—the golden age of board gaming that has filled my weeknights with games like The Quacks of Quedlinburg and Darktide—but I don't expect the industry to topple overnight. Middle-class Catan bros will choke down a lot of price hikes to get their cardboard fix, and Kickstarters for expensive boxes of fancy plastic are probably here to stay for a while yet.

Like, for example, the upcoming board game Tomb Raider: The Crypt of Chronos, launching on Kickstarter next month. In this game for one or more players, renowned animal-murderer Lara Croft searches the island of Kairos for "an artifact said to hold the reins of time" that will definitely not unleash a supernatural disaster when uncovered.

It sounds kind of like Citizen Sleeper in that Lara has a pool of dice that can be assigned to different actions each turn, like exploration and crafting. How does crafting work in a board game? I assume it's as abstract as it is in most videogames. Maybe you have to kill and skin the bear to make Lara's sweet bomber jacket.

The bear is apparently a boss enemy that is able to regenerate, while the standard enemies are gun-toting mercenaries sent by Natla Tech who are after the artifact for nefarious ends. Also, there's Roman legionnaires and Lara's ancient enemy, some dogs.

All are represented in lovingly detailed plastic, though they're standing on too many tactical rocks for my liking. Almost every base seems to include a fallen pillar and/or a small mine's worth of ore so the character can dramatically pose with one leg raised.

Apparently Tomb Raider: The Crypt of Chronos will have two modes of play, with Adventure Book Mode as a series of 20–60-minute story missions while Campaign Mode is a kind of open-world free roam through random locations, a full campaign of which will take roughly three hours to complete.

This isn't the first Tomb Raider board game, with Tomb Raider Legends pitting four classic-look Laras against each other several years ago. That was published by Square Enix, however, while Tomb Raider: The Crypt of Chronos is the work of licensee Iconiq Studios, previously responsible for tabletop games based on They Live and Saw, as well as a line of figurines based on characters from Silent Hill 2, Street Fighter 5, and so on. It'll go live on Kickstarter on May 27.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.