How to play Borderlands: Mister Torgue’s Arena of Badassery

Borderlands: Mister Torgue’s Arena of Badassery is a scenario-driven, miniatures game.

Title: Borderlands: Mister Torgue’s Arena of Badassery

Year Published: 2023

Designer: John Cadice, John Kovaleski

Publisher: Monster Fight Club

Players: 1-4

Game Time: ~60 mins per scenario

Set-up Time: ~10 mins per scenario

Ages: 13+

Theme: Borderlands Video Game

Mechanisms: Action Point Allowance

How to win: Advance through the scenarios and defeat the big bad at the end of the campaign.

Game Description

You and a team of Vault Hunters enter Mister Torgue’s Arena of Badassery to face off against his collection of skags, bandits, and assorted psychos.

How to play Borderlands: Mister Torgue’s Arena of Badassery

A spoiler-free quick how-to-play for the Borderlands board game.

Main mechanisms

You have an action point allowance with the number of action tokens you have at your disposal. It’s also a scenario-driven game which while not a mechanism, is very important.

USP

The USP is the Borderlands IP. The only other official game I believe is Tiny Tina’s Robot Tea Party.

Theme

The theme makes sense. you go through waves of combat then take a break to gear up. It’s very much like the video games. There are also a tonne of different guns just like the game.

Setup & Rulebook

Setup is frustrating with all the tiles (that slip about) and bits and bobs to get on the board.

But it’s nowhere as frustrating as the bad rulebook. It’s one of the worst rulebooks I’ve ever had to deal with.

For example, on page 4 it says to put all of the loot tokens in the bag. On page 14 in an unrelated side panel, it says not to put the legendary loot tokens in the bag. At no point on any page in the rulebook does it say that legendary loot tokens are not loot tokens? However, it does say this on a separate component list on their website…

Components & Artwork

The components are OK, and the minis are fine. They’re not awful but not the top quality of other companies.

The artwork is from the game which is a style I enjoy.

The expansion boxes are cheap, black and white and have those tabs that fold in… The cheapest boxes there are. On the plus side, I don’t feel bad about throwing them out.

Ease of Teaching

I’m only playing this solo so I don’t have to teach it, although most open info co-ops like this are easy to teach.

Similar Games

This arrived from Kickstarter about the same time as Marvel Zombies which plays similarly.

Borderlands: Mister Torgue’s Arena of Badassery Summary

The game is OK. When playing solo you have to control 4 Vault Hunters which means you have to know 8 weapons and 4 character abilities and as they level up the ‘things to remember’ list gets quite big.

It’s difficult to want to play this when I have the more fun Marvel Zombies and much more fun Marvel United on the shelf. Both of these are less brain heavy…

On top of remembering some of the tricky rules.

Speaking of rules, the rulebook is awful, one of the worst I’ve ever read. It’s all over the place and it was really hard to write a script for the how-to-play video. Even the line of site, which should be straightforward, was made tricky and ended with me causing a 2-page rules question thread on BGG.

But, I do like the characters and the video games and although I’ll only ever play as 4-5 of the Vault Hunters. (The rest I never played in the game) Playing as favourites like Lilith and Maya, as well as Tiny Tina of course is good fun.

Round-Up

A good conversion of a video game to the table that I wish I could play with 3 other human beings to get the most out of it.

Rating

I give it 6/10