Crossbows & Catapults review — A box of memories

Why do we play games? To spend time together? To win? To distract? There could be any number of reasons, but I can still remember being a kid and playing just to play. The rules were usually made up, they changed frequently, and there wasn’t always a point. Just fun. Crossbows & Catapults takes me back to that place and time when I had no worries and did things just for fun. It might do that for you too.

I can’t promise you will have the same experience with Crossbows & Catapults that I did but if you’re even a little like me, there’s a good chance you are going to love it. I never had an official game like this growing up, but it must be coded into little boys’ DNA to want to build things and knock them down because my brother and I played this exact game without knowing it was ever a real product. I see my own son doing the same thing with his Duplos and Magnatiles. Growing up, our version involved Linkin Logs, Army Men, and throwing plastic horses as hard as we could across the kitchen to take out the Linkin Log fortresses with Army Men taking cover inside instead of castle blocks and catapults. The game was the same though.

Crossbows & Catapults comes with a very brief rule book. You can read it if you want to, but I promise you don’t need to. You already know how to play. Build your castle however you want. Hide your soldiers behind the walls. Unlock a level of good times you’ve probably forgotten about as you unleash catapults, crossbows, trebuchets, and ballistas at your enemy’s fortress and watch the walls come crashing down.

There are rules for how and where to fire weapons, special abilities, and attack cards to add in, bigger and more awesome weapons, and extra building blocks for epic constructions. All of that is great and I had a blast using all of it. Crossbows & Catapults is a game, sure, but it’s really a toybox of potential. I can’t imagine anyone not being able to find a way to have fun with this box. If you’re a rule follower, there is still a solid game here but what I am trying to say is you don’t need to let the rules define how you have fun. I think Restoration Games would agree with me, which is why the rule book is barely two pages long. Like I said before, you already know how to play.

Looking at the overall components, the production of this game is top notch. When we spoke to Restoration Games at GenCon this year about Crossbows & Catapults we talked about the plastic and mold engineering that went into redesigning every component. The size and feel of the blocks is intentional. The sound they make as a wall tumbles down is intentional. The weapons are engineered to work every time and last forever. There is skill in dialing in your aim with the real screw adjusted distance limits. The weapons use metal springs instead of rubber bands. The care and design work that went into each piece is amazing and frankly out of place for a tabletop game. Nobody else is putting in this much work. The miniatures are a soft plastic so can safely blast them off the table and hold enough detail to be recognizable and look good when they are on the battlefield. 

It’s worth mentioning that the review copy we received is the Fortress War edition of the game. We also received the Builder’s Bounty addon that provides a pile of extra blocks for truly epic castles. As well as the Weapons Cache, which is where the awesome trebuchet and ballista come from. The addons are well worth it but if you can only choose one, definitely go for the Weapons Cache. The trebuchet is just too much fun to miss out on. It is a shelf hog so make sure you have room or you know… get another shelf.

I expected to have fun when I opened up Crossbows & Catapults from Restoration Games. I expected a light game that would provide some laughs and a good time. I knew building castles and knocking them down was going to score well with me. I did not expect to relive being a kid again, to lose sight of all of my worries for a brief time, to experience the giddy joy of an afternoon spent with my brother playing like we were back home on the kitchen floor. My face hurt I was smiling and laughing so much. We played for hours and it felt like no time at all. For just a little while, we were kids again. Thank you Restoration Games.

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