Grendel: The Game of Crime and Mayhem may be Off The Page Games’ most accessible title yet.

We’ve been big fans of Off the Page Games since their brilliant hidden movement masterpiece Mind MGMT, and each new title they have released has come with it a wonderful deep dive into some of the best independent comics of the last several years, from the gothic horror twists of Harrow County to the reimagining of the Lewis & Clark Expedition into a series of cryptid hunting adventures. There’s nothing like having a stack of trade paperbacks to dive into a game theme while you wait for its Kickstarter to fulfill! This time, however, Off the Page is adapting a bonafide classic from my formative years of comic collecting: Matt Wagner’s brilliant Grendel. 

Before longtime fans of the various comic series interject—to be very clear and precise—we are talking about the original Grendel, Hunter Rose, with the game framed by his conflicts with organized crime and the ancient, cursed Native American wolfman, Argent. When it came out, Grendel was notable for its noir-esque plotline and stark graphic design style of red, black and white, and you can find that original story in collected form to this day. By all appearances, Grendel: The Game of Crime and Mayhem captures the look and feel of the comic perfectly, even though designer/publisher Jay Cormier had to introduce a few new colors into the mix for gameplay reasons.

We got to sit down and play a few rounds of the game at Origins this year, and came away pleasantly surprised at how quickly we were able to get up to speed with the different player factions: The Mob rolls and allocates dice, The Police travel around a rondel on their player board, Argent uses a deck of cards, and Grendel spends the game bag building. Each of them has their own method of building and gaining control over the three different regions of the city depicted on the game board, as they upgrade their unique abilities and progress towards their faction’s win condition. Each region of the city has a corresponding tower which players feed Aggression tokens into, eventually triggering the physical counterweight ‘collapsing’ the tower and unleashing the mayhem phase on the region, and that’s when the fighting begins! On the third mayhem phase, the player with the most territory or scored end game conditions wins the game!

Though we didn’t get in a full game, we played enough to note a few things: One- it was fun! The design of the board and player components matched the comics perfectly, and the asymmetrical abilities of each faction utilized their mechanics well and very thematically. Two- while the player abilities were very asymmetrical, the player’s presence on the board was not; territory control was the same for all players. Even though each faction had a different goal in regards to territory, they occupied the same space on the board and keeping your opponents off of spaces was an intuitive goal. Three- Off The Page Games are distinct in that each release has utilized at least one gimmicky mechanic that is surprisingly effective and thematic (see the ‘cube tower’ in the box lid representing Hester’s tree in Harrow County, for instance). Grendel’s Aggression towers added a nice little bit of chaos, transitioning gameplay from prep to a more PvP mode, a little surprise in the middle of the game that got everyone’s adrenaline up. 

Grendel: The Game of Crime and Mayhem is sure to entice fans of asymmetrical gameplay, and while it doesn’t have the complexity of, say, Root, it makes up for it by being much more accessible. The Kickstarter Campaign winds down in a matter of hours, so get in on the action if you can; you won’t want to wait for the second printing!