In the Year of Our Lord 2025, I have found myself with two rather conflicting desires: To play more games as an escape from the current goings on, but also thanks to the current goings on having very little interest in playing games described as “grimdark”. I work in global health; my day job is, at present, a little bit grimdark.

Enter The Guards of Traitor’s Toll by Grey For Now Games, the makers of Test of Honour and 0200 Hours.

What exactly is The Guards of Traitor’s Toll? Essentially, “What if Discworld and 0200 Hours had a baby, and that baby was magnificent?”.

This article contains affiliate links to kits from Wargames Atlantic, which helps support Goonhammer.

The Concept

The core idea in Guards (which is what I’m shortening the game’s name to) is that you and your friends are playing between one and four units of well…guards. The semi-mercenary law enforcement of the city of Traitor’s Toll, paid for by the nobles and guilds responsible for levying the tolls that are the lifeblood of the city, which sits at an important crossroads between two powerful nations, and is nigh impossible to skirt around.

The setting contains a little bit of everything. Some docks, if you want to be searching for smuggled goods on piers and shady dockside taverns, surrounded by trading ships. A land entry, where the people of Traitor’s Toll do their best to extract extra coin from caravans waiting for tax assessment with food, drink, supplies and entertainment. Rumored smuggling tunnels, if you’re in a dungeon crawl mood. A ruined section of the city, still being repaired from a previous invasion. All of this overseen by some mysterious, lightly developed nobles who fund your Guard companies, and clearly pursue agendas of their own.

If this setting feels flexible to you, it should. I think that’s actually one of the great strengths of this game’s setup – it’s portable. It’s Fantasy-esq but doesn’t ground you in many setting choices – there aren’t Tieflings, or High Elves, but there’s not not those things. Just add horns or pointy ears to some of your townsfolk. Would you rather play in Ankh-Morpork? Do that. Or perhaps Mordheim, before things take a green and comet-y turn for the worst. Or perhaps you need a break from DMing this week, and want to put your TTRPG players in the seat of the usually NPC guards, fleshing out some of the daily life of a city at the center of your campaign? Or take a more historical path, and play a city under occupation. All of those are easily accomplished, and it’s easy to make a campaign of Guards your own. My own group, for example, has swapped the mayor for a Beholder in a trench coat, who everyone knows is a Beholder, but also no one comments on, because he really is doing a decent job.

Whether you choose to set your games in the city of Traitor’s Toll, or elsewhere, the core concept behind Guards is that it’s a semi-cooperative skirmish adventure game. All of those words mean something.

Semi-cooperative means that you are not directly fighting each other – but you are rivals. Your guards (assuming you’re not playing solo) will assist other guards in apprehending suspects, etc. But they will also happily snake a bounty out from under their fellow guards. There’s also a meta-level, of setting up events to inconvenience your opponent and benefit yourself – making your own suspects easier to capture, putting oblivious civilians in the path of your opponent’s own pursuits, or manipulating activations so that dangerous criminals have the chance to strike back at your opponent’s guards, but not your own.

Skirmish is what it says on the tin – we’re talking about a small band (no more than six usually, and often much less) of individuals guards, who each have their own stats, equipment, progression, etc.

Adventure Game is an interesting one. Guards is expressly not a wargame in the way a lot of people think about it. If for no other reason than it’s not really about war, and violence is definitely not always the answer (more on this later). What it is is a very compelling system for creating emergent narratives about the city you’re playing in, and the men and women who try – and often fail – to keep the peace.

Model Range

Guards is built around the Wargames Atlantic Classic Fantasy Guards and Classic Fantasy Villagers, previously reviewed on Goonhammer here and here respectively. These kits mix nicely, both with each other (though be mindful that the villagers all have their sleeves up, and the guards all have their sleeves down, so if you care, you need to match) and other Wargames Atlantic kits, like their new line that supports The Baron’s War, if you’re looking to make your guards look slightly less fantastic.

It’s also perfectly compatible with other miniature ranges. The Townsfolk Miniature Pack from Archon Studio would add a lot of variety, and there’s any number of “assorted villager” STL files out there for the 3d printing crowd.

What you want is a lot of variety, and that’s where the sheer number of options in the Wargames Atlantic kits come into play.

Core Gameplay

For those familiar with Grey for Now Games, that the core gameplay activation sequence is “draw a whole mess of tokens out of a bag” will be a familiar one. The number of tokens will increase and reduce during the game, but generally speaking there’s one for every guard (two for captains), two plot tokens, and three time tokens. When suspects appear, they get tokens as well.

When a token is drawn, it is assigned to an appropriate figure. Guard tokens are (obviously) guards, plot tokens cause you to draw a plot card (discussed below), suspect tokens move suspects, and time tokens move civilians (the first two times), or end the turn (for the third time token) – where you update things like “Hey, how’s that building that’s on fire doing?”

The Guards

Each player is in command of a small group of guards, led by a Captain. Each of them have five stats, with a range from 1 to 6, with 3 being the most common. Aim dictates accuracy when trying to strike an opponent, as well as for ranged attacks. Agility is for dodging, running fast, or trying to get a grip on a fleeing figure. Brawn is physical strength, which comes in most often in combat. Wits dictates a guard’s awareness of their surroundings, overall cleverness, and is a bit of a catch all for a number of different actions. Finally, Heart dictates a guard’s courage, ability to resist influence, etc. Generally, the value is how many dice a guard rolls for a test (Wits of 4 meaning they roll 4 dice).

The dice themselves are custom, with several faces having 1 to 3 swords, and others having coins or…feet.

Generally, you’re looking for three or more swords in your roll, while coins unlock special abilities (letting you hit harder, move through a door while running, etc.), and feet make movement based powers go faster. When guards wander randomly, which they often do, the tips of the swords point in the possible directions they may go, so more dice also means more potential opportunities to head in a random but useful direction, rather than doing what one of my guards did all game, which was as far as we could tell flirting with a barmaid while he was on duty, thanks to a truly useless set of rolls.

The cards for each guard, as well as the captain, have a nice mix of stats on them that allow for a bit of customization – making your guard with a ranged weapon a slightly better shot, some guards clever, others brutally strong. These will develop further during campaign play as they earn Trait cards, which modify their stats, give them new gear – or make them better with the weapons they have – or give them backstory.

Generating your guard squad is very…vibes based. There is a points system, but it’s both fairly vague rather than being super granular based on what equipment you have, and if you’re using the starter set, which is all you really need to play the game, you can dispense with it entirely, as most of the things that cost extra points, notably guards on mounts and guards with attack animals, aren’t in that core set. Generally speaking, you want a variety of different weapons. A crossbow is lethal, and very useful for taking down dangerous suspects, but if you have to subdue someone it’s absolutely a liability. The same goes for swords. Similarly, a guard armed with a chain or mace might be better at taking subjects alive, but will struggle with someone that has lethal intent. And honestly, the rule of cool is very much in effect here.

The Cards

As the turn advances, it’s likely one or more plot cards will be drawn. These typically ask you to identify as suspect, for example “Any barefoot civilian”, or sometimes a location, like a flammable building. These suspects have their own stats, default behaviors – do they flee, turn and fight, etc., and the conditions by which the plot must be solved – arresting the suspect, killing them, putting out the fire, etc.

Alongside this are the rewards for completing the plot, as well as how much discontent the currently unsolved mission causes – the civilian populous being rather unhappy if there are murderers or pickpockets in their midst.

There are also secret cards, which the game encourages you not to read until it’s called for, that can make a plot more or less difficult, or have other knock-on effects.

Combat, Actions and Suspects

In 0200 Hours, there are two phases – the part where some commandos are sneaking about out of sight and the part where there’s a lot of shocking violence and automatic weapons fire.

Guards follows a somewhat similar pattern. Your guards start out simply patrolling the city, often moving randomly. Then things go a bit haywire as plots start being drawn. In my experience playing the game, you draw plots considerably faster than you solve them, which means for a while the city is in absolute bedlam. Suspects are running everywhere, some of them dangerous, some of them not, and there’s only so many guards to go around. Then, slowly, you chug your way through the plots, things start to calm down, and the tension comes from trying to beat your opponent. Each time you complete a plot, you get a gold reward, and whoever has the most gold, wins.

This means the middle of the game is dominated by directed movement actions – spotting a suspect and trying to catch up with them – and combat actions. And combat is not easy. First you have to hit, then your suspect can defend themselves, and if they fail, then you have to roll to hurt them. Often times, you will have to rely on multiple guards helping each other, running the suspect out of activations, and/or wounding them once or twice before you can be successful. I found I really enjoyed the feel of this – the guards you are playing are not an elite strike force, nor do they pretend to be. There’s plenty of room here to characterize your guards – tired veterans who can’t really be bothered anymore, a corrupt guard captain on the take, or a company led by a fresh-faced idealist who is impossibly in over his or her head in a city rife with opportunities for crime and exploitation.

Importantly, there are three types of combat – close strike, ranged strike, or seize. The first two work the same, though one is obviously at range, and are meant to strike to kill. The third is an attempt to subdue and arrest a suspect, taking them back to your guard headquarters. It is also possible to be a little too brutal when subduing a suspect, and kill them. In a refreshing contrast to our own world, this has immediate and fairly serious consequences.

In essence, if you kill a suspect, either on purpose or on accident, who wasn’t violent, the civilian population gets upset, and the guard who did the killing gets “personal discontent” – which they may or may not be able to work off through the rest of the game. And at the end of the game, the level of discontent, both that generated from plots and your personal discontent, is subtracted from your gold total. This may very well lose you the game, as I discovered while testing out precisely how lethal crossbows are on a suspected pickpocket.

There are other ways to gain discontent – civilians being attacked by criminals, knocked down or injured by suspects or guards running through them, etc. In addition to the end game effects, the civilian population is less likely to help the guards the higher the current level of discontent is.

There are myriad other actions you can take – anything from questioning informants to buying items from vendors, but all of them boil down to the same core mechanic – roll the number of dice in your stat, hope for three or more swords, and go from there. While the variety is daunting, it quickly becomes intuitive.

The City Itself

There has been a rise in the number of terrain-intensive skirmish games of late – Port Royal and Trench Crusade both come to mind. Guards is very much in this genre – while it is played on a small board, because your not fighting your opponent as much as trying to keep a handle on the city, the city as a setting becomes very important.

Civilians

You’re going to need a lot of civilians – and importantly, a variety of civilians. When you roll to identify a civilian – either to move them because you drew a time token, or to see who is a suspect, you roll 2d6, and there are thirty-five possible options. Broadly, they are divided up into Arcane, Weaponry, Expensive, Tools, Consume, and Perform – with attendant sub categories. For example, if you roll a 6 (Perform), there’s then Instrument, Creature, Jester/Juggler, Puppet, Mask/Fan, or choose any as your options on the second d6.

Like I said, variety here is a must, though this too is often more of a vibe than making sure you absolutely have each and every one of these. The suggested minimum is 20, and the rules say 30 or 40 make for a more bustling part of the town. In my experience, it also makes for a more dynamic experience and a better looking game the more civilians you have. It’s also just fun to make them – I’ve got hedge witches and harried graduate students, a suspiciously young banker that’s a tribute to Cithrin from The Dagger and the Coin, and a professional duelist that’s a former character of mine from a long-dead play by post RPG. And a puppet troupe.

The civilians, in addition to being a major gameplay component, add a ton of texture to the board.

Terrain

The guidance for terrain is similarly open. “Patrol Duty”, the standard mission in the game that provides the filler for more specialized missions, specifies between three and nine buildings for a 3×3 board. That’s a wildly different level of crowding. In addition to large, freestanding structures, I also think that gameplay calls for a lot of scatter terrain, and genuinely benefits from someone going a little wild with carts, merchant stalls, barrels and an errant flock of chickens.

It’s also easy to envision rules for these things if you’re so inclined. Normally, suspects who are arrested need a guard to babysit them, or the guard has to take them back to the guardhouse – depriving you of their actions until they return, and when they do, they’re often far from the thick of things. But if you have a set of stocks? Perhaps you can secure the suspects there. Or perhaps suspects can dive into hay carts to lose their pursuers, Ezio Auditore-style.

There’s a plethora of options for terrain. Sarissa Precision makes pre-colored MDF kits, and many of the rules are expressly written assuming these kits are what’s in use. But my local group has found that anything from the perennially useful Laketown houses to any number of Legally Distinct From Mordheim STL sets to suit the purposes. Just like with civilians, both gameplay and the visual spectacle of the game seem enhanced by being at the upper end of the suggested number of buildings, and having a variety of types and shapes of buildings.

Gameplay Experience

So how does the game actually play?

The short version: It’s a blast.

The semi-cooperative nature of the game makes for a fun, communal experience, both celebrating each other’s successes and also trying to eek out a victory with some good natured skullduggery and underhandedness. The tactics of trying to work around civilians, getting your guards into position, and balancing the various plot objectives and how to accomplish them makes for a constantly engaging game. A guard who has been wandering a bit and is out of position might be in the perfect spot when a fire breaks out a moment later.

Even some mechanics that might prove frustrating in other games end up being entertaining. During one game, our companies were tasked with containing the escape of a small pack of small animals. This proved wildly more difficult than expected, but ended up with a great deal of laughter about a skink once more making its escape. In another game, a suspect accused of smuggling passed an improbable number of rolls to dodge, and several times managed to strike back at the guards, giving rise to the legend of the “Shaolin Baker”.

In that same unexpectedly bloody exchange, while the “Green Company” was trying to take her town, a member of the “Red Company” snatched the basket she was guarding out from under their noses, collecting the bounty for discovering the evidence that she was smuggling.

The one caveat I have observed about gameplay is that, while most people would assume a skirmish game with six or fewer models per side would be fairly fast playing, this is not the case. While some slowness can be attributed to learning the system, every time I’ve played so far, it’s been a full night’s gaming – and importantly, all of the missions end on when certain criteria are met, rather than a specific time point. This can mean a fair bit of time if one is tasked with, purely hypothetically, a bunch of fast moving, difficult to subdue animals who have dispersed all over the board.

Is Guards of Traitor’s Toll my every Friday night game? Probably not. But there are days when I just want to roll dice, have fun, say “What’s all this then?” in an absolutely appalling English accent and tell a story about my stupid little plastic army men, without worrying about the latest changes to the meta, or how some failson of a commander has caused my right flank to stall. Guards is the perfect game for that mood. And every time I’ve played it so far, I’ve wanted to play more, or to go paint up a new company of guards, or another handful of colorful civilian characters who may never do anything more than stand by an ox-cart, but who add texture and life to our little adventures.

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