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Mike Hutchinson's Hobgoblin
Mike Hutchinson, the creator of Gaslands, is back with a bloodthirsty miniatures game that allows you to build and battle with any fantasy army you can imagine. The army list system is a universal toolkit for building your own army to fit your imagination, and your miniature collection.
“Hobgoblin is a super solid addition to the pantheon of mass battle fantasy games.” — Patrick Rollens, Comrade's Wargames
Hobgoblin plays out as fast, brutal rank-and-flank battles: units are arranged in ranked blocks and clash across the table, with combat resolved quickly using dice so that even large armies finish in an evening. The free Fortune Cards deck adds battlefield twists and swingy moments without slowing the core rules down, and the Chaos of War tool can generate a scenario, deployment, and twist for you in a click.
Hobgoblin is completely miniature- and manufacturer-agnostic: there's no official model range, so any fantasy miniatures you already own (or want an excuse to buy) can be turned into a viable unit. You assign each unit a troop type, then buy advantage and disadvantage keywords to customize it, so painted armies from completely different manufacturers can face off on equal footing.
Standard wargames terrain works well — hills, ruins, and obstacles to break sightlines and give units cover. The Rotvärlden setting leans toward cavern fortresses and underground seas, so terrain themed around stalagmites, chasms, and subterranean architecture fits the game's tone particularly well.
There are no pre-set factions in Hobgoblin. Instead, players use a universal toolkit to build their own army: choose a base troop type (infantry, cavalry, war beast, and so on), then spend or recoup points by adding advantageous or disadvantageous keywords, so the list-building process doubles as light army customization.
Hobgoblin is set in the Rotvärlden, a fantastical underground world of cavern fortresses and vast underground oceans. The setting is intentionally open-ended — there's no fixed canon of factions or armies, so players are encouraged to invent their own warbands and lore to fit whatever miniatures they want to field.
Light in the Rotvärlden comes only from torches, watchfires, glowing runes, and luminescent fungi, giving battles a dim, claustrophobic feel — part of why ranged warfare plays a smaller role than melee in the setting's fiction. Magic is fueled by mercury, a strange resource drawn from the world itself, lending spellcasting an alien, otherworldly tone rather than a familiar high-fantasy one. Even the early rules material leans hard into this bleak, subterranean atmosphere, distinct from typical surface-dwelling fantasy settings, with plenty of room left for players to fill in their own lore.
Hobgoblin was the first game to launch with an Indie Tabletop Club companion app. The free official Army Builder lets you build, manage, print, and share army lists, the Chaos of War tool generates a scenario, battlefield, deployment, and twist in one click, and a Fortune Cards mode is available — all at hobgoblin.indietabletop.club.
Content for this page was written for Indie Tabletop Club by Artur Muller based on an interview with the creator(s) and the game's rulebook. Images used with permission.