Hold Your Ground

In Hold Your Ground, the players are trying to be the last-one-standing in a landscape that, literally, keeps exploding beneath their feet.

The box itself provides the play area: a plastic gridded structure, atop which tiles are placed before the game begins. Underneath the structure is a gadget called the Eliminator that players can – and will – activate to ‘explode’ a specific tile – and whatever is on it.

Each player begins with a ‘Battler’ on each tile. On your turn you go through two phases: moving, and doom. Moving is simple: from a hand of four cards, choose two. One defines how many battlers you can move, and the other how far. Key to your decisions are the location of the Eliminator, and the fact that the central tile is always safe, and never explodes. Also highly relevant: each tile has room for a finite number of battlers, so if this is exceeded the battler entering will push one of the others off onto an adjacent tile (or adjacent chasm of doom, if there is no tile there).

The doom phase consists of rolling a die, which will trigger different things depending on the result. If it’s a Battle Royale, then we look at every tile on the board and if any one player has the majority of battlers present, they get to kick another player’s battler off. The die may also move the Eliminator , or cause it to activate: which explodes the tile it sits under! Any battlers who fall under the grid or off the board are lost. If they land on another tile, they survive – for now.

Every tile must always have a path to the central, indestructible tile, so if any are cut off from it they are automatically removed and any battlers present are lost. The game ends either when there is only one players’ battlers left standing, or by majority when two or more players have survived on the central tile.

Currently only available in the USA