For What Remains: Suspenseful Chit-Pulling in a Post-Apocalyptic World

David Thompson has a knack for delivering a variety of excellent board games, whether on his own or when collaborating with a plethora of different designers. While some of his releases are gaining much deserved praise, such as War Chest from AEG and Undaunted: Normandy from Osprey Games, both which he co-designed with Trevor Benjamin, several other games he's worked on have remained under the radar.

In late 2020, I got hip to David Thompson's popular, solitaire wargames Pavlov's House and Castle Itter from Dan Verssen Games (DVG). When I saw DVG launched a Kickstarter campaign for Thompson's upcoming 2021 solitaire wargame Soldiers in Postmen's Uniforms, I had a treat yo'self moment and splurged to go all-in with the Valiant Defense series so that I could add all three of these solitaire wargame gems to my collection. Even though I was good to go, I couldn't help but notice the add-ons, which is the first time I saw For What Remains. I was curious, so naturally I looked it up on BGG and started rummaging YouTube for videos to see what it was all about.

For What Remains initially struck me as an interesting fusion of elements from War Chest and Undaunted: Normandy/Undaunted: North Africa, even though I could tell it was its own beast. It got me excited and I knew I wanted to try it out and let people know about it. It seemed like a game fans of War Chest or Undaunted: Normandy might dig, in addition to fans of skirmish games.

I emailed David who put me in contact with Sarah from DVG, and they graciously hooked me up with a copy of all three For What Remains games so that I could check them out.

For What Remains is a series of three tactical skirmish wargames for 1-2 players in a near future post-apocalyptic setting created by David Thompson with the help of his collaborators, Paul Low and Ricardo Tomas. For What Remains can be played two ways, either as standalone skirmish games or as a campaign with a series of skirmishes linked together to form a larger narrative. In either case, after setting it up, a single scenario plays in about 45-60 minutes.

Each of the three games in the series has its own flavor and narrative within the overall For What Remains storyline, and each game includes two unique factions each vying for control and survival in a post-apocalyptic setting that resulted from a nuclear weapon test that opened a gateway to an alternate dimension known as the Basement. Without spoiling the story, I'll just say...things got weird from there.

• In For What Remains: Streets of Ruin, you have the Freemen Coalition, a loose-knit band of human rebels who specialize in guerilla warfare up against the government military Combine, made of primarily mechs that rule over much of what's left of the world.

• In For What Remains: Blood on the Rails, you have the Echo, a group of humans with psychic powers led by a secretive cabalis rivaling the Soldiers of Light (SoL), some beasty-looking humans who can use mutated beasts and believe the fall of mankind was due to dependence on technology.

• The last in the series, For What Remains: Out of the Basement, includes the biologically developed creatures known as Erthen versus the Order of the New Dawn, which are creepier creatures from the strange subterranean realm, I mentioned above, the Basement.

Board Game: For What Remains: Out of the Basement

Even though each game has its own factions and campaign, they are all cross-compatible with each other and have the same rules, so you can combine the components and factions of any of the games together.

When you set up a game of For What Remains, regardless of which particular game you're playing , each player chooses a faction to control, then you pick a scenario, either from the campaign book or one you've created.

Next, you create the battleground using a modular board set-up, which is one of the things that gives For What Remains a lot of replay value. Each game in the series comes with twelve different double-sided battleground mats that you use to create a 3x3 battleground each game. The campaign scenarios give you a specific battleground set-up to follow, but if you choose to create your own scenario, you alternate placing battleground mats with your opponent to create a custom set-up. In either case, the result is a 3x3 battleground with detailed artwork and clean graphic design ready for action.

For What Remains: Streets of Ruin

Depending on the scenario you play, you will likely need to distribute some scavenge tokens (weapons, fuel, etc.) on the board; these are usually worth victory points if you can grab them and keep them in your possession during the game.

Next comes the character selection process, which I found to be the most exciting part of set-up in For What Remains. It's a nice balance of thinky, creative and suspenseful since you're carefully crafting your crew, but you don't know yet what your opponent's line-up will be.

Each game you'll decide on a certain amount of skirmish points to use to "shop" for characters within your chosen faction. Campaign scenarios tell you how many to use, but if you're creating your own scenario, the rulebook recommends ranging from 10 skirmish points (first game/low-level characters) to 30 if you're looking for a more epic experience.

Each of the six factions has five or six unique characters with varying strengths and special abilities that can come into play at one of three different experience levels: Recruit, Veteran or Elite. Each character has a reference card which shows their move (MOV), weapon range (WR), close combat (CC), ranged combat (RC), defense (DEF), and special abilities. In addition, each character has a value associated with its experience level that represents the amount of skirmish points you'll need to spend to purchase and use them for the game. Often more abilities are available the higher the experience level, but as you'd expect, it also costs more.

In the example below, the Death Vine (Erthen faction) would cost 2 skirmish points to bring in as a Recruit, 4 as a Veteran, and 6 as an Elite. Death Vine has a Camouflage and Constrict ability at all experience levels, but also has Hydro Merge if it's a Veteran or Elite.

Death Vine reference card

Before you even hit the battleground, you have interesting decisions to make when selecting your characters. Do you want to have a smaller, but stronger, more skilled group or do you want to have more, but weaker characters, or perhaps somewhere in between? It's super fun to experiment with building your line-up before each game, but I'll warn you, it can definitely make your set-up time run a bit longer depending on how long you mull over these decisions. It never bothered me and my opponents since in all cases we were both taking a while to think things over, so it's not like one person was ever waiting on the other. We pretty much always got sucked in and enjoyed the character selection process.

The other cool thing is that each game comes with two versions of each character, so you can have up to two of the same character in a game. The character counters have a little designator icon on it to distinguish between the two versions.

two versions of Psion (Echo faction)

After you've selected your characters, take character reference cards, counters, action tokens, and ability reference sheets. If you use Recruit-level characters, you use a single counter with an "R" on it, whereas if you use Veteran and Elite characters, you'll stack the lower level counters beneath the main one. This comes into play more when I tell you about getting injured in combat.

For What Remains also comes with nifty booklets for each faction with its backstory, artwork, and details on all of the characters and their special abilities.

The last thing you need to do for set-up is decide where your characters start on the battleground. Typically, you roll a die (d10) and whoever has the highest roll chooses a side and their opponent starts on the opposite side. Deciding where to place your characters also gives you a lot to think about, but I found it never took as long as choosing characters. Between this and the character selection process, you have a lot of interesting and tough choices to make before you even start the battle.

For What Remains: Out of the Basement

Each skirmish in For What Remains is played over a series of rounds until one player wins. Victory will depend on the chosen scenario, which usually has different victory conditions for different factions but oftentimes, you win the game by scoring a certain number of victory points or by defeating all of your opponent's characters.

Each round is centered around a clever chit-pull system. Players select action tokens they want to use for the round and place them in a little black sack, which is the action bag. You have three action tokens per character that you keep face-down in your own supply so your opponent can't see them. These action tokens are what you use to determine which characters take actions. Both players secretly place a number of action tokens equal to the number of characters you have on the battleground into the action bag, so if you have four characters, you place four action tokens in the action bag.

Then you draw tokens from the bag, one at a time, and discard them face up to activate characters. When a character is activated with an action token, you can take one action with the activated character. You can move, attack an enemy with close or ranged combat, use a special ability, or pass/forfeit the action.

After all action tokens have been drawn, you recover any action tokens from the exhausted action token area, then place the newly discarded action tokens in the exhausted area. This means that the action tokens you most recently activated won't be available to you until after the next round. Also, the discarded and exhausted tokens are face up, so if you're paying attention you can plan accordingly.

For What Remains: Blood on the Rails

This chit-pull system not only has you thinking carefully every turn about which tokens to place in the bag, but it can be incredibly suspenseful as you draw the tokens out of the bag to activate them. This is one of the elements of For What Remains that reminds me of War Chest.

Let's delve into actions a bit starting with movement. When you move a character, you move a number spaces (orthogonally or diagonally) equal to or less than their Move attribute. The battleground mats feature a variety of terrain types (difficult, water, elevated, and blocking) which are represented well graphically, so it's easy to differentiate them. Different terrain types will impact movement, e.g., you need to use 2 Move to enter difficult and water terrain.

When it comes to attacking, there's ranged combat and close combat, and in both cases, you'll be rolling d10s — which I find to be exciting and fun, but I know some people would feel the exact opposite about it. When you're adjacent to an enemy character, you can use close combat to attack. When you're further away, you can make ranged combat attacks at a distance equal to or less than your character's weapon range and if you have line of sight. Different terrain types can impact line of sight when attacking. The rulebook includes plenty of excellent, helpful examples for players to grasp and internalize the line of sight rules.

To fire an attack, you roll a number of dice equal to your ranged combat value or close combat value, and if at least one die rolled is higher than the target's defense value, the target is injured.

Each character counter has a healthy (front) or injured (back) state. Characters start healthy, so if they are hit from an attack, they flip over and become injured. Then, if they are hit again when injured, the character counter is removed from the game. Veteran and Elite characters start stacked (i.e., a Veteran counter is stacked on a Recruit counter, an Elite counter is stacked on Veteran and Recruit counters), so when they lose a counter, they level down and get weaker skillwise, but stay alive to fight another day.

Abomination healthy (left), injured (right)

If you do lose a Recruit token, it can be brutal since that character is completely out of the game, which likely helps your opponent with their victory condition and it also reduces the number of action tokens you can put in the action bag since you use one per character on the board. Ouch! It's not the end of the world, though, as the game hooks you up with a consolation prize as a catch-up mechanism. Whenever a character is defeated, you gain access to a special one-time use faction action token that you can use to activate any character you wish when it's drawn from the action bag. The faction action token really comes in handy and gives you a lot of flexibility, especially when you're down a character.

Maybe you don't want to move or do a basic ol' ranged or close combat and seeking a slightly juicier action. Each character has special abilities you can also activate as an action. These abilities vary from character to character, so I'll mention a few examples. The Medic has a Medkit ability that can flip an adjacent allied human character counter or her own counter from injured to healthy. The Mindbender has a Telepathy ability that allows him to give an allied character within weapon range a free, immediate close combat, ranged combat, or move action. The Tempest has a Rubble Runner ability that lets him move through difficult terrain and water terrain with no increase to the Move cost.

There are also some characters, like Inferno, who have cool, special weapons. Inferno has a Flamethrower ability that it must use when making ranged combat attacks, and it makes its ranged combat attacks hit all space touching the Flamethrower template.

Inferno's Flamethrower (Combine faction)

There are lots of unique abilities, along with some overlap here and there, where another character in a different faction might have a slightly similar ability. Nevertheless, the character special abilities add a lot of spice to the game and there's plenty of variety in the abilities and characters that is not only fun, but gives you lots of options strategically, and also adds to the replay value.

You continue playing round after round until one player wins the game by achieving the victory condition for the chosen scenario, or you can go with the default victory condition: first player to score 5 points or to defeat all enemy characters. You score a victory point for each scavenge token you possess and also for each character you defeat.

If you're interested in playing For What Remains solo, there's a fairly smooth AI activation system with three different difficulty levels. Each of the characters comes with an AI activation card that has orders you follow by rolling a die when it's activated. You randomly add a certain number of action tokens to the action bag for the AI faction based on the difficulty level. Unlike the regular rules, the AI action tokens are never exhausted, but instead, immediately shuffled back into the AI token supply after an AI character is activated. For skirmish games, I tend to prefer playing with a human opponent, but the solo system does work pretty well if that's your preference.

Regardless of whether you play solo or with two players, the campaign seems awesome for each game. There's a force roster chart for listing your characters, naming them, and tracking their progress throughout the campaign. After completing a scenario, you earn experience points equal to the number of skirmish points used in the scenario, and you can spend them to advance level-up your characters. Each campaign has five different scenarios, and you can dive into any of them, but if you want the full experience, you should play them in order, starting with Streets of Ruin, then moving to Blood on the Rails, and finishing with Out of the Basement.

For What Remains: Streets of Ruin solo game

I mainly played one-off scenarios from each book, but I would definitely like to try a full campaign sometime. I'm impressed with all the love and detail that went into the story and artwork. There's so much narrative all over this game, and it really soaks you in the theme. Kudos to David Thompson, Paul Low, and Ricardo Tomas, who served as a creative lead on the campaign's story.

I thoroughly enjoyed playing all three For What Remains games. The factions and characters are super cool and different, and I love the decision space when it comes to choosing your line-up of characters for a game and also deciding which action tokens to put in the action bag each round. The chit-pull system is great, and I love the element of suspense it brings, especially during tense moments during the game.

There's so much replay value in each game because of the modular board set-up and the options you have when selecting characters. For What Remains is also very accessible and plays in less than an hour. The rules are straightforward, and the rulebook has great examples when it comes to nailing down the line of sight rules, which we found hardest to learn initially.

I love the detailed artwork on the battleground mats and how much the modular set-up changes the feel of each game. I do wish the material was a bit heavier, though, since they sometimes slide out of place when you're moving your character counters around. It probably won't bother most people, but I can't help my OCD sometimes.

I like each game coming with two factions versus having a big super expensive game with all six factions. It allows players to choose their own adventure. You can try one game, then if you're stoked on it and looking for more, there's plenty more to explore with the other two games in the series. Plus, it's fun to mix and match factions and different battlegrounds for added variety...and of course, if you try one and find it's not your thing, there's no need to go all in.

After playing For What Remains, I'll be on the lookout for upcoming releases from David Thompson, and I can't wait to have some me time and delve into the Valiant Defense series when those games arrive!