Scrolled the Front Page - Cattle Royale Boasts a Tabletop First

A new quick-fire, two-player game features a tabletop first - a paper cane scroll game board.

Cattle Royale, which pits two hyper-territorial cow herds against each other, is played on the lightweight, roll-up board, akin to a Chinese calendar.

This scroll adds a unique look to the game but also ties in with the Far East theming, which extends from the pun in the game title through to the natural materials of the cows and dice, as well as the plain but practical and structured nature of the box inlay.

While the scroll is certainly eye-catching, the game itself is also worthy of note. A stripped-back version of chess, with a few new twists such as Respawns (cow pieces that land on their opponents' Home row regenerate on their own) and Reinforcements (roll a 6 to add another of your cows - either an additional cow or a fallen cow - onto your Home row) to keep things interesting.

The result is a fast-paced game that can ebb and flow on the single roll of the dice. This was intentional, according to the developers, Robinson Games.

Simon Robinson, the elder partner in the father and son duo, said the origin of the game came from trying to 'fix' chess.

"My 11-year-old son Oliver, my Robinson Games partner, went through a phase of loving chess, during which time he'd play his younger brother Joshua, 8, often," he said.

"Unfortunately, owing to the age gap, Oliver would invariably win and Joshua would get upset. Additionally, Oliver wouldn't really enjoy his victory, neither of them got any better as a result of playing, and neither wanted to play again.

"I thought there must be a game that takes chess principles and makes it more of a level playing field - reliant on strategy as always, but adding a dice element to include probability and luck.

"This led us to Cattle Royale, which Oliver and I have refined until it's just right. The theming, and the unique scroll game board, are just the cherries on the top of what we believe is a really solid, simple and subtly strategic game that players of all ages will want to play multiple rounds of back to back and come back to over and over again."

Cattle Royale is available as a free to download print and play game via itch.io. A pre-launch campaign on Kickstarter is also available.