Halo Flashpoint is a brilliant tabletop adaptation of Bungie and Halo Studios’ phenomenal multiplayer series. Following the board game’s ODST expansion last year, the tabletop game is now receiving a Halo: Reach themed expansion in the form of Noble Team.
Alongside bringing the entirety of Noble Team to the tabletop game—Carter, Cat, Jun, Emile, Jorge, and Six—the new expnasion also comes with the arrival of Big Team Battle, an expanded game mode for Flashpoint that feature more units and a double-mat game size for players to duke it out on.
Speaking to FRVR, Mantic Games’ Dan Mapleston explains that the new Noble Team expansion was developed with assistance from the newly-rebranded Halo Studios. “The team at Halo Studios are fantastic partners, know the whole brand inside-out,” Mapleston says, “and are a great help in making sure we can really nail the look and feel of how characters come to life in miniature form.”
Halo Flashpoint’s Halo Reach expansion is available to pre-order now for $89/£69, and ships at the end of April. However, Mantic explains that creating an expansion like this requires around a year of development. “There’s sculpting, mould-making, rules, play-testing, graphics layout and plenty more before manufacturing can begin – and then we need to ship it all around the world,” they told us.
With the arrival of Big Team Battle, Mantic has put a lot of work into keeping that feeling of Flashpoint’s frenetic arena fights into a bigger play area, just like how the video games need to balance for both arena and large-scale fights as well.
“The Big Team Battle scenarios with Noble Team are designed for double-mat games, so twice the size of the combat zones players have experienced so far,” Mapleston explained. “Naturally, you’ll command more units for these big games, and we have special scenarios to dive into – from Strongholds, to Extraction, to a special scenario where both sides race to score points in a central area before a heavy bombardment from a UNSC vessel hits…expect a heavy dose of risk-reward gameplay with that one!
Additionally, for the release of the series’ beloved characters, Mantic opted for MasterCraft resin, the same material used for the hero characters (Buck and Dare) for the game’s ODST expansion as “it’s great for capturing crisp details and accurately replicating different surface textures”. While the team will continue to create plastic models for other releases, Mapleston explains “this is the material we now turn to when we want something extra-special for painters and collectors”.
As for what that future entails, Mantic tells us that there are “more releases coming for both the UNSC and Banished factions, with more planned for the future”. Additionally, the team isn’t limiting itself just to multiplayer game modes from the Slayer sandbox in Halo. Could this mean a version of Firefight could come to the game? Maybe!
With Halo now approaching its 25th anniversary later this year—check out our Red vs Blue interview for more about that—Mapleston confirmed that there are some exciting plans for additional Flashpoint releases. With the tabletop game already proving popular—Flashpoint was ranked the #4 miniatures game in a recent US survey amongst retailers and distributors—Mantic is hoping to further increase the game’s popularity with even more content.
“We have an ambitious schedule of fantastic Halo Flashpoint releases still to be revealed for this anniversary year, as well as new ways to play, exciting new faction rules and other game updates,” he tells us. “Plus, of course we always love welcoming new faces into both the game and the awesome global player community.”
As someone who adores Halo, Flashpoint is a genuinely amazing recreation of the pulse-pounding arena fights of Halo: Infinite multiplayer. I didn’t think it was possible until I tried it, but Flashpoint is hands-down my favourite tabletop game, largely because Halo is my favourite video game series.
Unfortunately, Mapleston didn’t explain what exactly we’ll be seeing from Flashpoint in the future. Could we see a Flood faction? Maybe new designs of Blue Team to tie in with Halo: Campaign Evolved? Whatever we see, judging by what’s already been released, it will be fantastic.
