If you’re a fan of dungeon crawler board games, cyberpunk, or sci-fi miniatures, you should check out Ozob. The project is already fully funded on Gamefound, and promises cooperative action against the megacorps with 48 highly detailed miniatures.
Ozob is the first board game from the Brazilian team Nonsense Creations. The group has actually spent eighteen years making the popular Brazilian podcast ‘Nerdcast’, and Ozob’s setting and campaign is based on a three part cyberpunk actual play RPG that ran on the channel – though you’ll need to speak Portuguese to understand that original adventure!
As with all the best board games crowdfunders (or at least, the ones that blast through their funding goals the quickest), Ozob is absolutely packed with miniatures. The base set has six heroes, six chunky bosses, and then a stack of mooks ranging from soldiers to robot dogs to hovering gun drones.
A pledge for the base game costs $119 plus shipping, and is expected to deliver in March 2026. There are, of course, options to spend a lot lot more, buying additional expansions with yet more minis. You can back the campaign on Gamefound here. The campaign runs until 8pm PST / 11pm ET on March 31, or 4am BST on April 1.
Having a fat stack of miniatures doesn’t necessarily make something into one of the best strategy board games – often they’re totally irrelevant to the gameplay – but dungeon crawlers have a good justification for including them. Moving your hero around the board and knocking down the baddies just feels more fun when all the characters are characterful 3D models, not flat discs.
In Ozob, each character has a unique set of attributes and a deck of character cards which can boost their performance for the turn. This has a push-your-luck element. You can draw as many of these cards as you like, but some of them have crosses marked on them, which will cause damage to your character.
It’s a good thematic fit for a genre that’s all about people pushing themselves to self destruction in pursuit of their dreams. Particularly when the title character is a clown with a grenade for a nose.
Ozob comes with ten missions that you can tackle as standalone adventures, or in three short campaigns. The first mission of the game is available to play for free on Tabletop Simulator, and you can watch a playthrough with the creators here, to get a sense for what it’s like.
The challenge that all dungeon crawler board games face is persuading fans of the genre not to just play more Frosthaven (or indeed Gloomhaven). Ozob at least offers a very different theme and an impressive selection of minis.
If you somehow haven’t checked out Gloom- or Frosthaven yet, our Gloomhaven review and Frosthaven review are each based on a frankly silly number of hours played.
Source: Wargamer
