The XCOM Miniatures Game was one of the least expected yet coolest announcements of 2026, a brand new miniature wargame from UK firm Modiphius, based on Firaxis’ hit turn-based strategy game. Modiphius has a proven track record making great miniatures based on videogame franchises including Fallout and Mass Effect, and the game engine is an evolution of the excellent PVE system Five Parsecs from Home – promising stuff. I interviewed Modiphius’ CEO Chris Birch to learn what fans of the game should expect.
Alex Evans: We’re two months on since the pre-orders for XCOM went live – what has fan reception been like?
Chris Birch: Great, four times bigger than the next biggest thing we had going on that month! It was even bigger than we thought… we’ve done a lot of resin miniatures in the past, we know how to make lots of resin, beautiful resin, and so we were planning to do a big, big resin rollout. And then [demand] was so big, we were like, “We better do plastics because there’s no way we’re going to be able to make enough resin for this level [of demand].
So we went and talked to the guys at Archon Studios. They could quickly take our STL files and prep them for plastic, and thank God it worked, and they didn’t have to make loads of changes, and they could do it when we needed to, in between the huge piles of Starcraft.
Where did you start with XCOM?
CB: Laser Squad, which is the old Spectrum game [that Julian Gollop made before XCOM], I played that one to death. I think we had to get a replacement Spectrum because we played it so much! That turned me on to proper turn based tactics. And then really it was rediscovering it with XCOM Enemy Unknown, thinking “Oh my god, the graphics look amazing now, this is how you do turn-based games”.
When did Modiphius first seriously start planning an XCOM game?
CB: Oh, maybe eight, nine years ago. I spoke to 2k at the time. “Hey, what about doing XCOM?” And they were like, “Nah, not interested”. Then I think we got Star Trek, and I tried again, and they were like, “No, too busy”. It’s always the way of these things, people change, or the business decisions change.
We were working with Gearbox on the Home World board game, and then 2K bought Gearbox, and then a lot of the Gearbox licensing team joined their team. Suddenly I knew everyone. , “So, can we talk about XCOM again?” And they were like, “Yeah, sure”. But it was still a good 18 months of [asking] “How about this? What if we do it this way?”
Modiphius makes a lot of licensed titles – what’s it like working with videogame companies?
CB: Video games companies, they’re not sitting around waiting to approve great ideas for board games and role-playing games. They are busy making video games that make 100 times more money than we can ever possibly offer them. Even if we have a $10 million Kickstarter, that pays them a minimal amount of money. It’s a bit like going, “Look, I know you’ve got a video game to do, and you’re already working really long hours, but do you mind reading this 300 page book as an editor and give detailed comments if it’s wrong?” It just doesn’t work sometimes.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, we eventually got the deal. They’re wonderful people, they’ve been ever so helpful. Firaxis approved the manuscript in a week, they approved the layout in a week. They got it. They want all the toys – the whole company wants copies of the models because this was one of their big games to start with. So they’ve been really amazing at supporting what we’re doing.
The rules
Who designed the rules for the XCOM Miniatures Game?
CB: They’re designed by Ivan Sorensen, the wonderful creator of the Five Parsecs Games. He’s done a brilliant job, and we continue to bounce mad ideas off each other. We’re currently working on the next book in the Five Leagues range. We are also currently working on a big, big secret licensed product – actually, two! There’s two big secret licensed versions of Five Parsecs…
Does the gameplay really match up to the videogame?
CB:I think it’s just the right side of close enough, because any closer, and you might as well go and play the video game. When you’re doing a game like this, what you want is: ‘does it feel like XCOM?’ Not, ‘does it replicate XCOM?’ Does it feel like Overwatch matters? Does it feel like I get screwed if I don’t use cover? Are the aliens assholes? Absolutely, they’re going to get you every time, especially those damn chrysalids.
How much have you simplified things to make them work on the tabletop?
CB: People always have an argument about, “Why don’t you put this rule in?” or “There’s not enough abilities for the characters”. It’s not a roleplaying game, it’s a war game. We don’t have a huge ability tree for each class. We drilled down [to find] the one ability that defines the class, and we made a call on that. You’re controlling six operatives on the table, so it has to be streamlined enough that you can remember their special ability, plus they’ve all got attributes, and different weapons, that’s already quite a lot to manage.
So it’s this tricky balance. How far do we have to go for it to feel like XCOM? Do I get to feel like I did some base building? I don’t want to make XCOM the accountancy game, or XCOM the base construction simulation. That’s in the video game and it’s really good [there], but in our game, you come out of a mission, you get to pick a building to make, you don’t have to worry about how many resources you’ve got. You get to pick some research, you can use alien resources to make stuff, but it’s fairly straightforward.
What I love is complexity in decision making, not in mechanics. So you’ve got lots of complex decisions to make that are interesting. that make you really think “Oh, if I built this, I’d be able to get the nanoweave armor, but if I did this one, I could get the laser weapons, and oh, but wait! If I do this…” Interesting choices that are going to make you sit up in the middle of the night, go “Yes, I’m going to have lasers for my entire squad!” And then you die horribly.
So fewer choices, and less record keeping?
CB: Fewer, more interesting choices. You don’t need all the resources to have the feeling of managing a base. We didn’t want to tie people up into a complex web of tech and resources and stuff. We stripped the tech trees right down and simplified unlocks. In an ideal world, you want to be able to play a little mission, do a campaign turn, and get on and do another mission, maybe in the same night.
So with those changes, how well does it match up to the brutality of an XCOM campaign?
CB: If people don’t know, the XCOM Miniatures Game is based on Five Parsecs from Home, which is a procedurally generated solo or co-op miniatures game. You have a crew of six characters, the crew of a ship. You’ll go into frontier towns, each character does a different thing – gets trained, searches for clues, jobs, goes to the bar, and gets to roll on all sorts of random tables and all sorts of bonkers random stuff emerges that tends to form the story. And then you do a battle, and you come back, you get some gear and you do it again, but this storyline emerges as you go. But it’s hard, you will lose characters, and that’s part of the story.
XCOM [the videogame] did that in spades, you had to be prepared to lose your characters. I remember reading about someone who said they renamed everyone a number so that they didn’t feel so terrible when number seven died. We’ve baked that in. It is hard. The council morale is a ticking clock against you, you’ve got to keep that just above the threshold. The months are going to tick on, and the aliens are going to get harder. And if you don’t keep up with your tech, if you aren’t unlocking the better weapons and whatever tech strategy you want…
There’s also milestones, when you kill your first alien, when you capture an alien, which are all part of various missions that you’ll do, and they’re gradually pushing you forward towards the scripted battles. There’s the point where the aliens will come and attack your base, there’s the final battle with the uber Ethereal.
We’ve got some dials in the game, so you can dial up the difficulty, you can go really hard. Or there’s a few little things you can do just to ease off, so you don’t feel so much under pressure to deliver. Some people just want to play a few games and bounce around and see their guys improve and stuff. But it will punish stupidity.
What doesn’t the game do very well?
CB: If you’re looking for a hardcore tournament game that you’re going to be playing in competitive matches, I don’t think this is the game, there’s actually three ways to play like that. You could have a points game, but that points game hasn’t been tested to death. It’s what the designers know as fair points, but it’s not designed to be a tournament game. It’s designed to be a pick up and play. This will give you a roughly matched battle. But we’re not trying to design Necromunda or Kill Team.
What’s it like playing as the aliens?
CB: Depends how much you want to punish your friend because the aliens are, in a sense, a lot more powerful. If you’re playing the campaign game, you get to choose what the aliens will do. You get more freedom about where your aliens are going to go, and you’re not rolling dice to see how they move. You’re not having to follow their AI mechanics, so you can be a lot more evil, which makes it a lot more fun.
What do you think the game does best?
CB: It makes you feel like you’re playing XCOM! I played a battle the other day with this child of a friend of ours who’s 12 and didn’t know what XCOM was at all, no idea. But I was like, okay, it’s aliens, it’s marines, it’s a pretty familiar feeling, right? And I was like “It might be hard, so just so you’re aware, we’re probably going to lose some of our guys”. All this was before I had any miniatures. I’ve got a massive bucket of the green aliens from Fallout, so I just grabbed a big bag full. I had the crashed UFO from Fallout.
I think I ended up having to put a dozen sectoids on the map, and we were surrounded in this street. It was a Sky Ranger Down mission. And we had some downed characters, and all hell broke loose, and you know those painful moments where you just have to press pause and take a deep breath and have tea and go, right, let’s do this… it was like that.
For the benefit of newcomers to single-player wargaming, how does the enemy AI work?
CB: Each mission has a slight different tweak to the way the aliens work, and different aliens have different, very simple hooks. For example, the Thin Men tend to turn up above you, around you, like they’re really sneaky. But we didn’t need to create a rule for how they move, they just appear there, they tend to teleport to pieces of terrain that are above you or behind you. That’s quite a simple rule that feels like Thin Men, but we don’t need complicated mechanics for how they got there in the first place.,
If you’ve got four or five different types of aliens on the table, the last thing you want is for each to have a page of rules. We’ve tried to keep it that they have one or two simple abilities that replicate what those aliens do in the game, and they’ll try and do them to you multiple times, again and again, until you’re dead.
What options are there for players who want to play larger games with more minis?
CB: That’s me! I just want to have all the models on the table, I don’t want to limit it. So there’s this platoon war mode where you and I could have a campaign running each, and I go, “hey Alex, this weekend you want to come over and join my campaign? You bring your squad as they are, and you join my squad as they are”. It could be at different points of the campaign, but we’re playing my battle, and then obviously it dials up the difficulty. There’s a lot more aliens, there’s a lot more spawns, a lot more stuff going on.
Release dates
How close to print is the rulebook?
CB: It’s not gone to print yet. Firaxis have seen the book – there’s a bunch of new art that they’d already approved. This is the last chance to spot anything. We’ve had a load of errata in from fans who got the pre-order, been reading the PDF to death, have sent us pages and pages of comments, design ideas. Hopefully we’ve caught pretty much all of them.
That’s a big benefit of having such a passionate community behind it. We’re just waiting to go to print now once Firaxis sign it off, and then the books will ship out to people who pre-ordered the resin sets along with the resin product around November time. And then the hard plastic all ships in January.
Do any particular sculptors get credit for the designs?
CB: We’ve got quite a big sculpting team, everyone’s been contributing to it. If you look at our credits, we usually have a block of credits for everyone who worked specifically on the game, but then we do the entire company credits because the the people who paid the invoices and booked the payments, and the people who did the social media posts and made the videos and booked the logistic shipments, you would not have got your toys without them. So we try and make sure everyone’s got a credit in there because I think it’s really important that we recognize that there’s so many people. We’ve got about 70, 80 people in the business who at some point touch these books or toys that are going to get into your hands.
But the sculptors that particularly worked on XCOM are Joanna Abbott, Ben de Bosdari, José Luis Roig, Doug Hamilton, Sean Bullough, Alex Edinger, Francesca Orrù, and War Cradle Studios helped as well.
That’s interesting, Warcradle are another UK miniature game design studio.
CB: They love XCOM so much, they were like, please, please, please, can we do something? John Webb, who runs our 3d team, got them involved. Enemy Unknown was a massive upgrade in graphics [compared to the original X-COM], but now looking back, for what we do with miniatures now, they’re quite low detail. So we actually had to add a bit of detail to everything. The team have done Fallout and Mass Effect and Skyrim, they’re very good at interpreting older video game characters, so they did a fantastic job.
Then we’ve got a really great internal painting team. Callum France, Amy Snuggs, and Rosie Williams did beautiful paint jobs on the miniatures that really brought them to life. For the art of the book we took the 3d sculpts, and Christian Quino, our artist, painted them digitally to look like the painted miniatures, and then put those into 3d scenes that he’d created, outside a burning warehouse or a farm or whatever, and we created artwork scenes like that. Initially they were too nice! We went back and added more brushstrokes and filters, you don’t want it to look like a video game.
The invasion timeline that you put out in August is basically your roadmap for the pre-order stuff to ship out, and the new releases to come out month by month?
CB: If you pre-ordered the resins, you get them before Christmas. If you’ve ordered the HIPS [High Impact Polystytrene], then you get it in January.
The big retail launch in February is basically the rulebook, the card pack – just some nice reference cards which have got all the stats on one card – and the first three core miniature sets. That’s the Operative set, Alien set one – which is sectoids, sectoid commander, thin men, and an outsider – and alien set two – chrysalids, seekers, and floaters. We’ve also got some infection pods coming,the pods that you see at the beginning of the game. They don’t do anything, but if you imagine any modern day scenery you’ve got, put down a couple of infection pods in the street, suddenly it’s clearly XCOM.
Then we hit March, and that’s the first of the new stuff. There’s the Veteran Operator set – you’ve got a sniper in Archangel armor, a heavy in Titan armor, and so on. There’s about six veterans, including the psionic armor. There’s actually tweak [to the timeline]. Alien Set Three is now coming in March, because I know people are going to be desperate by then to get the new aliens. That gives you the mutons, cyber disc, and drones as well. Alongside that, in March we’ve got some UFO objectives, [based on consoles and power consoles from inside alien UFOs].
May has the tracked SHIV, and you get three optional turrets with it. There’s the good old Mechtoid, and the Mech Trooper with some arm options, some different gun options as well. So that’s heavy duty reinforcements. And May has alien set four: the Muton berserker, the Muton elite, a couple of heavy floaters, and an ethereal.
Then June will be the really big Sectopod, and then the Hover-SHIV, again with three turret options. And then lastly there’s the Exalt – I think it’s a squad of five Exalt, a bit of a mirror of the operative squad. They’re the Elite Exalt versions, which have got combat vests over their shirt and tie.
I noticed the scenarios in the book already involve aliens that won’t have miniatures until later in the year.
CB: The gameplay [is split into game months], and we’ve tried to line up the product releases [to match that]. If you’re playing a few missions every month, and each real world month you were moving on a [game] month, then roughly speaking, the miniatures are going to line up with that.
When you play the video game, you start to see different aliens cycle in [and out]. The game does differ a little bit – if you don’t have an alien, then the game defaults down to the next [on the spawn list]. If all your mutons are on the table, have you got some sectoids? Great, use those.
How important is terrain in the game? There’s none in the starter bundle!
CB: You definitely need terrain because it’s a skirmish game, you need stuff that breaks up line of sight. You don’t want it to be rammed, you don’t want to be fighting in a car park. But you do want to have stuff that breaks up the line of sight so that you’ve got a chance to move and get into cover.
If you’re a board gamer you might have some Zombicide tiles, which are streets and buildings. You might have some modern day role playing tile packs. If you’re into modern day war gaming it’s easy to find street buildings, street furniture. Toy cars are dirt cheap. There are lots of maps of buildings that you can download and print off.
So it’s very easy to get started with terrain – you don’t need to do much to see if it’s something you enjoy. Just a street with cars and a few buildings is a great way to get going.
Some of your Fallout range is going to be transferable
CB: Oh yeah, and then also you’ve got people like Battle Systems that do a great plug together modern day town center. You’ve got Monster Fight Club that do really amazing cyberpunk. There’s loads of stuff that you can 3d print at the moment for modern day buildings. I’ve seen people use a Cylon Raider as their crashed UFO, a Fallout crashed UFO, an X-wing, and all sorts of stuff people have been using as their Sky Rangers.
We are looking at making a UFO, but that would be huge. So we’re exploring with Archon whether we can make a sprue that’s effectively a quarter of a small UFO with the curved plastic screen… if you get four of those, you’ve got a whole UFO. Or maybe you only need half because it’s going to be like half buried in the ground. It’s not easy, it’s going to take some time.
A Sky Ranger’s on the list [to make] as well but it’s a big box, so if we make that in resin, you’ll have to take out a mortgage. So we’re looking at doing it in FDM, or maybe as STL files.
Future releases
Are you considering going broader or deeper with your releases?
CB: Potentially, because it’s done so well. There’s only so much in the timeline. Would we do something with a gene modded trooper? We had to make choices about what the veterans are wearing, so we’ll be looking at doing other poses as well to give people more options. There’s some characters in the XCOM base that might be quite fun. There’s a couple of NPCs like Shen that you know might be interesting, if we can find the right – like, why do you need them?
The idea is that there’s no more rules coming. This is one of the things I think people kind of missed with the pre-order. They were like, “Why is the getting started bundle so expensive?” Because it’s not a 40 page rulebook, we’re giving you the entire rule book for the whole range, this is a full hardback 288 page rulebook.
Now it might be that, if we release some of the characters, we might build them into a fun PDF mission, or some scripted missions. But there won’t be any rules that you have to pay for going forward until we get to XCOM 2 – assuming that happens.
Once we get closer to the Exalt we’ll look at how the line’s performing. Usual boring commercial decisions; if it’s incredibly popular, if we can build a community around it, if people really get excited about it, there’s definitely going to be more stuff.
Speaking of XCOM 2…
CB: You could say that we probably should have started with XCOM 2 because it would have been even bigger. XCOM 2 is bonkers big, there’s still thousands of people playing it on Steam. It’s the one that people mod and meme. We wanted to start with XCOM Enemy Unknown because that’s where the story started. I’m always about the story, and I think it lays the foundation.
If Firaxis like what we’ve done – they seem to be happy so far, but assuming they stay happy – the plan would be to move on and do XCOM 2 with all the knowledge behind us. I think there would have been bigger bucks if we’d done XCOM 2 first, but we want to do it justice when we get to it.
Chris, thank you for your time.
CB: Cheers.
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Source: Wargamer
