Rise of the Wastelands

Elznir Games · 2025

Translation, English to German

Many designers have tried their hand at putting the 4X genre – eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate – on boardgamers’ tables over the years. Some have managed to do a nice job, but games like Twilight Imperium or Voidfall can’t help putting off more casual gamers with their complexity or the sheer amount of time required to play. Rise of the Wastelands, or RotW for short, attempts to boil down the essence of the 4X genre somewhat by providing a kind of condensed version of all four Xs. The map isn’t huge, there are an easily overseeable number of different units and buildings, and the rules governing the available actions are simple and straightforward. Once players have the rules more or less down, a session can be finished in under two hours. None of this means that the game is dumbed down or boring. Gathering the required resources to advance your technologies can be quite challenging, weighing what you have against what you want often requires foregoing one or the other, there’s an action point economy to manage that rewards planning ahead, and player factions come with asymmetrical abilities. The victory condition is very original, requiring players to complete missions (called achievements here) that will let them place influence tokens on their opponents’ player boards, with tokens distributed deciding the winner. In what I thought was a nice twist, it’s more or less impossible to win the game simply through military dominance. If you don’t go after all 4 Xs, you’ll end up falling behind. I translated this entirely in its native layout, which was both fun and once again taught me a thing or two about using InDesign (don’t mess with cutout positions in files for double-layered boards!). Getting German text to fit where there was English text before is also almost a puzzle game in and of itself. The game’s post-apocalyptic setting, short fluff texts on the leader boards, and many card and ability names gave me a nice opportunity to think up flavourful translations.