Tabletop Gaming
The world of tabletop gaming has never been more diverse, but the language we use to describe it hasn’t kept up. While terms like “board games” and “TTRPGs” (tabletop roleplaying games) are well understood and help clarify their unique spaces, there’s a growing genre of games that still doesn’t have a proper label.
Board gamers and RPG players aren’t the issue—if anything, they’ve done a good job of adapting language to fit the medium. TTRPG, for example, expands on RPG to distinguish between pure theatre-of-the-mind experiences and those that involve minis, terrain, or battlemaps.
The real confusion comes from the wargaming side of the hobby.
The term “Warhammer hobby” is a deliberate piece of branding. It turns a broad, diverse hobby into a single-brand experience, implying that painting, modeling, and playing skirmish games all revolve around Games Workshop. But in practice, even devoted Warhammer fans use third-party paints, tools, and miniatures. Reducing the entire hobby to a corporate label doesn’t just erase that variety—it’s a marketing move designed to make one company synonymous with the medium itself.
Wargaming, as it’s traditionally defined, is usually broken into muliple scale categories: such as mass battle games and skirmish games. But this scale division overlooks an another type—one that borrows elements from both wargaming and RPGs, yet is distinctly its own thing.
“Narrative wargaming” is sometimes used to describe this space. The term likely comes from historical wargaming, where players re-enact famous battles. In a fictional context, it refers to scenario-based play drawn from books, movies, or custom-written missions. While that’s close, it still doesn’t capture the full scope of what these games offer.
There’s a specific kind of skirmish game that emphasizes ongoing progression, emergent storytelling, and persistent consequences. Characters level up. Injuries linger. Loot is found. Missions unfold across linked scenarios. There’s tactical combat, yes—but also downtime mechanics, random events, and evolving threats. These systems often include solo or cooperative play, procedural generation, and story arcs with tangible effects on gameplay.
They aren’t RPGs, because they don’t require character immersion or open-ended dialogue. They aren’t traditional wargames, because the focus isn’t on list-building or competitive balance.
This hybrid space needed a name. Ivan Sorensen, creator of Five Parsecs from Home, gave it one.
Tabletop Adventure Games
Tabletop Adventure Games are campaign-based skirmish games that blend elements of wargames and RPGs—but are neither. They feature miniatures, tactical combat, and progression over linked scenarios, usually with loot and story events. They also typically include tracking experience (xp) which is used to gain new abilities and money which is used to buy new gear. They might find new gear and relics along the way but also might gain permanent injuries.
Examples include Five Parsecs from Home, Five Leagues from the Borderlands, Forbidden Psalm, Stargrave, and Frostgrave. Also, almost every game published by Black Site Studios such as Don’t Look Back, Hametsu, Lunar, and Violent Dark.
These games focus on adventure and narrative-driven play, without the open-ended roleplay of RPGs or the army-scale tactics of traditional wargames.
This category of game continues to grow, both in popularity and creativity. And it deserves a name that reflects what it actually is.
Tabletop Adventure Games offer structure, story, and strategy in equal measure. They’re built for those who want to see their warbands evolve over time, face meaningful choices, and carve out a narrative through gameplay. Whether it’s a crew of spacefarers, a band of fantasy mercenaries, or survivors in a haunted town—the experience is about the journey, not just the fight.
Let’s stop bending genre labels to make these games fit. They’re not skirmish wargames with extra rules. They’re not RPGs without a gamemaster.
They are Tabletop Adventure Games, and they finally have a name of their own.
I am an outdoorsy geek. Which is not rare at all. In fact, outdoorsy geeks are some of my favorite people 🙂