Review of Nuka Notebook

Blurb from the publisher: 'These officially licensed notebooks are great accessories for Fallout: Wasteland Warfare tabletop gamers and Fallout lovers alike. They include settlement play pages for easy logging of campaigns in the game, plus plenty of lined, plain and squared paper with various Fallout designs to keep a record of all your wasteland adventures.

The Nuka Cola version of the notebook features Fallout's iconic Nuka Cola girl in classic pin up style, in two different poses on the front and back, along with the usual authentic wasteland ageing.'

What you get: Your EUR 14,59 or USD 15,97 or GBP 12,99 will buy you the Nuka Notebook for use with the Fallout: Wasteland Warfare game line. This is literally a 160-page hardcover notebook at a size of almost 15 x 22 cm.

This is not the first notebook that Modiphius publishes; the Vampire: The Masquerade Notebook and the John Carter of Mars: Prince of Helium Notebook are just two examples.

The notebook has five different entries of 32 pages each, the first two of which are the game's settlement sheet. There are no rules or any other pre-recorded entry in the item. The cover art features the Nuka Cola pin-up girl. On the cover page she wears something that resembles a uniform (as impractical as a two-part, tank-top uniform with fishing boots and high heels would have been). On the back page she can be seen in a typical pin-up pose, where the impracticality of her uniform and the depths of her cleavage can be better observed. Every piece of equipment she wears or holds (oxygen tanks in the first image, a zap pistol in the second) are curve-related with a strong retro feel. As expected, these items are strongly reminiscent of Nuka Cola bottles.

An attached rubber band helps keep the notebook closed. The notebook boasts an integrated royal red cloth bookmark.

Out of each 32 pages 2 are those of the settlement sheet, 5 are squared, 5 are blank, while the remaining are lined. These are spread out through each entry; after every six lined pages you will encounter a square and a blank page respectively. The paper is matte as expected in a notebook, while the background is greyish. The notebook boasts of fake stains, even though they are not of the same style and effect as those on the V:tM Notebook.

Seeing how this is literally a notebook, no pdf version of the item exists.

The strong points: Fallout: Wasteland Warfare might not be primarily a roleplaying game, it is however close enough to one in order for the notebook concept to work well. If you enjoy the game and its campaign aspect, it is by far preferable to keep note of what transpires in a cool, thematically appropriate notebook, than on the blank back sides of your utility bills.

The production values are very high; this is in fact an eye-catching notebook. Its pages are not white, but greyish. The blank page is always adorned by the ever-smiling and thumbs-up Vault Boy, while the emblem of Nuka Cola figures prominently once every four pages, both inside a cap, as well as in the form of a rocket-shaped bottle. This is by far the most thematically immersive approach I have encountered in the three Modiphius notebooks I have examined up to now. Content is there, as it was expected. The notebook allows you to better organize and access the information that relates to your campaign's escapades. The layout obviously took adventuring and the need to draw or map into account. The rubber band ensures that all its information remains safe when you don't use it, while the classy bookmark makes the notebook stand out.

In the V:tM Notebook review I compared that item to antecessor concepts like the HackMaster Player Character Records. The Modiphius' Notebook won hands down, and everything I wrote there is valid here up to the last t and dotted i. The notebook doesn't force entries you might never need thus it doesn't waste your space. It is compact and not rulebook-sized. It is hardcover and not softcover, thus it can take quite a beating when you transport it.

The best part about this Fallout Notebook is that if you don't like it, there is another one on offer. You read that right: If you don't like the red Nuka Cola girl on the cover, you can opt for the blue Vault Tec girl. The contents of the two rulebooks are identical; it is only the cover that changes.

The weak points: This is a notebook with a Fallout theme. It is nothing more than that. It does not contain any new gaming material, and nothing links it expressly to the game except from its cover art and the character sheets. Having said that, I can already hear Statler and Waldorf heckling from the gallery. 'What do you mean 'nothing more than that?' That's a big deal already!'. In many ways, this is true. This is an official Fallout product that some of us will enjoy irrespective of its links to a boardgame. In fact, out of the three notebooks Modiphius has published up to now, this is probably the only one that could potentially sell itself as a pure-bread notebook without any links to a game. Cool aesthetics tend to have that effect.

Depending on the depth of your note-taking, thirty-two pages might or might not be enough for the kind of campaign that your group is running. The obvious solution is to expand into the next 32-page entry, even though this means that your will get less use out of the notebook in the long term.

A side-effect of keeping all your notes together in one place means that if you misplace or otherwise damage the book (e.g. by spilling a drink on it), you might risk losing all of them. A bit of attention and you will do fine.

I really like Fallout's artwork, this doesn't mean however that it might not raise some eyebrows here and there. The thematically pertinent girl with the high heels and the voluptuous curves pays a gorgeous tribute to all the retro sci-fi clichés from the 1960s. Some however might perceive this imagery as tone deaf, with all the gratuitous cleavage and the suggestive posing. Just look at the cover; you will instantly know whether the image is good for you. If it isn't, that's what the Vault girl is here in the second notebook from the line. She not any less pretty mind you; it's just that the image as much a tribute to socialist realism as it is to pin-up girls.

Conclusion: The Fallout: Wasteland Warfare Nuka Notebook is an artifact that every Fallout lover needs to have. It doesn't even matter whether you actually play Wasteland Warfare in miniature or RPG form, if you limit yourself to the computer game, or if you even play the other Fallout board game out there. The cover's images smell as much of the wasteland as they do of the 1960s, and that's all one needs to buy it.

For more info on the Nuka Notebook and the Fallout: Wasteland Warfare game line overall, visit the Modiphius Entertainment website at http://www.modiphius.com.

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