The Witcher: Old World

I've never played any of the Witcher games nor read the books they're based on. By all accounts I would have skipped the board game based the IP if it weren't for the fact that CD Projekt RED partnered with Go On Board. The designer and developer has made other games, such as Valhalla, which is one of my husband's favorite games, and Titans, which I got because of Valhalla and thought it had a very solid design. Because they rely solely on crowdfunding, I approached this with the mindset that it would be harder to get after the campaign as it'll most likely be a one-print run.

The Witcher: Old World is a deck building game where you play as a young Witcher from one of the schools, set years before the game and books. Based on the card combo that they demoed in the videos during the campaign, it looked like a really fun design. So based on initial previews, the track record of the publisher, and a little bit of FOMO, I backed the campaign.

In this game, your deck is everything: you use it to explore the map, visiting locations for bonuses, and you use it for combat, acting as both your actions as well as your life. And the end of your turn you're always acquiring one card, so there's a linear progression of gaining strength by improving your deck over time. And as you gain trophies, you permanently remove cards from your deck, refining it for the combos and actions you actually want to execute.

The game accounts for this by having three tiers of monsters. When one is defeated, it gets replaced by the next higher tier, ramping up the difficulty. Players need to make preparations for when they feel they're strong enough to tackle a monster before another player takes the opportunity away from them. The game ends once a player earns 4 trophies, so it's pretty clear who has the lead and who is a threat to winning the game.

The game does have PvP built in, but its optional in some ways - as in players don't necessarily have to engage in PvP if they don't want to. Plus, the game mitigates beating down on each other too much as you can only get one trophy per other player. Besides, it could be at least interesting to see how your deck faces off against another witcher who's playing smartly, versus the random effects and damage that the PvE monsters do.

Probably one of the most enjoyable parts of this game is the storytelling, if you're not fighting a monster then usually you'll be doing a random story encounter. These snippets of story and lore help make the world of The Witcher come alive. Sure, they're essentially a large event deck with often binary choices, but they're well written and breathe life into an otherwise straight forward "go kill baddies here" game.

There were a plethora of expansions developed and produced as part of the crowdfunding campaign. Notably, the Mages one introduces 5 new playable characters that use entirely different cards and play mechanically a little different from the Witchers. With Wild Hunt it adds a full cooperative mode to the game, in case you want to work together against a common threat. There's plenty more that you can mix and match based on compatibility, but clearly the replayability and modularity is there and almost all of it can fit in the single big box solution.

There are a few downsides to the game though. For one, it can play very long. If players aren't actively driving towards getting trophies, then there's really no pressure to just meander around the map, ramping up in strength, and do the story encounters. Finding certain rules in the rule book can be hard, trying to hunt down the one instance of where it mentions something across the different sections and pages. I would also say its hard to get to the table due to there just being so much content in the big box - there's a lot to set up just to get started playing.

With all that, I will say that it does deliver a very well themed adventure game that you can play in one session. Compared to other fantasy exploration games, this one doesn't ask for you to have repeated play sessions to campaign through. Even though it looks like a ton to process, the overall breakdown of gameplay is simple enough to pick up and run with. When you can get it to the table, I think it offers up a good time.