Toss some coins to your witchers
THE WITCHER: OLD WORLD
Designer: Łukasz Woźniak | Publisher: Go On Board, Cd Projekt Red
Centuries before Geralt of Rivia stabbed his first nekker, mutagen-enhanced witchers roamed the Continent doing what they did best: hunting monsters, quaffing potions, having testy encounters with the locals, gambling in pubs and occasionally beating the crap out of each other. All this is precisely what you’ll get up to in The Witcher: Old World, which, despite being co-produced by CD Projekt, ignores The White Wolf and his chums entirely, serving up five of its own monster-botherers for you to choose from.
Each witcher comes with their own player board and, in a nod to asymmetry, their own specialisation. You might be a School of the Wolf witcher, who excels in swordsmanship; or from the School of the Bear, giving you greater defensive capabilities. During the course of each game, you’ll be aiming to level up your special skill through training, along with the three basic stats of Combat, Defence and Alchemy. If you max out one of these stats, you earn a trophy card which awards you a bonus ability and provides an important step towards victory, as the winner is the first to claim your four trophies.
More usually, however, you’ll win trophies by killing monsters, with the process of tracking and attacking these beasties forming the meat of the action. The main board is dominated by a beautifully rendered map of the Continent, which you’ll traverse by playing Action cards. Primarily, these cards depict a combat manoeuvre, but they also show a terrain icon: mountain, forest, or water. This must match a connecting location in order for you to move there. On arriving, you’ll be able to perform an action specific to that location, such as boosting a stat (so long as it’s not already higher than your character’s overall level), gaining a potion, playing Poker Dice (a mini-game that’s basically Yahtzee) or tracking one of the three monsters on the map (a mini-quest that, once completed, will give you initiative for your next monster-scrap). Then you can either draw an encounter card – which provides a fun narrative vignette with an either/or option at the end– or attack another player who’s on the same space, or get stabby with a monster that might be lurking there.
Combat is one of The Old World’s most satisfying elements, relying on chaining combos with your cards, a la Tainted Grail. Each kind of Action card manoeuvre is colour coded; if a played card has a tab of the matching colour, you can connect it to form a combo. The more cards you chain, the more powerful the attack. Of course, it’s not totally random, as the mechanical core of the game is deckbuilding, meaning you should be constructing your deck to best optimise combo-creation. Your deck also represents your witcher’s life pool, so you must balance it being lean and effective with being thick enough to survive tougher fights. Each player’s deck is beefed up at the end of their turn, when they must choose a new card from the display, paying the relatively small cost in cards that would otherwise have been available for their movement phase next turn.
All the game’s mechanisms click together neatly, servicing the evocative and superbly illustrated theme. However, each three-phase player turn can really stretch on, leading to some unwelcome downtime and a play time that starts to feel gruelling at higher player counts; for all its plus points, it really is a cumbersome experience with four-plus participants. The flipside of that, however, is The Old World does make for a great one-shot-adventure solitaire game – even if it means you don’t get to beat up any other witchers.
DAN JOLIN
WE SAY
If you can swallow the length of the player turns, then there’s much to enjoy here, from the narrative elements to the combo-centric combat.
WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
◗ Game board
◗90 Action cards
◗50 Starting action cards
◗20 Witcher trophy cards
◗28 Potion cards
◗72 Exploration cards
◗56 Event cards
◗8 Attribute trophy cards
◗28 Monster cards
◗20 Monster fight cards
◗10 Help cards
◗ Solo help card
◗10 Witcher Poker dice
◗35 Gold tokens
◗ Closed tavern token
◗18 Location tokens
◗28 Monster tokens
◗5 Scoring tokens
◗15 Name tokens
◗5 Player boards
◗5 Witcher miniatures
◗5 Colour bases
◗25 Wooden cubes
◗5 Wooden shield markers
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED LOST RUINS OF ARNAK....
With its mix of deckbuilding and exploration, The Old World brings to mind Mín and Elwen’s competitive adventure game, even if it does lack the workerplacement aspect.