Skyrim, except it’s a board game

Bethesda has a plan for you. And that plan is to have you buy Skyrim multiple times. Dozens of times. From the various releases on the various consoles and PCs, and the DLCs, and the soundtrack albums, and the Dragonborn cosplay helmet and… and now, the board game.

Funded on Gamefound just over a year ago, Skyrim the Adventure Game seemingly manages to fit every aspect of the videogame into the board game, somehow, while also allowing you to share the experience with friends. Need some help with a Daedra Matron? Bring friends. About the only thing I can think of that is not in the board game are the Dragonborn, as the game’s plot takes place before the Dragonborn arrives on the scene.

And, there is a plot. Two campaigns of three chapters each in the base game, and of course, there are expansions. The game does have a tutorial, but it appears that is meant for one person to play. We opted to skip the tutorial and dive right into the game. That may not have been the wisest choice… but be warned, if you’re opening this game for the first time at a game night, maybe crack the case the night before and run through the tutorial first.

We have a gaming table that doubles as our dining table. Before we put the dining covers back over it, we ask if we should leave the game set up, or pack it up and play something different the next time we get together. This will be the third time we’ve said, you know, let’s keep this going. THAT SAID…

This is a complicated game, and almost anything you can do in the video game, you can find somewhere in the board game. You can level up. You can get perks. You can find or craft gear, and you can enchant or upgrade that gear. There are wandering monsters to deal with. There are quest chains. There are normal events, active events, and world events that shake up the whole game. There’s three different bars that come into play during combat — health, stamina and magika. You get to choose which of these to raise when you level — just like the video game. When everyone levels, the monsters get tougher. Just like the video game. There are mines to explore, and draugr ruins, and daedra, and catacombs filled with undead, and so, so many traps. You can invite other players along, or go it solo. You can go into the wilderness and just harvest materials and mine ore.

Especially when everyone is off doing their own quests, it’s kind of hard to think of a reason not to just play the video game.

The base game supports unstructured play, but if you choose to follow along with the campaign, there are two campaigns of three chapters each, and each chapter should take about two hours. We just finished the first chapter of the first campaign the other night, where we learned that our organization, the Blades, had just been disbanded by nefarious means and we were now all urged to go into hiding.

This took all four of us working on our main quest line until we came together in the stronghold of Solitude to confront the Khajit woman who had been working against us all this time. She won. We have to scatter to the winds. Well, Drew’s character accidentally made a pact with a Daedric prince (who was in disguise at the time). So we’ll see how that ends up. Probably not good.

Turns go with the first player turning over a new Event card. This can have positive or negative effects; many add to the unrest of strongholds within Skyrim, which affects access to the marketplace and such. Then, all players move simultaneously (and yes, there is a version of fast travel). In no particular order, players can then explore dungeons, try to find quests in a stronghold they are at, or work on their own private quests, buy, craft or enchant gear, and so on. There’s usually way more options than can possibly be done, but it’s not impossible to grab another player to help out with a difficult wandering monster if needed, as the movement options are pretty generous.

Combat — and there is a lot of it — is a rather confusing mess. Fights usually start with a skill check of some sort — sneaking, lockpicking and so on — that let you either avoid a fight entirely or to start with some sort of advantage, like a free attack. These skill checks can be modified by gear and by perks you buy when you level.

Enemies have resistances to heavy damage, light damage, magika damage, or some combination. Defeating an enemy requires bringing them to zero on all three tracks. If they only have a resistance to light damage, but you are doing heavy damage, then you do full damage to them. If they did have a resistance to heavy damage in that scenario, then all you are doing is chipping away at their heavy armor before you can make the killing blow.

Weaker encounters are removed from the encounter deck if they are below the experience level of the players, organically raising the threat as people level.

Once defeated, encounters typically drop money, loot, or experience, or some combination. If there’s more than one player involved, the one who got the last hit loots first. This tends to lead to people preferring to adventure alone, for maximum loot.

So…

If you loved playing Skyrim, the video game, and you love it so much that you really need to bring it to your local game night, sure, go for it. It takes a long time to teach, and if you are playing with people unfamiliar with Skyrim, there’s a lot of terminology to pick up (and plus, no Dragonborn, as this is a prelude to the events of the video game). The game focuses mainly on questing and existing in the world of Skyrim. If you’re not working on a campaign, then the players can just keep on playing and leveling up until they feel like stopping. It is entirely open ended, if you want it to be.

If you’re just looking for a dungeon crawler, Skyrim the Adventure Game is not the game for you. There aren’t really any dungeons, per se, just two random encounters that change depending upon the dungeon type. There are plenty of tabletop games that focus on dungeon exploration.

It’s hard for me to recommend the game, but, we are having fun with it. Take that any way you like.