‘Skyrim’ Board Game Captures the Essence of the Game: Aimless Wandering
Hey, you. You’re finally awake. You’ll feel like you took an arrow to the knee with how engrossed you’ll be in this Skyrim board game adventure.
How do you describe Skyrim? Okay, yeah. It’s a fantasy action/adventure RPG. Fine. Thanks, Captain Buzzkill. But that doesn’t really capture the full sense of scale that comes when you really understand what Skyrim offers.
So with that in mind, how would you even begin to design a board game which offers the full Skyrim experience? Let’s find out.
Skyrim Board Game Overview
Rather than focus on the small-scale interactions, the Skyrim Board Game pulls back and gives the players a full view of Skyrim, the province.
Here players will control the movements of their characters, interact with wandering travelers, battle with monsters roaming the lands, and do all in their power to keep the cities of Skyrim from full-scale rioting.
The Skyrim Board Game is more interested in building a compelling narrative and engaging the players into the goings on of the world. It doesn’t worry so much about whether you’re in short range or long range of that Draugr.
The game is ostensibly about completing quests to achieve victory. But, like Skyrim the video game, Skyrim The Board Game encourages you to wander off and do your own thing for a while. The game is packed with wilderness to venture into, dungeons to explore, treasure to find, and side quests. Lots and lots of side quests.
Quests For Days
One of the core mechanics of the game is the Quest Deck. This deck is chock full of interactions and choices and plot. Like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, each decision within these quest cards will alter your options from that point forward.
Most cards will add or remove cards from the Quest Deck, so a choice you make now could unlock an entire quest line that you didn’t even get to see during your last playthrough.
But this is not to say failing a quest is a lurking danger. The Skyrim Board Game was designed to allow players to “fail forward”. Even if the players fail a main quest, the story will progress.
There’s no worry of having to repeat a quest if it didn’t go well. No good story doesn’t have its failures, after all.
Incredibly Replayable
But of course, there are tons of other mechanics: Combat, Magic, Upgrading, Enchanting, Leveling Up, Followers, Sneaking, Skills, and plenty more. If you’re curious to give the game a few rounds before picking it up for yourself, you can download the Tabletop Simulator module for free!
Perhaps the best aspect of the game is the “Free Roaming” mode combined with the Solo Play rules. Basically, it’s a ruleset designed specifically for how I play open-world games anyway, with my key thought always being “Yeah, I’ll save the world in a minute. Right now I’m helping a woman find her lost chickens.”
In fact, in the hundreds of hours I’ve put into Skyrim… I’ve still never beaten it. Whoops.
