I got a chance to play The Witcher – Old World this last week and I have to say right up front, I was not disappointed.

Adventure board games fall into many different categories, I would say it’s a genre with quite a few different sub-genres, but The Witcher – Old World kind of felt like a new sub-genre was invented and that is perhaps what attracted me to the game.

In a way, Old World is a very strategic game that combines deck building, resource management and time-pressured competition. You have some of the classic things you hope to find in adventure board games via story telling through cards and other things that create a relationship with role-playing games like special abilities, leveling up, finding loot and fighting monsters, but at the heart of the game it’s all about that most optimal move each round. Trying to squeeze as many actions and gain as many benefits as possible each turn because to a certain degree, the game is a race to the finish line, giving the entire experience a more gamist feel, more like a competitive board game than what you might expect from a typical adventure game.

You can’t just sit back and do things when you are ready, the pressure comes from the other players progress and as soon as one player pushes forward, you are left with little choice but to do the same because if you’re not keeping up closely with the leader, you start to fall behind and are essentially in catch up mode.

There is also this harshness to the games monsters that you fight. There aren’t many of them and the adventurers you represent in the game are initially pretty ill-equipped to deal with these monsters. Your goal is to get yourself prepared as quickly as possible and it becomes a game of risk vs. reward. Go in to early and you get crushed, go in to late and someone might beat you to it.

I also really liked the built-in catch-up mechanic that worked very well to counterbalance players who get too far ahead of the pact. Each time you lose a battle, you gain a lot of benefits for the effort, while winning a battle costs your resources and reduces your strength, forcing you to take time to rebuild yourself. This gives the game a nice tight feel and makes taking bigger risks a plausible effort which results in you getting more of those exciting “let’s see what happens” moments.

The quality of the game components are outstanding, the art especially captures The Witcher franchise with perfection, they just nailed it with the presentation of this game.

Altogether, I really enjoyed this one, a big improvement over the last Witcher game I tried called “The Witcher Adventure Game”, which I thought was pretty shit.