Designer: Ignacy Trzewiczek
From the mind of a Pol that gave us the rather complex 51st State and the humorous civilization builder Imperial Settlers, after playing the Witcher its clear to me that Ignacy Trzewiczek is a designer with a bright future. Whether you love or hate his games, there is no denying that he aspires to be inventive, creating the line rather than towing it. I might not be a huge fan of his games as they don’t really rub the genre of board games I prefer, but there is no question regarding his fresh approach to game design.

The Witcher board game is an attempt at a quasi-semi cooperative, semi competitive adventure game based on the PC game that bares its name. Now right of the bat, if you have ever played any of the Witcher PC games you will note that there was a very dedicated and concentrated effort to bring the Witcher universe to life in this board game through the art style and flavor text. It burst with Witcher themes, backstory and art. It’s clear, whoever made this game is obviously well researched or big fan of the Witcher games. The attention to detail here is uncanny. I say this here at the start before I get into the review because whatever can be said about the game play, there is no denying that this IS a Witcher game and for that alone the publisher (Fantasy Flight Games) deserves a node from Witcher fans for making sure that when you make a themed game that the theme comes through and in Witcher the board game the theme is most certainly center stage.

In the Witcher each player takes on the role of one of the main characters from the Witcher PC games story, for Witcher fans you can probably guess who those characters are. These characters each have their own special abilities, combined with a special die(dice) that reflect those abilities which they add to a pool of common dice when facing various challenges. In addition there is a development deck which represents the various items and abilities of that character, each being unique and asymmetrical. The designer did a great job of making sure that not only do the characters in the game play and feel like their PC equivalents, but that each is well balanced and offers a unique way in which the game is approached from that characters perspective. The goal of the game is to complete three main quests, this is done by going around the map collecting clue tokens to qualify for completion of these quests. Relatively simple premise but in the world of the Witcher, this seemingly simple task is a daunting one because around every corner there are very unforgiving encounters that will do everything in their power to stop you. The game ends when any one player completes his third main quest, but the winner of the game is the player with the most

victory points at the end, so while it’s a kind of a race to complete quests you have to make sure that you are actually winning the game by having the most points.

It’s really a game of playing to your strengths, without question it’s all about the characters. For example if you are playing as Geralt, you are the definitive warrior able to take on the game’s most fierce monsters very early, even before you start gaining development cards. He is a bad ass and appropriately you feel like a bad ass throughout the game. While in the same token Dandelion is not particularly well equipped to fight, instead his approach is more subtle, able to gain great success through subtle plays and stealing the thunder from the success of other hero’s. The point here is that whichever hero you play, you will approach the game in a very different way and in its own way this creates significant replay ability, but above all else it empowers the thematic presence of the characters in this adventure game.

In the course of play each player will take two actions from a pool of five actions, four of which are the same for everyone and one which is unique to the character. Players can travel, which allows them to move on the board to new locations on the map. Something you have to do to track down clue tokens necessary to complete your quests and deal with different threats at those locations like misfortune cards or monsters. You can also investigate, which is essentially the act of drawing from one of three investigation decks. These can be positive or negative, but in general you can make gains through these cards and many of the cards you keep which can later be used in combination with other investigation cards. It’s kind of a gamble, but one you can prepare for by developing your character. It’s a dangerous endeavor but it is one of the many ways you can get one up on the competition as investigation can yield extra clue tokens, gold, victory points and sometimes even the much sought after and very powerful fortune cards.

You can also develop, now this is perhaps the only risk free thing in the game you can do. You get to draw two development cards from the unique development deck for your specific character and keep one card. These very potent cards make your character more powerful in some way by imbuing you with powers or representing special equipment. Absolutely necessary to gain developments throughout the game, the more you have the better chance you stand against the many threats you will face in the game.

Finally there is resting, simply put, during the game you are going to sustain injuries and the trouble with taking damage is that you place the damage tokens over one of the actions for your character. When you have an injury on an action you can’t take that action, so over time gaining too many injuries results in you having fewer options. If you take enough damage the only action you might be able to take is rest. Resting simply allows you to remove one of your critical wounds or two of your regular wounds.

The final type of action you can take depends on your character but effectively this action will allow you to gain some special character advantage. Geralt can recharge his potions, Triss can recharge her spells, Dandelion gains much needed gold and Yarpen can make use of his companion cards. In a sense characters power up their ability, sort of recharging them and getting them ready for whatever dangers lay ahead.

The sequence of play is that each character takes his two actions and deals with any encounters as a result which is typically through the drawing of misfortune cards, investigation cards or monsters. You continue around the table taking actions until a winner is determined.

All and all the Witcher is a very easy game to learn to play and while there are a few special rules and effects, largely anything you need to do is written on the various cards you draw, most of which are very thematically laid out so that the card and the activity are decisively linked. There really is a lot of common sense in the game and the instructions are clear ensuring your focusing on the game rather than trying to figure out the game.

The question is does all this amount to a good game and my first instinct is to say yes, for an adventure game it really does exactly what you hope it would do and it does it in a streamlined and organized fashion. It’s entertaining to suffer at the hands of the Witchers very tough world almost as much fun as it is to watch your friends suffer. Unfortunately the Witcher suffers from three problems that make this largely a pass for me and I think unless you are a hardcore adventure board gamer and huge fan of the Witcher you will feel the same.

The first issue is the length of the game. Now when you first start to play the game, after a couple of hour’s players will be finishing their first main quests and really if at that point the game ended the length would be near perfect. At this point however you are only 1/3rd through the game. By the time someone finishes their 3rd quest not only will you be well into your 4th or 5th hour of the game (depending how fast players take their actions) but you will have known who is going to win the game a couple of hours back.

In every game that I played the winner was pretty much determined about midway through the game and while the game is well balanced (each time it was a different character), it was quite decisive. It was one of those situations where you are playing a board game for 2 more hours after you already know you lost and that really takes the steam out of the game.

Simply put, the game just overstays its welcome, it’s too long and the gaps between the clear winner and the losers comes way too soon in that process resulting in you playing a game you have already lost for far too long.

The second problem with the game is that there really is very little strategy in how the winner is determined. All the players are going to be doing pretty much the same thing and while I will grant you the how of it differs, ultiamtly its all about collecting clues, finishing quests and scoring points. There are different approaches to this, but while the methods differ, the strategies are identical.

The winner will be the player who has the fewest set backs and about 90% of the time when you draw a card with a negative effect it’s an effect you have no control over. You draw the card and it says “this bad thing happens to you”. There is no opportunity or chance to do anything about it in most cases, you simply suffer the effects for drawing the card, an element of the game made worse as you typically have no say or control or opportunity to avoid drawing the card in the first place.

In a sense, it’s a game of drawing cards and seeing what happens to you and while there are some decisions that will effect when you draw cards, to win you must push forward so drawing them is inevitable and since you can’t influence most effects it’s really just a question of how many bad affects you suffer compared to the other players, or more specifically which bad effects. Drawing a misfortune card that causes you to lose a couple of clues, or hits you with a bunch of misfortune tokens can delay your progress by 2 to 3 rounds. If that happens a couple of times, your chances of winning will slip away very quickly and catching up is very difficult. I played a game in which I gave no thought to strategy at all, I just moved around collecting clues as fast as I could and I won simply because I didn’t get hit as hard or as often as the other players with negative effects.

The moment you realize that the few decisions you actually make have very little impact on what does and doesn’t happen to you, the game really derails. It maintains some level of excitement because drawing a card to see what happens has its own fun element to it, but doing it for 5 hours is far too long.

The third and final problem is that although it’s an adventure game it’s neither cooperative nor competitive, even though it really does try its best to be. There really is very little you can do to help your friends, for example you always fight monsters alone, no one can help you and since it’s a competitive game of victory points, I’m not sure there would be any reason to do so. Cooperation comes in only one form which is trading gold or clues, something I found is seldom done, again because your so called allies are your main competition in the game so helping them is not something you want to do. In fact in 3 games only once did anyone actually ever trade anything. On the flip side while the game is a competitive race to victory points there is almost nothing you can do to other players in the scope of that competition to hinder them. There are no actions you can do to stop or slow them down in any way, really much like the rest of the game aside from drawing a random card that has an effect that impacts one or more players by chance there is nothing you can actively do to anyone.

In a sense everyone plays their own game and while it’s entertaining to watch people try and fail miserably at the hands of the many set back type cards, It’s really just a waiting game for your turn. The wait for your turn however can be excruciatingly long, in particular by the time you reach the mid-point of the game because by than players have many cards and effects they can use which triggers more card drawing and subsequent resolution. At first players might take the time to embellish their plays by reading flavor text, but that gets really old really quick. The downtime is extremely long in this game which again, combined with the length of the game as a whole makes this a very painful and often frustrating wait.

Conclusion
The Witcher is a very well designed and illustrated game, it’s streamlined and modern and there is no denying that Ignacy is a great designer that got great support from Fantasy Flight Games to make the Witcher. I think for hardcore fans of adventure games in particular if you love the Witcher universe you might be willing to overlook the drawbacks of the Witcher. For the average gamer however, the Witcher is far too long, with too much randomness and far too little interaction between players.

I think the Witcher might be a far better game if completing the main quests happened faster, for example if this was a game that took 2 hours to finish, I think I might be more willing to play it. At a 4-5 hour experience however this game is just way too bloody long and it’s not something I want to do again.

Final Verdict: Give this one a pass.