The Witcher Adventure Game Review

Being a fan of both The Witcher series and Games Workshop tabletop games, I assumed The Witcher Adventure Game would be right up my alley. This is basically a digital version of the board game that carries same name, which itself is based on The Witcher videogames.

First, I select the tutorials and find they consist of ten instructional videos, each between 1 and 3 minutes long, which explain every facet of the game. After watching five of these I begin to experience that sensation you get when you read a book that you’re just not interested in: the words were going into my head, but they just weren’t staying there. I slog forward onto the next five videos, which by now are covering the more complex areas of the game, and I start to feel like a labrador trying to grasp the finer points of chaos theory.

It’s worth pointing out the slightly obvious point that if you have never played a Witcher game before, or read the books, you won’t have a clue what’s going on. You may grasp how to play the game, but the characters, monsters and lore will be lost on you. It’s been a good while since I last booted up The Witcher 2, meaning I had to look some things up on the game’s wiki to refresh my memory.

Before starting the game proper, you decide if you wish to play against the CPU in an offline match or go up against online opponents. Choosing the online option will let you either start a private game with friends or have the matchmaking system find opponents for you. A slight warning if you do decide to try and find fellow online board-game enthusiasts: I waited almost ten minutes before three other players were found, who subsequently all quit the game after about four turns. Although you can alter the number of opponents per game, which would probably help speed things up.

To start off with, you first select the number of quests a player needs to complete in order to win, either one, three or five. These quests are fairly detailed and fit in well within the Witcher universe, they really wouldn’t feel out of place in one of the videogames themselves. The actual gameplay, however, does just boil down to accumulating different coloured points and travelling to specific places on the map in order to complete these quests.

At the start of each turn you choose an action. One option is to draw cards that help you gain points, but bad luck can mean these often result in leaving you with debilitating effects, such as certain actions being temporarily disabled (this is classed as having a wound). I did find myself on the receiving end of an awful lot of negative card draws, but I suppose that’s just the nature of the game. You can also gain points through battles, these involve throwing multiple dice in the hope that you land a set number of symbols in order to defeat your opponent. You can often draw cards that boost your rolls, helping you to beat the more difficult opponents. This combat section was definitely my favourite part of the game, though it was probably more nostalgia for my multi-dice, Games Workshop past.

What I found strange about The Witcher Adventure Game was that for a four player board-game, it seems you have barely any interaction with the other players. There are optional support quests that bring in your opponents, but in all my play-time I never used them, nor did the computer controlled players. Another issue I found was when the other players were taking their turns, as it always felt like an eternity for them to complete their actions.

The game is apparently an almost perfect copy of the board game that it’s based on. It is graphically pleasing and the music certainly has that atmospheric, Witcher-esque feel about it. Witcher fans will enjoy seeing the monsters and characters they previously met in the games.

Maybe the problem with The Witcher Adventure Game is that it’s just too much like the board game which was meant to be played with four friends together in a room, narrating their actions to each other while making inappropriate jokes about Triss. Playing this version just feels too solitary and mildly tedious. For fans of the board game only.