The Witcher Adventure Game

I WANT to like this game. I really do. The board has a nice look, the rules make sense, the game is challenging vs. human players & even the music is good. Problem is the AI is so bad it makes the game unplayable. Your computer opponents consistently make decisions that just make no sense by not using special abilities, moving past needed destinations & completely ignoring working on quests that are needed to win the game. DO NOT BUY IF YOU WERE LOOKING FOR A BOARD GAME WITH A SOLID AI.

I played one game against the AI so far and found the rules to have a lot of potential. I can see how it could be a lot of fun, but there was one glaring flaw - the AI is incredibly stupid. Very quickly, they had accumulated enough wounds to render them impotent, never actually moving out of regions with monsters they couldn't beat. What's worse, the AI players aren't even trying to win. All three were running around randomly from start to finish and didn't complete a single main quest even once, even though all prerequisites were there. I won with a 70 point lead, the runner-up had 12. At this point, playing against the AI is an utter waste of time; there aren't even any difficulty setting I could see that might remedy this. I subtract 2 stars for the completely nonfunctional SP mode alone. As for games against humans, this might be worthwhile, although I haven't tried it yet.

My rating is intended to help people understand what kind of game this is, or rather, what it isn't. It is NOT an "adventure game," as the name implies. The description additionally makes this game sound like it has some sort of campaign or story; "hunt for deadly beasts, solve ancient mysteries, and take part in complex political intrigues. Make choices and face their brutal consequences in a world begging to be explored!" In truth it's just a board game. That may seem obvious if you knew there was a board game version ahead of time, but I did not, and I suspect others don't as well. There are plenty of games that use board game *mechanics* to do more, which is what I expected. A similar example would be Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales. It uses Gwent-like deck-building card game mechanics, but it tells a story where you genuinely do make choices and participate in monster hunting and intrigue and all that stuff. In this game you're really just moving pieces and rolling dice and playing cards. Sure the quests are *framed* as monster hunting or political intrigue or whatever, but there's no cohesive plot or narrative, it's just "go here, collect these, kill that." What character you choose gives you different abilities, but beyond that is irrelevant. And as far as that goes, it's fine? It's a competent Witcher skin for a dozen other board games that operate exactly like this. But there's nothing that really makes it stand out, to me. There's no voice acting for any of the characters, no interactions between them, nothing that makes this a "Witcher" experience but the aesthetics.

I love everything that is the Witcher. The lore, the characters, the world. So I wanted to love the game. The problem is it is a very random game. I even got stuck in a loop of repeating the same actions over and over again until a random game mechanic came along and released me. Not cool. When you complete a quest there is very little feeling of accomplishment because of the randomness involved. You draw cards and get random cards to use. You run into random monsters which is cool unless there is virtually no way to defeat them. Then you have to wait for a random event to hopefully release you from the battle. I think there is potential for a much better game if the game play was tweaked a bit. I feel bad only being able to give the game two stars because the looks alone almost deserve better.

A few different heroes, everyone with one unique skill and five standart ones, battle for the most victory points. Every turn, you move to another city for an investigation plate and draw a card to make your character stronger until you eventually complete your quests and defeat a few monsters. The game is pretty simple and we learned everything there is half way through our first round without ever looking at any kind of instruction or tutorial. But the problem i have with this game, is that you pretty much play for yourself. Even when four heroes walk on the same board, they interact almost never, and that is the sad part. No option to really hurt other players progress or drop some stones in their way and at least for me, that makes board games interesting. the way this game plays, it plays as a single player racing game.