Elden Ring board game review – a promising yet tarnished adventure

Pre-orders for Steamforged Games’ The Elden Ring board game go live today, and I’ve been hard at play working my way through the core box campaign. If you’re wondering whether you should splash some cash on this hefty cube of cards and minis and dive once more into the land of Limgrave, read on!

What is the Elden Ring board game?

The Elden Ring board game is a campaign game for 1-4 players which sees you working together or adventuring alone in the Lands Between. It features varied gameplay, with a mixture of open-world exploration, grid-based encounters with miniature monsters, challenging boss fights, and even sections that play like a choose your own adventure gamebook.

In between scenarios (which can include any of the above), you’ll take time out to upgrade your characters, spending runes to boost your stats, equip new weapons and armor, and upgrade decks that control what you can do in combat.

But is this among the best board games, or is it best left on the shelf?

What’s in the Elden Ring board game?

Like many Kickstarter board games, including Steamforged’s Dark Souls series, The Elden Ring board game is sold in chunks. What’s available now is Limgrave, and future expansions will presumably cover other areas of the videogame’s enormous open world.

I wish more tie-in board games would focus on distilling the most memorable and iconic moments of the video games they adapt, but like most, Steamforged’s Elden Ring aims to be comprehensive. Pretty much every enemy and mini-boss is represented across the various expansions, and the full shabang, including two adds-ons and a bunch of exclusives only available in the Kickstarter, contains hundreds of miniatures and costs $429 (that’s apparently with a $216 discount on the MSRP). Not a cheap game, then.

The product I’ve received is the Realm of the Grafted King core box campaign. On Kickstarter, this was the Core Pledge, and cost $179/£152. It advertises 40 hours of play, and features about 30 scenarios and 54 miniatures, ranging from tiny little imps to enormous trolls. Perhaps a little confusingly, Godrick the Grafted himself is not in this one – instead the main boss is Margit.

How does the Elden Ring board game play?

A lot of different content is packed within the box, but exploration and combat are the two primary gameplay loops. In the former, you plop down hexes and gradually build up a landscape to traverse as you play a mission. Specific scenarios add or remove hex tiles to an ever-changing stack, which you randomly draw from whenever you explore.

These tiles feature different icons representing various encounters, such as crafting supplies you can gather, NPCs to chat with, or enemies to fight. You’ll travel across Limgrave, facing ‘hardships’ that demand you test your attributes or suffer damage or some other inconvenience, finding random events that change things up, resting at sites of grace, and generally flipping over or hoovering up every token on the map. Each exploration encounter has one or more goals, which you need to complete before a time deck depletes.

In combat, which (in terms of time) is the largest chunk of the game, Elden Ring uses encounter books featuring battle grids. Each player has one of these books, and important battles and boss fights will ask you to push all four together to form a giant battle map.

Fights are lane-based, with both enemy and player attacks hitting or missing depending on their respective positions left and right on the grid. Forward and back, meanwhile, determines your stance. A player (and some monsters) up front can hit harder, while staying back gives you more opportunities to fend off damage. Maintaining a middle position gives you greater control over the battle, letting you move your initiative card around.

These initiative cards determine the order of action in battle. Each enemy and player has one, and you’ll shuffle them up and deal them in a row at the beginning of each round. For enemies, these cards also control how they act, with a series of actions dictated on each one. Smaller monsters have only one of these each, but bosses have a sizable deck of combat moves. Each round, you’ll know exactly what’s coming, however, so can plan accordingly.

Players, meanwhile, fight using a deck with different actions, featuring combat cards that are determined by the weapon and shield combination they’re wielding. Another deck hosts attributes which power up those moves.

You have limited actions per turn, with which to move around, draw cards, use items, and attack. When you play an attack card, you then draw a card from your attribute deck. These each feature various stat icons, which correspond with effects on your combat cards (dealing damage, applying stun to an enemy, and so on). Similarly, drawing the right attributes with a block card will allow you to avoid damage, and you can also discard cards before you play a block, to further soak up a hit.

Is the Elden Ring board game good?

I should start with a small caveat. Though I’m several missions in and have now played multiple 2-hour long sessions, I still feel like I’ve only really dipped my toe into what the Elden Ring board game has to offer. I should also admit my biases. I don’t often enjoy co-op battle board games against AI opponents. For one thing, for me personally, they’re a recipe for forgetting mechanics, and constantly worrying that I’m accidentally cheating the system.

That being said, Elden Ring’s fight system is quite solid. The card-based mechanics contain within them a neat fusion of luck and strategy, and it’s clever the ways in which it’s designed to ape the feel of the video game: your limited health bar means it’s essential to recognize patterns and dodge attacks, only striking yourself when it’s safe to. It certainly hasn’t changed my mind on the genre, but it’s also a well thought out set of mechanics.

My favorite aspect of the game, however, are the campaign elements. I’m an absolute sucker for any game that gradually unlocks new content as you play, and Elden Ring is full of little quests and objectives that ask you to take extra cards out of a ‘vault’, giving you a new spirit summon, say, or a new event to shuffle into the event deck.

Similarly, the character progression is done really nicely. You have quite a lot of freedom right from the get-go about how you want to spend your Runes and build your character. There’s a neat deckbuilding aspect, as you can purchase new attribute cards with different icons, to slot into your deck.

One thing that surprised me is that Elden Ring’s rulebook is pretty simple and easy to understand. It’s something I’ve had gripes with before in Steamforged Games titles, so this was nice to see. I also appreciate how the turn structures are designed to keep things moving – essential for a multiplayer game. Turns don’t take long.

In open-world scenarios, your allies have the opportunity to jump in and help when you enter a battle, but can likewise choose to keep exploring, while you handle a small section of combat on your turn. Overall, I found the Elden Ring board game to be much more approachable than its massive box might suggest.

What really hampers Elden Ring, however, is a constant and unnecessary fiddliness, which I constantly resented the designers for not finding a solution to. The box contains over 200 tokens, with dozens of different types, and you need to be able to access almost all of them all the time. (It doesn’t help that you’re only given three bags to store them in).

This constantly bogged down gameplay. Here’s a quick example. Each time you take the Explore action and reveal a new tile, you then have to spend a few minutes looking for the matching tokens. You only need most of these so you can flip them over to a (almost undistinguishable) exhausted side once you’ve used them. I refuse to believe that there wasn’t a better option. Why couldn’t it just be a generic ‘exhausted’ tile that you placed over the icon on the board when you interacted with it, for instance?

Similarly, bosses have handy dials to show their health, but for regular monsters, you’re supposed to place piles of tokens indicating damage, other status effects, and – in a fight with more than one of the same monster type – identifying letters next to their mini. This is pushed from inconvenient to just silly when you consider that the monsters move around the board each turn.

And even the campaign elements I love so much suffer from this component bloat now and then – when a quest tells me to fetch a card which only exists to tell me to turn to a page in a book, for instance.

Another drawback I noticed was the writing, especially in the missions that play like adventure game books. In my opinion, the writing in an Elden Ring game should be grand and mysterious, full of lines that are evocative, if a little obscure.

Instead, these missions contain lengthy descriptions of what you see, hear, and feel. They’re not badly written – if a little purple-prosey – but it completely misses the tone I’m looking for. Luckily, I played these missions alone; I could not imagine how my friends would have reacted to the way they drag on. It also doesn’t help that it’s hard to make meaningful choices in these segments. After the first, I found myself skipping through them as speedily as possible.

While overall, I thought the gameplay was decent in both the exploration and combat sections, I have to admit I never found myself wowed or surprised by it. The most exciting parts of my time with the Elden Ring board game were reaching for a new card or tinkering with my character – but when actually playing missions, those moments of excitement were few and far between.

Who is the Elden Ring board game for?

The Elden Ring board game is a pretty fun experience, but for the money Steamforged is charging, I would be asking for a lot more than that. If cash is no object, then have at it – I thought the mechanics were mostly well-designed, and I can’t ignore the fact that my experience was soured by the fiddly tokens, and the fact it’s not my personal cup of tea.

Everyone else I think should really consider what they want Elden Ring for, as I worry this is a board game that many are going to buy (or have already backed on Kickstarter) for the name recognition, and then will struggle to get to the table enough times to get their moneys’ worth.

For instance, if you’re a miniature painter, the value proposition obviously goes up. If there’s one area Steamforged can be relied on to knock it out of the park it’s in its gorgeous, faithful minis, and Elden Ring is no exception. The bizarre beasties FromSoftware cooked up look great in physical form, and the bosses in particular are imposing and grand, while still featuring plenty of detail.

Likewise, if you’re an Elden Ring fanatic, have played the video game to death, and just want another way to enjoy this world, that makes this game a much easier sell. For general tabletop gamers without a particular love of the franchise, I’d say better campaign games and strategy board games are out there.

The ideal audience for the Elden Ring board game is a group of friends with a love of Soulslikes and campaign games, who are pooling together to split the costs – and one of them plans to paint the miniatures afterwards. If that’s you, I can firmly recommend Elden Ring. Otherwise, it’s going to depend on how much this sort of game pushes your buttons, how much the annoyances I noted would rankle you, and how confident you are it’s going to see play.

Source: Wargamer