Thorgal: The Board Game

I had the opportunity to play Thorgal: The Board Game today. I did receive the crowdfunding version of the game about a month ago, but played the retail version at my board game night. With the crowdfunding version having 10 scenarios to the retail's 7, plus additional characters and more cards, I don't regret my pledge. Especially since the price I paid is the same as the retail price now.

Thorgal: The Board Game is not a campaign game. The scenarios are independent from each other, and each has some replay value. However, there are narrative elements in each scenario, so playing a scenario once will result in some spoilers for playing it again. But this isn't a "choose your own adventure" kind of purely narrative game, but a game of action economy. Players need to work together to gather resources, and strengthen their characters, to fulfil various tasks and reach one of the win conditions, while preventing one of the loss conditions to happen. I only played the first scenario, which serves as kind of a tutorial and was possibly a bit easy, but I did like the gameplay. And there is a way to try to go for a harder victory condition, which is narratively "nicer", so there certainly is some challenge even here. But maybe not enough for really hardcore board gamers.

Interestingly, each scenario has different special rules, which change the feel of the game and the optimal strategy. Also in setup the different scenarios have different bonus effects on the six possible action cards, making, introducing even more variety. These action cards can even be changed *during* a scenario, making the possible actions better with time. And that is linked to narrative: For example in the first scenario you start as a chained slave, and fulfilling the task to overcome the guards gives you a better movement action card, as you are now freed from your chains.

Character progression in Thorgal: The Board Game is simple, which is good, because it resets when you start another scenario. There is a combat xp track and a journey xp track, with combat xp giving you better / more dice to roll, while journey xp give you better polyomino tiles to lay on the journey track. The game cleverly uses the same polyomino tiles also for your characters wounds, and for combat, while the dice in combat tell you what tiles you can lay.

Thorgal: The Board Game is a medium complexity game, which isn't immediately obvious, as the large number of components suggests more complexity than there actually is. But not all components come into play in every scenario. The difficulty is not much affected by the number of players, as the players always have 4 actions in a round. I played with 3 players, which meant that the starting player had 2 actions in his round, but as the starting player changes every round, that didn't really matter much. With 3 players, setup, and rules teach, the game took us two hours. I do like to have this in my collection, as narrative game that doesn't need too much time to play, and doesn't require a commitment to a full campaign.