If you read my posts from back when I backed Malhya in 2022, and when I finally received the game in October of this year, I was optimistic that this could be a good game. Since then my optimism had faded quickly. In part that is due to me looking at the game and the rules. In part that is to other people publishing their experience with the game. And I think the problems some people have with the game are rather important general criteria to judge a campaign game by.

The reason I was optimistic about Malhya is that it provides the things that I want a narrative campaign board game to provide: On the one side some fantasy story or fantasy world to explore and have adventures; on the other side some sort of system, combat and otherwise, in which board game mechanics are used by the players to have their characters perform actions and try to overcome challenges. I used to play Dungeons & Dragons, and these sort of board games are kind of "roleplaying games in a box" or "roleplaying games without a dungeon master". While I would say that a roleplaying game with a dungeon master is inherently superior to a roleplaying game without one, that advantage is reaped mostly by the players who aren't the dungeon master. Me, having mostly been the dungeon master in my roleplaying games, I have a lot less work and stress in a game without a DM.

And that brings me to the other side of the equation, which also applies to selecting the best campaign board game: How much work does setting up the game, learning its rules, and then playing it actually involve? The main reason I am less optimistic about Malhya now is that in an attempt to make the game less language-dependent, the developers decided to use hundreds of different icons on the cards and other game materials. That is a bit as if you had cards with text on it, replaced the text by translating it into hieroglyphics, and then asked of the players to learn those hieroglyphics to play the game. Many games use iconography to replace at least some text, but that tends to be a handful of icons, at maximum half a page in the rulebook. Malhya has an icon glossary that covers an astonishing 8 pages, and sometimes the differences between icons aren't all that obvious.

The game we are currently playing, Tidal Blades 2, has a rulebook of 35 pages. That might seem a lot compared to other board games, but these narrative campaign games tend to stretch over 50+ hours of gameplay. That is fundamentally different to games you can play through in a single evening, where you wouldn't want to have much more than 20 pages of rules even for a complex game. (And yes, number of pages is just an approximate measure, as some rulebooks have more illustrations and examples than others.) Malhya has 80 pages of rules. Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era has 98 pages of rules. And if a group wants to play such a campaign game, that is going to be in several sessions, going on for months. Reading the rules once isn't enough, all players are supposed to have at least a large part of the rules memorized, and only look up special cases when needed.

So why is Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era on our short list, and Malhya isn't? I have already played one session of Elder Scrolls: BotSE, and know that it is a complex masterwork. Chip Theory Games have been making successful games with similar combat systems for over a decade, and Elder Scrolls is the sum of all what they learned over the years about how to make this combat system interesting, combined with the very interesting Elder Scrolls universe and the closest a board game can get to open world adventure games like Skyrim. Malhya is the first game of a small group of 4 people; while they poured years of effort into this, according to the reviewers they haven't quite nailed it yet. To the best of my knowledge, Malhya would require a large effort to bring to the table for an okay result, while the Elder Scrolls: BotSE would require a large effort for a more likely also great result.

The other extreme from the shortlist would be Kinfire Chronicles. The initial rulebook is tiny. When you look inside the box of Kinfire Chronicles, you find a lot of other boxes representing the scenarios. The game is designed to be learned while playing, nobody has to read a long rulebook in advance or memorize pages of icons. Kinfire Chronicles is more like Tidal Blades 2 insofar as there is a main story being told by a sequence of scenarios, and much of that is just linear. There is no such thing as adventuring in an open world, and besides some minor branching or side quest options, there is no decision to take as to what to do next. In Elder Scrolls: BotSE you start by deciding in which region of the world to adventure, and what quest from what guild to pursue. In Kinfire Chronicles you start by opening box 1 for scenario 1. Kinfire Chronicles gives up freedom in exchange for accessibility and ease of bringing the game to the table.

And in the end, that is our decision to make. Do we prefer a game with more potential, but a higher barrier to entry? Or are we okay with less choice and a linear story in exchange for quick setup and better accessibility? How much tactical depth do we need, and how much work are we willing to put into learning the rules for more complex combat? Before actually playing a game, it is not always obvious to see how much effort a game demands, and even less how rewarding the experience from that effort is going to be. Especially if you buy a game years in advance via crowdfunding. It is totally possible to buy a huge box of game for $200 and then find that there isn't enough fun in there for the effort.