Navigator Lana

Designed by Mat Hart, Sherwin Matthews, Fraser McFetridge
Published by Steamforged Games Ltd

First Impressions Friday

While I have never played Elden Ring myself, I am familiar with Dark Souls games and Elden Ring in a house full of gamers. The video game was too time-consuming for me. It is the type of game you have to commit yourself to for an extended period, and fully understand you’ll die again. And again. And again. 

That said, what can the board game offer?

Treasures & Traps

Treasures

If you’re a fan of Elden Ring, you’ll likely love this for the lore and so many references back to the video game. The Adventure/Guide book features a well-written story that immerses you in the world. Even as an outsider only slightly familiar with the game, I enjoyed the storytelling aspect of it. It has a “Choose Your Own Adventure” feel. “What do you do? Draw # card for X and # card for Z.” 

The miniatures are highly detailed (unpainted), the player boards are nice and double-layered, and the artwork is solidly dark fantasy themed, all tying into the Elden Ring world. The box is huge and stores nearly all the bits and pieces that I saw (unless you got the double-layered board, it did not fit). The maps were part of a spiral-bound notebook, making it easy to store.

There was an “Exploration” phase of the game where you added on tiles as you went along, giving it a dungeon-crawl feel of exploring deeper into the environment. The combat system streamlines pretty well and has a fairly standard hand/deck building Combat Deck coupled with an Attribute Deck to help determine the success or failure of the outcome. 

Each player has a personal quest, and as the game progresses, they complete it, pull the next card from the box, and move on to another quest. This idea was an excellent way for each player to have an individual goal to work towards, in addition to the primary goal of the party for each encounter.

Traps

While there are pros above to provide some positivity, there were quite a few cons on the other side of that coin. If you have zero investment in the Elden Ring lore, this will fall squarely into just another fantasy game. It strongly felt like any other dark fantasy game with a popular IP slapped onto it. Since it is a Dark Souls inspired game, the bosses are nearly undefeatable. (Back to an upside, though, the system has a way to keep the game pushing forward, despite this.) 

This game comes with a bunch of cards. When I say a bunch, I mean it. The base set, The Realm of the Grafted King, has over 1200 cards. If a game has that many cards, it needs a solid system to organize them understandably. Elden Ring certainly lacked this organization. Countless times, we tried to shuffle through cards that should have been in a logical order, but were sometimes numbered correctly and then mixed in with other cards that didn’t make sense. The game comes with card dividers, but the strange mash-up of numbered cards—Events, Weapons, and Enemies —mixed into 150 cards in one section quickly became overwhelming. As if this wasn’t confusing enough, if you plan to stop your session partway (because really, who has time to play through 22 scenarios at once?), there was no convenient storage or method for keeping track of your accomplishments. There was a divider for your character, but I didn’t find it an easy way to store your progress. Everything just gets stuck into this one spot, and you’re unsure whether to place item cards in with it, the progress you’ve made on your character’s quest (which tracks through tokens placed on the card), or any sheet to write it down on.

Despite my wanting to like the exploration system, it felt uneventful. I liked the aspect of adding more tiles to explore, but I found it simple to go from one tile to another, pick up a token, and move on. You did your thing. Move on. And then, as an action, you can craft an item! Cool! I had six items (for the record, the other three players had one or none), and I still couldn’t craft anything. 

There was a minor combat moment where some players were in the combat encounter, and the game did try to incorporate a way to prevent stagnancy for the players not involved, but it still had a period of “just sit and wait.” It rotated from a round of combat to another player exploring, and continued in that momentum. After playing so many games, my friends and I usually know quickly when part of a game is going slower due to the learning curve, and when it’s just the game’s style. Now, this could have been part of the learning curve, but it was more just the style of play that struggled to find a balance between turns. 

We went through about five scenarios and played from roughly 11:30 to 3:00. For 3.5 hours of gameplay, I would have expected at least one moment of being like, ‘Yeah, that was awesome!’ Yet, I didn’t find myself saying that. There was one point where it asked if we wanted to stop and talk to a roadside merchant. I mean a classic video game translation of the roadside NPC that will either sell you something or provide information. We read the encounter, and he says, “Oh well, let me give you this then”. We thought, “Cool, we are getting something! See, I knew it was a good idea to stop and talk to him.” What item do we receive? — “You might see some of my kin along the way” (add cards XYZ and XYZ to the massive event deck). That’s it? So, our item is shuffled into this 100-stack deck, so our chances are about 2% of reencountering it? Again, it felt lacking in those big “I did a cool thing” moments. After five scenarios, I expected more umph. 

Fans of Elden Ring, Dark Souls, or campaign style games… you’ll probably enjoy this one.

Who Should Embark?

The Navigator’s Chart

No Safe Harbor: This game offered no refuge for my preferences, and while I wouldn’t seek it out or purchase it myself, I’d likely partake if others wanted to play.

The End Voyage

Overall, this one can keep on sailing past for me. I do believe that gamers who are faithful to Dark Souls or an Elden Ring fan will find the game enjoyable, especially when regularly played as a campaign, which is fine because that is likely the market for the game. As a hobby gamer not involved in the IP, I am perfectly content letting this one travel on. If someone offers to play it again, I wouldn’t turn it down. It wasn’t horrible by any means. However, I wouldn’t go out of my way to play this one again, or unquestionably would not purchase it for my collection. I feel some of the other big box campaign games, such as Roll Player Adventure or Kinfire Chronicles, hit the mark better.