Fus Ro Dah!

With over 60 million copies sold, Bethesda’s Skyrim is one of the most successful video games ever. In the open world game, which is bursting with dragons, dark undead and secret magic, you can easily spend over 100 hours fighting your way through countless dungeons, mastering exciting quests and developing and improving your character in a variety of ways.
So it’s no wonder that this digital luminary has now been given its own board game adaptation. We were curious and tested the game for you.

First of all: this board game is definitely not for beginners! However, if you already have experience with extensive rulebooks and complex game cards, you are welcome to try Skyrim. A little prior knowledge of the video game is sometimes helpful, but not a must.

The game is played with six different characters: Imperial, Nord, Dunmer, Altmer, Orsimer and Kahjiit. Each character has their own skills, which are an advantage at one point or another in the game. Up to four players can take part, but solo mode is also possible.
Because Skyrim is very complex and promises a long playing time, it comes with lots of cards, tiles, tokens and dice. It therefore takes some time to get an overview and set everything up correctly.

You can play six chapters in two campaigns. However, we skipped the campaigns to start with and simply threw ourselves into the world of Skyrim – learning by doing!
At certain locations, e.g. in towns, cards with smaller quests can be drawn, which will then lead you to other quests. You can earn experience points, gold or useful materials with every successfully completed quest. Sometimes valuable treasures such as amulets, weapons or pieces of armor are also up for grabs.

The experience points help you to level up your character and thus increase your health, stamina and magical powers. The latter logically give you more power when fighting enemies.

Speaking of which, what does a fight like this actually look like?
If you enter a dungeon or cave, for example, you have the opportunity to explore this location and will then encounter enemies there. Your enemies are drawn at random from a pile, but generally correspond to your level. Both your attacks and those of your opponents are now rolled. The luck of the dice was not always on our side here and if this is the case, there are of course consequences. Lost battles can deprive you of valuable rewards.

The same applies to unfinished quests. If you fail to successfully complete one or more quests, this will affect the principality in which you complete them. Example: you fail an important quest in Weisslauf – the consequence of this is an increased danger level, which means that the market is closed or you can only enter the city if you pay gold. So every action you take can have consequences.

What is our conclusion?
Due to the lengthy preparation time, including studying the rules, it takes a while before you can start playing. However, you shouldn’t let this discourage you. After a bumpy start, we became more familiar with the rules and gameplay and then Skyrim the adventure game really starts to be fun. The ability to level up your character encourages you to take on more tasks and master them successfully. The numerous quests guarantee a long playing time and you can certainly play several times without getting bored. We recommend Skyrim for fantasy enthusiasts, passionate board gamers and fans of role-playing games.