Unboxing The Witcher: Old World Board Game

Board games based on video game IPs has generally been a pretty bad idea, but lately companies have been getting the experience just right. When the Kickstarter campaign for The Witcher: Old World ran last year, add me to the group of folks sceptical that the game would be any good. After seeing it at a trade event put on by Asmodee Canada, I was instantly intrigued. Last week, the standard retail version of the game arrived, and I was excited to open it up!

Don’t want to read about my unboxing experience? Check out the video above for an actual look!

There isn’t as much in the box as I would have expected – remember, this isn’t the version with tons of expansions and miniatures for the enemies – this is just the retail version which has miniatures for the Witchers, but uses cardboard tokens for the various monsters.

When you get the box open, you are met with the single, folded cardboard punchboard. Here you’ll find the various location tokens, gold & silver coins, and all of the monster tokens. They punch out very easily, and the quality is top notch. Beneath the punchboard is the player board, and this thing is absolutely beautiful. It is so very detailed, showing off a huge part of the Witcher world, including locations you may be familiar with if you played The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. I love board games that almost put ALL the items on the board, as opposed to in piles all around the board.

Some things are still going to be placed on the table – the monster tokens and cards, gold & silver pieces, and the Poker Dice, but most everything else is stored on the board. Everything is clearly marked, which means setting up the game is much easier than I would have thought. The board even has the three phases separated and printed so you know where you intersect with the board during each phase.

I always rave about board games with good inserts, and The Witcher: Old World has a great insert. Deep in the box is a little box that holds the Poker Dice, Witcher miniatures, coloured pieces, and plastic base rings. The box easily comes out and can be used to help setup the game, prior to being put back into the box and tucked away.

The player board sit nicely below this little box. I love that the player boards are dual layered, which means each of your little cubes that you will be using to track your Witcher progress in various attributes will nestle into a space, as opposed to just sitting loose on top of the cardboard.

On either side of the small container and player boards are places to store all your cards. There are a TON of cards in The Witcher: Old World, so it’s great to see dedicated spots to place them all. How you choose to sort your cards after each game is up to you, but there is plenty of space for all the included cards, with room for some expansions I would assume.

There are good board game unboxing experiences and bad board game unboxing experiences. This is definitely of the good variety, and made me even more excited to get this game to the table. I cannot wait to see how much I enjoy it!