Monster Hunter World: The Board Game Unboxing

I absolutely love unboxing a brand new board game, even when I know what components are going to be inside. Monster Hunter World: The Board Game is something else, with so many great components inside, and one small issue. Let’s take a look at what you get from Monster Hunter World: Wildspire Waste and Monster Hunter World: Ancient Forest!

I could treat these as two unboxing experiences, but that seems silly as each box is essentially identical in what you get, although obviously with different looking monsters, heroes, and the board. The cards, which vary from each game, feel and look the same, and are of fantastic quality. With as many cards as you will use in this game, I think having those high quality cards is very important.

When we talk about the generic pieces in each box – the 3 dice, health trackers for heroes and monsters, the cards, the stamina board, the tokens, etc – there are just a few things that are disappointing to me. I love a game that uses cardboard chits as long as those pieces easily come out of the punch board. That wasn’t the case with this game. I had to be VERY careful not to rip or separate the cardboard when trying to get the pieces out of the board – with care you shouldn’t have any issues, but just a bit of haste (which really shouldn’t be an issue) you could tear some of your tokens!

I also wish the stamina board was just a bit better quality. I do understand that including 4 cardboard stamina boards in the box would have created a larger box, but perhaps just a bit of a quality bump on the card-quality stamina board would have been nice!

What most people want to see out of this box, however, are the hunters and the monsters. The quality of the hunter sculpts are just OK in my opinion. They are quite small to help create that scaled look when next to the monsters, so I understand it’s harder to get the detail in those miniatures. It might be the colour choice for the heroes, but they feel just a bit underwhelming. I’m not passing on the game because of this, and I think a little bit of paint from an experienced painter could make them look phenomenal!

The monsters, however, are some of the best sculpts I have ever seen. There is detail on these monsters that even I didn’t expect. It would have been easy for Steamforged Games to minimize the detail in hard to see areas (beneath bellies, under tails, inside the mouth, etc.) but they did not. Every inch of these figures is highly detailed, and as I just said, easily some of the best sculpts I have ever seen. I think if the hero miniatures had been larger we would have seen this level of detail.

These monsters are massive, and I’m looking forward to slapping some paint on these as soon as possible. But even without paint, these are definitely going to pop on the table, and will draw onlookers to take a peak. This is a crowd pleasing game, and has a beautiful table presence, and I hope the gameplay lives up to the unboxing!