After ignoring the platform for what seems like the longest time, I've been slowly reacquainting myself with the Board Game Arena and all the various digitised joy that it brings. It has a strange mix of simple games translated almost just component to component to screen, to the bigger more crunchier affairs. Your Earths and Ark Nova's, Carnegie and City of the Big Shoulders, where now all the housekeeping and number crunching is done behind the scenes and it's relatively impossible to make an illegal move but at the same time still play a game and have absolutely not the first clue about how the game plays. It's highlighted to me that some games need to be tactile to work, and that other games that see a mass of calculations and numbers are actually extremely shallow affairs, where the working out of wins and loss was all part of the fun.
It's a world away from what Steamforged Games have been trying to achieve over the last eight years, with their various forays into the translation of the videogame IPs into tangible board game slices. The irony for Steamforged is that a lot of their cardboard property already exists in its final complete form in the digital space. Which is probably (apart from licensing) why they're yet to grace the Arena in person and also because Capcom already has that covered.
The tight rope that Steamforged treads is a balancing act of representing the videogame gameplay with turning the entire end product into a half arsed dungeon crawl hybrid with maths and tables, and sometimes it has embraced the journey fully with its Resident Evil series. Other times like Horizon Zero Dawn, it has simply taken a slice of the action and presented that as gameplay to an equal amount of boos and cheers.
With Monster Hunter World, Steamforged has chosen to loosen the belt a little and let itself chomp down on that extra course, diet be damned. The first thing is that the box is huge, almost double in height of the Horizon Zero Dawn and Resident Evil Boxes. For good reason too, as while there are only eight miniatures in the entire base game to play with, these miniatures stretch the definition of miniatures so far, they should be called mediumtures. They're huge. You painters out there are going to have little cups of joy overflowing when you paint them because you're going to need cups full of paint to cover these behemoths. Secondly, there's over 600 cards waiting to unwrap and being sorted and shuffled and ordered. You're going to have to chew your food to get through this lot. A chunky rulebook. An even chunkier quest book to accompany it all. I'm going there. Everything about this game shouts monster. I'm not sorry.
There are of course expected doubts once you dig in. When I saw the board for the first time, using the small circular nodes, I must admit that my first thoughts were back to the days of the Dark Souls board game, and I hoped we weren't going back down that frustrating road. The sheer number of cards screamed to me that there was going to be so much unnecessary over required set up. After all, we're trying to emulate a videogame that people spend weeks of their lives playing, and that alone requires representation of the various facets of what the videogame offers.
Luckily in terms of the set up and the teach, the rulebook demonstrates it comes from a team used to combining game set up and rule teach and you're practically on your way to starting your first turn by the time you separate out all of the various decks and chits. While the huge number of cards seem slightly intimidating, the iconography on the card backs makes lighter work of the initial set up.
Monster Hunter gives each of the four hunters their own set of equipment to play with, which they will upgrade during the game to make it stronger and more powerful to take on the larger beasts of pain. Even in the solo variant you'll always be fielding two hunters on the quest. You'll have an action deck to plan your attacks and a damage deck when you're successful, with an all too familiar life dial sitting at the side, recording all those delicious bump, bruises and loss of limbs. All in all the card colour palette is sombre, dull and full of darker colours, so sits on the table looking slightly sorry for itself.
Thank goodness for the monster cards and boards. It's like the cheeky intern crept in and decided to paint the town red, blue and yellow. Each of the fabled monsters is represented on the board in an art style that seems to be a mixture of a bastardised cave type painting, with illustrations of the monsters resplendent in bright colours that lift that entire part of the game but also serve to highlight the life points of the monsters you are hunting, plus the areas of the beast that can be attacked and where you have to be in order to deal out the damage. After the navy and browns of Resident evil, this is a real delight for the eyes and I'm hopeful this is repeated in future Steamforged Games.
Just when you expect Monster Hunter World to take the same direction as Horizon Zero Dawn, it then sets you a reading exercise. Actually it takes you down a chose your own adventure, where the first part of any quest that you take is about exploring, reading sections and then flicking back and forward between the pages of the quest book. It kind of makes sense as normally in the videogame, you're usually spending time gathering resources and potential extra resources to upgrade your kit. Fortunately this isn't a time wasting event as you can decide to try to mainline to the big bad, or explore a bit more and get the chance to gain extra potions, and upgrade materials and scout tokens. Scout tokens help decide the level of monster you'll be taking on. Have more tokens and the monster will have a deadlier move to deal with. Some quests you'll take on will require you to have a certain 'Scoutfly' level in order to meet the monsters you are trying to hunt. Then battle commences.
The battling in Monster Hunter is evidence that Sherwin Matthews is honing his craft when it comes to designing combat. There's controlled randomness in the combat cards that you'll place down to strike against the monster. There's some real thought gone in to how to bring the main bad guy to life when you are facing them on the arena, and this is important, because unlike Horizon Zero Dawn, or Resident Evil, you'll only ever be facing off against one enemy at a time and that enemy has come to the table with a whack of hit points and some attacks that can knock the wind out of you.
There's no dice, no rolling and no feeling like you got unlucky because you got two pips instead of four. Instead you have a system where you're told how many can attack and how many attack cards they can play in their stamina mat before they end their turn. There's damage cards that decide how hard you've hit and time cards that govern how long you have to do it in and what you do when your turn ends. As expected when you're facing foes of such a size, there's arcs to take into consideration and monster parts to break. And at the end of it all, you'll either walk away with claws and teeth and hide to use as weapon upgrades or limping back to head Quarters to regroup and consider another strategy.
Just like the videogame you'll make decisions to tackle tougher foes after you upgrade you weapons. Or you can take a Palico with you if you're not feeling as brave. It plays like an light RPG, with a light touch of narrative and hits like a focused miniatures combat game.
It's strange because as far as representing the videogame, it's probably up there with Resident Evil as being one of the more faithful representations that Steamforged has done. It certainly hasn't taken a lazy route of simply reskinning one of the other offerings in the portfolio and offering it up as a new experience. My only concern is whether the continual cycle of Scout, Hunt, Upgrade is going to be enough over a longer period of time after repeated plays and the game will become a preordained process rather than a dynamic challenge. But as with all of these things there is an abundance of expansions and additional content for those who want to be fighting monsters for as long as they wish to, including the latest Iceborne expansion For those who wonder if Steamforged have managed transfer a much loved Capcom franchise from screen to table, then on this occasion they have, and I think those fans will be very happy with this box of monstrous delights.
Lead Design - Sherwin Matthews
You can purchase your own copy from https://steamforged.com/en-gb/collections/monster-hunter-world-the-board-game
