Skyrim The Adventure Game Unboxing - Frozen Adventures In The North

When the wind howls high on the frosty peaks of Windhelm, a call to heroism and adventure must be answered. And now, with Skyrim The Adventure Game by Modiphius, you can return to Skyrim (again!) by bringing the action to your tabletop. Modiphius just provided us with a copy to review, but before we sink our dragon teeth into this massive game, we thought we'd put together a quick unboxing article to show you some of the contents and speak a bit to the nature of the game. So, in the name of the High King, here's our Unboxing of Skyrim The Adventure Game.

What's Included in Skyrim The Adventure Game?

Included in the core box of Skyrim The Adventure Game is everything 1 to 4 players need to jump right into the action and begin their adventures. Core components include:

Contents :

• 1 Game Board
• 1 Rulebook
• 1 Tutorial/Scenario Book
• 6 Player Figures 
• 8 Skill Test Dice
• 1 Enemy Dice
• 4 Character Boards and 4 Health, Stamina, and Magicka Cubes
• 18 Armor Cubes
• 800+ cards, including almost 300 Quest Cards, and almost 200 Item cards!
• 300+ tokens, including skill, experience, gold, and wandering monsters!
• Plus, as a bonus, the Legendary card expansion unlocked during the original crowdfunding campaign

The game itself is played over a series of two campaigns, each with multiple quests. To play the game, you'll read from the Scenario book to start your adventure, and then move to drawing cards kept neatly in a tuck box. You'll move your miniature around the map, interacting with familiar locales and delving into dungeons to defeat all sorts of enemies. Player health, stamina, and magicka are tracked with colorful plastic cubes, and there are tokens upon tokens, upon tokens to mark your map as you progress.

What goes into the setup of Skyrim The Adventure Game?

Setting up Skyrim The Adventure Game is, like many other big box adventure games, all about sorting, sorting, sorting. There are three sheets of roughly 300 tokens to be punched and sorted, with plenty of plastic baggies to help keep them all separated (for the most part, you may need to combine some tokens frequently used together, like the resource tokens). There are also tons of cards, both large and small, that need to be opened up and placed in order. Luckily, these come well packaged, and you won't have to comb through your piles to ensure everything goes where it should.

Though the rulebook does have a section dedicated to all components of the box and the setup of your first game, it can be a bit difficult to understand exactly what you're sorting - and why - before reading through the entire rulebook. Maybe we were just overwhelmed by all the options, but the setup guide left us a little confused. Once we read through the rather long rulebook, we had a better sense of when, where, and why we'd interact with each component, and when we went back and referenced the setup again everything made much more sense.

Skyrim The Adventure Game Is Big On Tokens, Light On Miniatures

One important thing to note before going all in on Skyrim The Adventure Game is the fact that, in the entire box, there are only six miniatures - one for each of the playable characters you can play as in your game. This makes sense, from a gameplay standpoint, as you battle by flipping a card from a deck of enemy monsters and roll against that card. So an extra boatload of minis wouldn't really enhance the game experience all that much.

But it should be noted if you're looking for a new hoard of plastic Daedra, you won't find it in the base game. There are upgrade packs available containing plastic monster minis, but just wanted to call out a fair warning: what you get here is rather limited. That being said, the miniatures included are well-sculpted, and feature each playable character in a fun, dynamic pose.

Skyrim The Adventure Game Production Quality Is Worthy Of A Jarl

From the card stock to the absolutely massive map to the above-mentioned miniatures, the production quality on Skyrim The Adventure Game is top notch. The map is gorgeously and clearly illustrated, depicting most all of Skyrim and many important places of interest. The tokens are clear and representative of their purpose (which is never a guarantee). And the storage solutions in this game are fantastic.

Along with boxes complete with card dividers to sort the cards the drive the story by the hundreds, you'll find tuck boxes to help you "save" each of your characters, giving a place to store their cards, upgrades, skills, and more. There's also a box to store your board state as well, as you'll likely be adding new cards to various decks as you progress in your game. All in all, it's a big game that could have turned unwieldy if not for these smart decisions.

We're still diving into the game and will report back with our full review, but for now we're loving what we're seeing from this first unboxing. Just remember, if you're in it for thrilling adventure and tons of great choices, this is for you. But if you're a miniatures fiend, it may be worth investing in an upgrade kit to fully deck out your game.

The copy of Skyrim The Adventure Game used in this review was provided by Modiphius.