Monster Hunter World: The Board Game
April 20, 2021 | ≈ 639 words | Monster Hunter World The Board Game
Thoughts on the Monster Hunter World: The Board Game board game
yeah i just skimmed through the rules.
i don’t know if you ever heard of Kingdom Death: Monster, but this game looks very inspired by it. i don’t really care about the progression but it looks like standard kdm go back to town and convert monster parts to things. making your characters better is fun so i assume this part will be fun. this part of the game makes the game very long. because it’s a campaign.
the part i actually care about is the combat which looks pretty fun.
there are some lame things that keep you from having fun forever because you attack by playing cool cards with cool card abilities, and you attack the boss while it’s attacking you (which is neat) but if you don’t wanna die you have to dodge sometimes (makes sense) but you dodge by playing your cool cards with cool card abilities F A C E - D O W N which is about as not cool as how i just said face-down. this is lame. this is lame because sometimes you have to do nothing so you don’t die. it is not cool to do nothing. and when I say nothing I mean nothing. it is not a decision to do nothing so you don’t die and do more nothing. sometimes it is a decision to choose which cards you lose, and i’ll touch on that in a second.
i’d have to actually play it to see how often lame things happen because it’s hard to imagine the tempo of the game without seeing any of the cards or playing out turns.
I think the combat in this game is very evocative because of the weapon styles from the video game turn into the asymmetric decks that players use in combat, but a lot of the experience hinges on whether you build your character to be tanky enough that you actually have meaningful decisions during the fights. And by meaningful decisions i mean you’re not forced to dodge constantly. i’m going to pick this spot right here to say i literally never played monster hunter before this has been a public service announcement thank you. This is the kind of game where if you can’t take a few hits you’re going to have a miserable time and the kind of game where the more you get hit the less decisions you’ll have and the less decisions you have the more you’re going to be doing nothing and the more you’re doing nothing the less fun you will have. or you’ll be resetting; most likely will be resetting a lot.
Also the game probably doesn’t function as a one time session game, and a lot of the game probably only works as a campaign that relies on progression system to make your characters better (and tankier). If your characters aren’t good (read: tanky), your relatively interesting decisions in combat will be reduced to “I need to dodge every time or I die, so this will play this card face-down in defense mode”, or even worse, you’ll think you don’t have to dodge, get reduced to enough health and you realize “oh, I have to dodge or I die anyway, but I got to hit the thing once and play cards face-up, but now its all face-down from here oh look at the time it’s miserable”. if you are tanky i guess you get to play the game and choose which cards you lose which is a Tough And Interesting Decision. Otherwise, I think the game looks pretty good, mainly because the combat system is very thematic (or evocative. take your pick).
oh and yeah the minis probably. they look pretty good so that makes sense.