Elden Ring is headed to the tabletop! Following in the wake of Dark Souls and Bloodborne, From Software’s latest is bei…
Elden Ring is headed to the tabletop! Following in the wake of Dark Souls and Bloodborne, From Software’s latest is being adapted into an upcoming board game — and Dicebreaker has had a first look at how tabletop studio Steamforged Games plans to cram the fantasy epic into a cardboard box.
Elden Ring: The Board Game looks to be as vast as its on-screen counterpart, spanning a number of upcoming standalone games and smaller expansions in order to cover the whole of the Lands Between. Players’ progress will carry across between each box (or they can jump in with a new, appropriately-levelled character), eventually forming a tabletop campaign matching Elden Ring’s story that Steamforged says will ultimately last over 100 hours.
The first of those core releases will be Realm of the Grafted King. Despite being the size of a footstool and requiring you to stick down $179 during the game’s upcoming Kickstarter campaign, the enormous box will cover only the starting region of Limgrave, its roughly 20-plus-hour campaign culminating with a final fight against Margit, the Fell Omen at the gates of Stormveil Castle. (A separate expansion will delve into the castle itself and include an encounter with demigod boss Godrick the Grafted King himself.)
Ahead of the board game’s crowdfunding campaign on November 22nd, Dicebreaker was able to play through a 90-minute preview of the upcoming game at Steamforged’s Manchester office.
The demo we were shown focused on showcasing the exploration and combat gameplay of the board game, but gave more than enough time to get a good understanding of how each session will play — and realise that Elden Ring: The Board Game is much more than a direct adaptation of the video game to cardboard. That is only a good thing.
Elden Ring: The Board Game is a game of two halves, separating out general exploration of the Lands Between before players dive into a climactic boss battle. More precisely, it’s a game of three thirds, with exploration estimated to take up an hour of each 90-minute session and the boss occupying the rest.
The final foe and players’ goals for each session — dictated by a number of ‘Guidance of Grace’ objective cards — are determined by the quest they’re on. Like wandering between dungeons in the video game, these quests won’t be in a fixed order — instead, players can freely choose which they take on next (and swap to a different one if they find their current boss too tough) along a non-linear campaign.
In the case of our tutorial demo, our party needed to hunt down a number of Stakes of Marika — which here add to a pool of shared lives for the group during the last fight — collect some resources and defeat some enemies out in the open world before we were able to confront the Beastman of Farum Azula in Limgrave’s Groveside Cave.
In a stark contrast to the flawed Dark Souls: The Board Game, which buried its best moments between frustrating and exhausting grind, Elden Ring: TBG’s pre-boss prep is kept relievingly light. Each player gets three actions on their turn, with the choice to move, add a new hex tile to the board — gradually revealing the modular map — and interact with one of the various tokens that litter the Lands Between. These icons smartly reimagine the video game’s landmarks in cardboard form, from Effigies of the Martyr that can be used to summon your companions into battles (more on that in a moment) to map pillars that must be reached before a second stack of hex tiles can be placed.
