The Divinity Original Sin Board game is here!

[legend]

After five whole fucking years since the kickstarter, the Divinity Original Sin board game finally arrived this month!

 

It's a purely coop game for 1-4 players. (If you play solo, you control two characters).

 

My wife and I have been playing through the game in 2 player mode and have finished many sessions so I thought I'd give my thoughts on it here.

 

Overall, the game is fantastic and though it was a long wait, there is a lot of good stuff here.

1. The artwork is stellar.

2. The materials have excellent quality -- especially if you got the bonus metal coins and boss figurines.

3. The core game mechanics of the video game have largely translated beautifully to the board game

4. I really enjoy the mix of exploration, combat, and light story telling.

5. For a game as complex as this, the setup and tear down is pretty good. We've mostly been keeping the core materials out (thanks Wyrmwood gaming table!) but it's still so much better than something like Gloomhaven where you have to devote your day to setup and tear down and custom organizers for the 8 billion parts. The box itself is very well laid out and keeps everything organized when you put them back. You will never have a problem where you feel like the box doesn't quite fit like it did when you first got it.

6. The game starts with a nice tutorial section and clearly labels what you should learn for that and then wait and learn the rest as you go. It works well.

7. The enemy rules are easy to follow.

8. The game does a great job allowing for out-of-combat skill checks that use properties unique to your origin.

 

 

The bad:

1. The game is super stingy about gold and I don't get it. We got gold the first two sessions (tutorial and first main session) and never since in something like 7 additional sessions (sessions are broken up into locations and give clear stop points if you want to pause. We usually play 1-2 sessions a day). This is not from a lack of exploring or losing combat, it's just not given out. And if you lose a fight, you often lose *all* your gold. It seems like the only way to make gold is to sell stuff to the merchant between sessions. But...

 

2. The merchant rules are tedious. You have to *pay* a substantial amount of gold (equal to your party level) just to visit the merchant and you get a small random draw of two decks to choose from what to buy. If you want to see a few more random items, you have to pay again. Selling only gives you half price and it would be easy to lose most of your gold just trying to find an item you want. This sucks and doesn't make buying items fun. I highly recommend you house rule this to something like pay no gold to see an item deck and one consumable deck and they pay if you want to see additional decks. Or something else less tedious.

 

3. The boss fights are horribly balanced for 2 players, at least the first 2 we played were. I think they balanced for 4 players and didn't have time to do proper balancing for fewer players. Outside of bosses, the way the game works for balancing is minions basically get one move + attack action per turn. For fewer players, the game scales down by spawaning fewer enemies, which naturally keeps the action economy balanced and this works quite well and those regular encounters are good.

 

Bosses, however, get their own action point system like the player. But the game doesn't adjust the action points the boss gets for the number of players. The only difference is how its health is *slightly* lower for fewer players. This is horrible, because it means the boss as an action point economy balanced for 4 players. When it's the boss' turn, they just go on and on and on and can often wipe the party in one turn before you can do anything.

 

Ultimately, the boss has

* 2-4x the party's cumulative health (meaning summing each players health together)

* Attacks that do much more damage than a player can do with attacks or skills, even with synergies

* More armor than any party member, which often makes player attacks wiff unless they can do direct (armor bypassing) damage

* Many more actions per turn than the total turns of the party <- this is the real killer

 

It's just makes the boss stupid. The only way for two player parties to win with rules as written is very lucky dice rolls. On the last boss we did from the haunted house expansion, the boss party wiped us in the first turn before we could even take a single action. While stacking all those things against the player is bad, the fundamental issue here is unlike the minion fights for which action economy naturally scales by spawning fewer minions for fewer players, the game does *not* scale the action economy of bosses for fewer players.

 

I haven't tried this yet, but we're planning a house rule where we scale the action points the boss gets by the number players assuming it's written for 4 players (e.g., half it for 2 players, as in our case). That might make it more reasonable.

 

 

So overall, fantastic game with a few problems that can probably be fixed with house rules, with the boss issues for two players (or one player) in particular being the real sour point.

 

 

[Kal-El814]

That boss stuff seems like a weird oversight. I assume it's not a Gloomhaven situation? The first boss we saw there had what seemed like an impossible amount of HP, but once we got the rules better they were manageable. Getting wiped before you can go just seems... busted.

[legend]

1 hour ago, Kal-El814 said:

That boss stuff seems like a weird oversight. I assume it's not a Gloomhaven situation? The first boss we saw there had what seemed like an impossible amount of HP, but once we got the rules better they were manageable. Getting wiped before you can go just seems... busted.

 

I don't think so. The rules are pretty manageable, especially if you played the video game whereas Gloomhaven feels vastly more complex, if nothing else but because of all the management of each unit.

 

It's possible it's a party make up issue. The game, to its credit, has *a lot* of different ways to build your character, but then maybe isn't well tuned for all party set ups. And unlike the video game, you can't go grind something else, or configure things in some crazy set up well outside the usual combat box to achieve victory. 

 

That said, with the third and fourth bosses we played yesterday we tried the house rule of halving their AP and they were kind of push overs. However, it was to an extent that seemed more than just because they had fewer moves. Their hits just weren't nearly as strong as the first two bosses that hit like a truck *and* kept taking moves from their huge AP pool. So maybe some bosses are well tuned and others not? I dunno. It might be worth trying a mid way point to reduce to 3/4ths AP instead of half. Although my wife tends to like this half rule and is much happier with the last two boss fights because she doesn't want an intense challenge  And she also dislikes just how long the boss turns go if you give them the full AP because it makes it boring to just have the boss go on and on.

[Kal-El814]

5 hours ago, legend said:

 

I don't think so. The rules are pretty manageable, especially if you played the video game whereas Gloomhaven feels vastly more complex, if nothing else but because of all the management of each unit.

 

It's possible it's a party make up issue. The game, to its credit, has *a lot* of different ways to build your character, but then maybe isn't well tuned for all party set ups. And unlike the video game, you can't go grind something else, or configure things in some crazy set up well outside the usual combat box to achieve victory. 

 

That said, with the third and fourth bosses we played yesterday we tried the house rule of halving their AP and they were kind of push overs. However, it was to an extent that seemed more than just because they had fewer moves. Their hits just weren't nearly as strong as the first two bosses that hit like a truck *and* kept taking moves from their huge AP pool. So maybe some bosses are well tuned and others not? I dunno. It might be worth trying a mid way point to reduce to 3/4ths AP instead of half. Although my wife tends to like this half rule and is much happier with the last two boss fights because she doesn't want an intense challenge  And she also dislikes just how long the boss turns go if you give them the full AP because it makes it boring to just have the boss go on and on.

 

I should look at the rulebook I guess