Gothic: A Shadow's Quest is a cooperative campaign-style board game with RPG elements for one to five players, based on the original Gothic from 2001 -- or more accurately, the recent remake from June 2026. Set in a fantasy prison colony where convicts were originally sent to mine magic ore to fuel the kingdom's war against the orcs, the prisoners since revolted and took control of the colony, splitting into three Camps based around different ideologies, that each sustain themselves through different means. In this game, which takes place before the events of the video game, you play as Shadows of the Old Camp -- the original camp that still trades magic ore with the king -- working together to explore the Valley of Mines map having scripted encounters that you read from an adventure book based on the things you discover at each location, while also fighting deadly creatures on a separate side board on your way to solving a series of main quests and side quests given to you by various NPCs. Surviving encounters and completing quests will grant you assorted resources like magic ore and experience points, which you can spend towards improving your character by buying new equipment or training your stats and skills. This is important because enemies do not scale to your level, so you will need to level up to face tougher encounters later in the main quest, or in more dangerous regions of the map. Players work together to solve a series of main quests that tell a loosely over-arching story spanning multiple sessions and up to 60+ hours in total, but you're also free to just explore the Colony in a non-linear fashion while also working on whatever side-quests you come across. The game is being crowd-funded through Gamefound with no plans for a future retail release; the campaign is set to launch on September 30th, 2026, with an anticipated fulfillment date in the summer or fall of 2027. It will have three pledge levels to include "standard" cardboard standees for enemies, "deluxe" acrylic standees, or "premium" 3D miniatures.
The version of the game that I'm previewing, here, is a prototype and therefore is still very much a work-in-progress, so it does not necessarily reflect the final product that everyone will receive since everything is subject to change. Some graphics and artwork are clearly just placeholders and will be updated for the full release, and there are various production issues with this print run that they're already aware of and planning fixes for, while other things like specific gameplay mechanics, enemy and item balancing, and the complexity of the narrative encounters, for example, are all constantly being refined and expanded. The "global threat rate" tracker that this prototype uses has supposedly already been replaced with a more localized system to affect specific locations independently, instead of the entire colony all at once, so this specific mechanism, for instance, is already out-dated. There may be other improvements to the game since this version got manufactured, and the designers are planning even more changes and potential enhancements through stretch goals, which will offer expanded variety in some of the item cards you can uncover, plus more in-game depth given to the quests and exploration encounters, among other things. The previous prototype that I tested featured a one-off, "random adventure" scenario meant to be completed in one session, which is not represented in this prototype, so I'm not sure if that will still be an option in the full release, and the campaign that's presented in this prototype is likewise not the same campaign that will be featured in the final version, which will allegedly be "completely new" with a "complete overhaul" of the campaign book. But since this is the version I have, this is the version I'm going to preview; just understand that it's hard for me to predict what the final game will be like, and so take all of this with a grain of salt and some understanding that things will change during the crowdfunding campaign and as game development continues.
Speaking as a longtime fan of Gothic and an avid board gamer for the last 12 years, a board game based on one of my all-time favorite video games is right up my alley, and so I was extremely excited when "A Shadow's Quest" was first announced back in early 2025. But when viewing the original crowdfunding campaign on Gamefound, my excitement turned into extreme skepticism in large part due to the campaign itself telling us very little about how the game actually works, with what little we could see not looking very interesting, and then not really offering a good value for backers in certain regions of the world in terms of manufacturing and shipping costs. After receiving a lot of feedback and criticism from prospective backers, THQ Nordic eventually cancelled that campaign and vowed to re-work the game design and shipping policies for a new campaign. An updated prototype followed about six months later and was actually sent out to content creators in anticipation of a campaign re-launch, but following feedback from that prototype, THQ Nordic once again decided to postpone the campaign in favor of re-working the game design. And so here we are with officially Round 2 of a new crowdfunding campaign nearing its launch date, and I was fortunate enough to receive a prototype for the revised-revised version, which is much improved from what I saw on the original campaign page, and indeed much improved from the previous prototype that I tested back in November 2025.
Now, please note that this article is not meant to be a full-on "how to play guide" -- if you want to see how the game works in practice, my playthrough video shows all of that from a handheld POV and I explain all the specific rules and mechanics as I go. This varticle is just my Final Thoughts, with a brief overview of the basic mechanics to provide context, to serve as feedback for the designers on what I like and would like to see improved. For this video, I'll be considering how authentic it feels as an adaptation of the Gothic experience; how good it plays compared to other similar types of board games that I've experienced; and what kind of audiences I would recommend it to, if at all. This copy was sent to me for free, but THQ Nordic is not paying me to produce content for them, so this is all my honest opinion on everything.
Watch this same article in video format!
Before getting into my Final Thoughts, let me take a moment to summarize how the game works. If you already know all this, then feel free to skip ahead to the actual review portion of this article.
Each player
begins with two learning points and a certain amount of magic ore (the
in-game currency), which you can use to train your stats and skills or
buy better equipment at the start of the game. In the campaign, the market starts out being seeded with weaker, lower-level equipment, but as you advance through chapters merchants' stock improves to include newer and better options. As you explore the map and complete
quests, you'll gain experience points towards level-ups which will give
you more learning points and other bonuses to help improve your
character, like gaining extra energy to use in combat or a free point of health or mana. Any time your party is back in the Old Camp, you treat it as a rest site where you can recuperate lost health and mana; buy and sell resources; grill up your raw meat; trade herbs for potions with the alchemist; and other such tasks, before setting back out to explore the map.
As previously mentioned, your goal is to complete a few different main quests in each chapter. These require that you visit specific locations on the map and complete an encounter by reading a specific entry from the campaign book, which will usually involve a specialized combat scenario that you read from the combat book and play out on a separate hex board. Once complete, you then return to the quest-giver in the Old Camp to receive your reward. Some NPCs have reputation levels that can increase or decrease depending on the decisions you make when interacting with them, and becoming friendly with certain ones can unlock them as special skill trainers. Moving around the map allows you to draw the corresponding location card to resolve various types of encounters therein, which can include finding small bits of free loot lying around, hunting creatures in the area, talking to an NPC, or resolving any number of other types of narrative encounters which you read from the campaign book, often times with choices to make that will send you to other branching entries. Once completed, these activities are then marked off the glossy-finished cards with an erasable marker. As you spend time in the world, by moving about or sleeping at the Old Camp, the threat level increases, to a point where ambushes can start to occur in certain locations; the more threat tokens have accumulated in the pool, the more likely an ambush is to occur. Surviving an ambush then removes one token from the pool -- until another eventually replaces it. Different spots on the map have different colors on them, which correlate to the relative safety level of the types of enemies and encounters you can experience therein -- yellow being easier, orange a little tougher, and red the most dangerous.
At certain times gameplay will then move to a larger encounter board where map scenarios are created from two ring books, providing terrain with different types of obstacles that can block movement or line of sight in different ways, in addition to other features like dead corpses or treasure chests or meat bugs that you can interact with to gain loot -- not to mention the initial spawn points for different creatures, and hidden objects or events that aren't revealed until you get close enough. On this map, you'll be trying to complete your main objective, which can vary from things like defeating all the enemies, or escorting an NPC to a location and keeping them alive, or destroying an inanimate object, or solving a riddle by finding clues in the environment. During this segment of the game, you alternate between player turns and enemy turns, spending energy on your turn to perform actions like moving, attacking, using items, interacting with objects, etc, and then resolving the enemy AI on their turn. Enemies have simple rules for activation, basically only acting if they have direct line of sight on a player and are within their designated aggro range, or if they can "sense" your presence within a certain number of spaces, or if an adjacent enemy of the same type has already aggro'd that round; players generally pick the shortest logical paths for enemies to move along, and prioritize targets that are closest. Enemies have different stats and special abilities which can make the fights play out a little differently depending on what you're fighting.
And that's basically how you play. So now, let's move on to my Final Thoughts.
Let me start off by saying that I think this game has potential and that the designers are on the right track with things. The core gameplay loop of exploring the map having narrative encounters to represent things that you see or do while out and about, and then stopping to play out a more tactical scenario for a specific quest, is almost exactly what I would've envisioned from a Gothic board game, so I'm generally pleased with this premise. The fact that the first iteration didn't have this world map, but instead a purely abstract progress tracker that was simply meant to represent your "Journey" or whatever, shows that the design team is listening to feedback and making positive changes to things, since the world map by itself is already a huge improvement in making the board game feel like a more authentic Gothic experience. As an adaptation/representation of the source material, it does a pretty good job in highlighting the actual, important locations from the setting, while also tailoring thematically appropriate encounters for those spaces as it would be in the video game.
Like for instance, you're not going to have encounters against orcs while wandering around in the areas immediately outside of the old camp -- that only ever happens in the orc lands, the orc cemetery, the old orc arena, and other such locations. Because that's where the orcs would be. Instead, you'll be running into scavengers and molerats in the main areas outside the camp, and if you wander into the woods you might encounter wolves, or possibly snappers. As such, enemies are all placed where they would logically be based on the video game, and the types of encounters likewise make thematic sense for the respective area -- like stopping to drink some schnapps with someone in the rice fields of the New Camp, or finding a treasure chest that's been swept out to sea at the shipwrecked beach. Thus far, everything I've seen has made sense and has been consistent with the ideas established in the video game, and all of the new events for things that weren't depicted in the video game feel appropriately believable. There are certain liberties being taken with the source material, of course, like with certain caves being much bigger in this game's encounter book, so it's not a perfect 1-to-1 adaptation, but it's in the right spirit of things to where I appreciate all that it does right and don't get hung up on those kinds of minor, nitpicky deviations.
Probably the most interesting thing for this game is that, with it being set before the video game, it gives the designers chances to tell stories that expand on some of the lore and events that players are already familiar with but never actually got to see happen. The famously-deceased Nek, for instance, is alive at the time of this board game, and you get to interact with him and do a quest where you explore a cave full of molerats for him. Another quest depicts the events that led to an ore baron becoming the undead guardian of the crypt in the stone circle, as mentioned by Milten during the quest to gather the focus stones.
So things like that are fun to see as a fan of the video game, but I'm not certain how well the board game stands on its own if you don't already know the source material. This prototype added location cards, which were absent in the previous version, and these do show you a picture of what it looks like, along with a brief synopsis of some of the lore and geographic details of the area, so I'm sure it's possible for a layman to follow along with the basic details of the world and setting -- but I feel like when I play this, my mind is filling in a lot of details based on my familiarity with the video game, and I'm drawing on those past experiences to paint a more immersive picture in my mind than what the cards or gameplay mechanics are actually doing by themselves. Some of the best aspects of the video game, like the incredible immersion, or the unique atmosphere, or the engaging real-time active combat system, don't really translate to a board game format, so realistically it can only do so much to capture the same feeling as playing the video game. But I feel like there's enough here for me, as a fan of the source material, to buy into the setting.
Another thing the video game does well, that the board game has a hard time implementing, is the "zero to hero" progression curve, since you start out capable of fighting wolves and minecrawlers very early, and thus you don't have as much room to grow. That's fine thematically, since you do start the game as Shadows, but I just never really felt challenged by anything unless I was deliberately stepping way out of line to fight elite boss-level enemies that were explicitly too high a level for me. I mean I was even able to kill a level 7+ black wolf at level 2 just by virtue of a few lucky rolls and having adequate healing supplies handy. The rules for reviving downed characters may have contributed to that as well, because they seem to imply there is no penalty if the downed character can be healed within one turn, and so it was surprisingly easy to just cast healing spells on my mage while the fighter tanked and dealt out hits. To be fair, the relative ease with which I took down that black wolf may have been due to the game's balancing still being a work in progress, and thus we might expect things to be tightened up some more with further playtesting, but I'm honestly not sure I would want this board game to have the same kind of harsh difficulty curve as the video game, since death and failure in a board game involves heavy real-time consequences versus just quick-loading a save state in a video game for a minimal amount of time lost and no real consequences. So in my opinion, it's okay if the board game is easier and presents a shallower difficulty progression than the video game. Now granted, usually in cooperative board games it's good for them to be challenging, and I usually advocate that you should lose more often than you win so that winning actually feels like an accomplishment, but in a game like this, I feel like the journey and your sense of adventure is ultimately more important than simple win or fail states, and so I would wish for a difficulty setting that facilitates the story and adventure more so than being challenging just for the sake of being challenging.
Where things become a bit of an issue for me is that there's not much dynamic change to the gameplay as you level up in this board game, since everything associated with leveling up and getting stronger is largely passive, in the sense that you mostly just increase background numbers while repeating the same core actions over and over and over again. You increase your skill training with your desired weapon type, and now you score critical hits on 11s and 12s instead of just 12s, and your attacks cost one less energy. Or you increase your strength and now you score successful hits on 6s and above, instead of 7s. Or you learn the hunting ability which lets you gather animal trophies on a die roll of 2 or higher instead of 3 or higher. This is a far cry from the video game (both the original and remake) where each level of combat training unlocks some new active ability, like longer and faster combos, parries, and finishers, among other things like roll-dodges, but even without that basis of comparison, it's a bit lame for just a board game as well, especially one with a campaign that will allegedly last 40+ or maybe even 60+ hours.
To be clear, these passive upgrades do make a significant impact on your character's strength, and it is satisfying to be several levels higher and find yourself able to confidently one-shot enemies that used to take two or three hits to kill on average, so leveling up is still gratifying in a raw sense; I just really wish there were some kind of active abilities you could unlock to make the combat system grow and evolve as you level up. Because as of right now, the most interesting the combat gets through character progression is eventually achieving enough energy and efficiency to decide between making two regular attacks or one special attack, and learning the acrobatics skill to be able to jump over certain types of obstacles. The mage character is a little better off, in that you gain entirely new spells with each magic circle, albeit with some questionable mana-per-damage ratios that make certain higher level spells less desirable than I feel they really should be, but even with these, there could still stand to be more mechanical variety. Like Wind Fist should really push enemies back a certain number of spaces; Control should let you take actions as the target enemy during your turn, with however much energy you spent to cast the spell; Fire Storm should hit up to 2 extra enemies if they're adjacent to your target; Ice Block should emphasize debilitating an enemy's energy so they can't take actions in exchange for dealing far less damage; Chain Lightning should have a 50% chance to jump to a target 1-2 spaces away with cascading chain reactions until it eventually fails; and so on. As it is, a lot of the spells are just minor variations on "Do X amount of damage" or "cause X amount of fatigue" which is not all that exciting and is not necessarily accurate to the source material. But regardless of all that, for pretty much all playstyles, the gameplay is not much different when you're level 1 in chapter 1, or level 15 in chapter 5.
So like, what if, when you level up weapon training, you could choose one of two special ability cards to add to your repertoire, which would be a whole new type of action you could do in combat? Like maybe a one-handed fighter could choose from a dash attack that closes an extra two spaces (which is effectively like the quick attack that enemies can do), or a retreat ability similar to what Scavengers do, to give you a free movement away from an enemy after attacking if you choose to do so? Then the next level-up would add two more choices to the pool, so you effectively get to choose two out of four total options, which might include a stun ability or a parry ability? Maybe archers could get penetrating shots that hit multiple enemies in a line, or that pin enemies in place so they can't move. Or maybe you could get a super-powered attack that could only be used once per combat, with you flipping the card over to indicate it's been used, or perhaps rotated to give two or three uses? I don't know, these are just spitballing ideas, but I just want the combat to have a little more active decision-making with choices and Things to Do™.
Because as it is, the combat itself is somewhat simplistic, and frankly a little boring to me. It's a fairly standard action-point system where you have X amount of points to spend per turn and different actions will cost Y amount of points, and then you spend the majority of your turns simply moving and attacking, where it basically just boils down to trading dice rolls to see who will win each fight. At which point, the outcomes are determined largely by your stats and luck of the dice, with minimal player input to influence things. At most, your decisions amount to matters like "should I bother trying to block this attack, knowing that it's going to reduce my energy on the next turn and prevent me from doing a stronger attack," and "where should I position myself to selectively aggro the fewest enemies at a time." A lot of decisions seem pretty obvious, or else are dictated by circumstance. Like it's presented as a choice whether you'll do a standard attack with your chosen weapon or a special attack, but you pretty much just always do the strongest attack possible with whatever energy you have remaining. Or the situation might be "I'm about to die, so now would be a good time to use my healing items." Or "this elite enemy is going to get a stronger attack after every two hits I deal to it, so maybe it's better for me to utilize fewer, stronger hits versus spamming more weaker attacks." The situations are usually pretty straightforward, and thus there isn't much satisfying decision-making involved, here, because there just isn't much in the way of viable alternative options to make you weigh the costs and benefits of different courses of action.
Other actions like blocking and concentrating were generally unappealing to me because the whole fatigue system just felt a little too punishing, since it reduces your energy pool to start the next round, and then costs even more energy to relieve your fatigue by catching your breath, thus effectively becoming a "lose half your next turn" mechanism. So it usually made more sense to me to just save the energy to be able to execute a stronger attack to try to kill the enemy faster, thus preventing an entire extra attack. The best defense being a good offense, in other words. So I'm not sure the whole blocking and fatigue system is implemented as well as it could be. I would have more incentive to use those abilities if, for example, I could use left-over energy to perform those actions, with gaining fatigue being an option in the event that I'm out of energy, or if you could automatically recover one point of fatigue at the start of a combat round.
On the bright side, the mechanics are easy to follow and make intuitive sense, so combat flows reasonably well and isn't overly fiddly or cumbersome. It is, in fact, a vast improvement over the previous prototype whose combat was so tedious and obnoxious that I basically hated it.
[Excerpt from my unreleased review of the previous prototype: "Okay, this enemy normally has seven energy to spend this turn but their behavior card is giving them plus one energy, so eight energy total this turn, and they're moving two spaces, which means they have six energy left, and they'll spend three of that energy attacking, leaving them with three leftover energy which is enough to trigger one extra Hit Point but not quite enough for two extra Hit Points, so they'll be doing three base Hit Points plus one from their bonus for four total, which will be reduced to one because of my three armor, so that one Hit Point becomes one Damage, and then their base Damage is adding two to that, plus another two from their special ability which got activated by the behavior card, for five total Damage, and the Wild Strike symbol makes it so the first point of Damage will require two points of Block, so that first point of Damage drops my Block from three to one, and then my one remaining Block will reduce the remaining four Damage down to three, meaning I will now lose three health."]
It previously took way too much time to calculate a simple thing like damage with all the weird modifiers and arbitrary rules that could come into play every turn, while making conversions between four different types of offensive and defensive numbers, where the order of operations matters. For this prototype, all of that stuff is gone, and everything has been streamlined significantly to follow a consistent formula every time, with the calculations being quick and easy to administer. "Enemies roll this many dice, and they need this number or higher to score a hit, adding +1 to that value for each point of defense or block that you have." Totally straightforward and easy to manage, so it goes faster and flows much better now. They also got rid of a previous rule that had new enemies spawn into the battle every other round, which I presume was originally intended to keep pressure on the players to get in and get out quickly, but ultimately just bogged down every combat encounter with excessively more and more combat -- now, there are a fixed number of enemies to start every fight, unless more would be spawned through a special event in the scenario book -- which makes the fights more manageable without being so oppressive.
With these changes, I now actually tolerate the combat in this prototype. So it's not like the combat is bad by any means -- it's certainly functional and gets the job done. Like I said earlier, it's intuitive and dare I say even has some elegance in its simplicity. However, it's still not a positive selling point in my opinion. The way I see it, you either have intense, tactical combat with lots of depth and tough decision-making, in which case the combat is the whole reason you play the game, or you keep it simple and use it mainly as a tool in service of some other greater area of importance -- like more abstract, over-arching strategic gameplay, or narrative storytelling. This board game leans more towards the latter in my opinion, which is fine, maybe even preferable, but I don't feel like there's enough extra stuff going on during these combat encounters to compensate for the simplistic gameplay. Like I feel that they should have more interesting and varied map designs that require a special approach to navigate them, or more narrative events that can happen in or as a result of the fight, or more mechanical variations that make each fight play out in a special way, to make each one feel more unique. As it is, they all just felt pretty similar to me, with largely interchangeable variables that weren't enough to mix up the gameplay sufficiently. You combine that with the passive progression system where gameplay doesn't really change or evolve as you level up, in conjunction with just how much combat there can be, between hunting multiple groups of creatures at every location, fights that can break out through the encounter book, ambushes, and quest scenarios, and I just lost all interest in the combat beyond a certain point. In some cases, you can choose to ignore or skip combat, which is nice, but that's also a double-edged sword because those simpler fights are a good way to earn experience and healing items and so there is heavy incentive to go through with those kinds of fights. But in reality, it does feel like grinding, which isn't always fun in a video game, and I would argue is even less fun in a board game. It makes me wonder if it would be possible to simplify the "hunt" encounters by turning them into more abstract skill checks, because it does get a bit tiring having potentially four, five, six, or maybe even seven combats at the same location.
In my experience, the combat scenarios were just too simplistic and repetitive, to where I just started skipping fights altogether and estimating the amount of health, mana, and resources I would spend, just because it had become so rote that I knew there wouldn't be anything interesting or exciting happening to make it worth my time playing out the entire fight round-by-round. The quest objectives, for instance, usually amount to just "go here and kill stuff." Which would be fine if the combat mechanics were interesting and engaging, but they're really not. Even when they mix in other objectives like having to solve a riddle, or destroy an object, you basically just move to a location then roll dice to attack stuff to advance progress on their respective tracker, for not much mechanical difference from the standard "kill all the enemies" objectives. The "solve a riddle" objective, for instance, basically just tells you to do the same types of basic actions you do in every single other combat scenario, except now you roll a d6 after each one to see if you randomly gain progress towards completing the quest. That's a case where it feels like there should be some kind of actual puzzle to solve, maybe with temporarily sacrificing combat dice in a sort of dice placement mechanism to solve a simple equation on the scenario card. The missions where you have to escort someone are the only ones that feel at least somewhat interestingly varied in that it's more of a defensive task with extra consideration like having to spend your own energy moving the NPC and keeping them alive since they have limited health and can't fight back. And that feels weirdly counter-intuitive to suggest that the escort quests are actually the best and most interesting, considering that escort quests are notoriously derided in gaming media. The map layouts are somewhat generic and thus rarely played an interesting role in how I approached the scenario, and the enemies -- while having different stats and usually some kind of special ability -- behave generally the same in the grand scheme of things, and so it didn't really change things much if I was fighting snappers or minecrawlers or skeletons or whatever else.
In short, there was rarely anything in the fights I could see that made me want to care about actually executing them in full, be that fun tactical decisions or fun story events, which is a stark contrast to games like D&D where every fight may have strong narrative implications for the events to follow depending on what conditions the DM has concocted and how you react to things, or compared to something like Gloomhaven where the whole combat system is an engaging puzzle of playing cards with unique special abilities in the right combination and order while trying to maximize how long you can make those cards last before permanently losing them for the rest of the fight. Another game like Mechs Vs Minions has relatively simplistic rules and combat mechanics, but that game mixes things up significantly in each of its mission scenarios to create unique gameplay loops that make it feel fresh and interesting, despite always using the same core ability cards and basic enemy types for every fight. So the combat scenarios in this game could be better with some more variety and creativity, I feel -- they don't need complex mechanics muddying up the gameplay, just more Things to Do™ with regards to completing objectives, besides just standing there rolling dice to trade hits.
The one thing that does interest me during the combat scenarios, is the hidden text you can read during certain times, like when you get close enough to a discovery point to reveal some new information about the battlefield, or when certain events happen during the fight. That gives the fights an alluring sense of mystery that I find compelling, just wanting to know what's going to happen when I reveal that text. It's a little disappointing how often they turn out to be simple prompts to spawn a human corpse or treasure chest, however, so in practice they were often somewhat anticlimactic in this prototype. But I can see a lot of potential with conditional triggers that cause a mechanical effect or narrative event to occur when or if something in particular happens during a fight, so I would hope to see this system expanded more in the full release to give the combat scenarios a little more dynamic excitement. Supposedly, the campaign will be more fleshed-out than it currently is in this prototype, which I presume was mainly intended to test basic gameplay mechanics and progression more so than crafting an elaborate narrative with lots of unique scenarios, so I have some hope that we will, in fact, see improvement in the combat scenarios in the full release.
Ultimately, I found much more enjoyment just reading through the campaign book as I explored the Colony, seeing what seemingly random, unexpected encounters I would get into, and then making decisions and seeing where they would lead. There's obvious room for improvement here, as well, of course, given that I wasn't always impressed by the actual text in most of the encounters. A lot of the character interactions, for instance, are really crude, with some being as simple as just saying "What's up?" and then "Hey, here's a quest you can do for me." It's all rather perfunctory, with no real sense of personality or actual characterization coming through the text. Meanwhile, a lot of the decisions are basically just "do something" or "do nothing," or else they involve something that's obviously good and beneficial versus something that's obviously bad and detrimental. The choices, therefore, are incredibly straightforward and not usually very satisfying to make. As with the combat scenarios, I want to chalk this up to it being a prototype where they're just trying to pump out content for the sake of testing the mechanics, so it's probably not representative of what the actual game will be like, because there are still fun encounters to experience in this prototype which showcase how good the exploration encounters could be.
For example, I think it's neat whenever the encounters give you options to bypass something challenging if you have learned a particular skill, or when they require a certain skill that you might not have at the time, in which case you can come back to it later, which gives the world a sense of permanence, like everything persists outside of these isolated encounters that would otherwise only exist for this one fleeting moment. That's true with many other encounters as well, in the sense that you can start an encounter, do part of it, then retreat, and come back to it later with progress having been saved based on things you already completed and left unresolved. Sometimes the encounters create lasting effects where you take a status card that affects your next combat encounter, which might make you hesitate in the future when taking certain actions, knowing there might be delayed consequences. I particularly enjoyed this one encounter where you explore the cliff above the goblin cave and get ambushed by harpies, and then you find a treasure map which triggers a side quest, where you go towards the fog tower and run into some mysterious signs with a choice to back off before accidentally summoning a demon. That was a fun little adventure that told its own complete story arc with mystery and rising tension, and really sells the idea of the open-world exploration being a thing all on its own.
The important thing to consider with regards to this phase of the game, however, is that it's not really conducive for multiplayer formats, in the sense that the group always travels as one and you always make a group decision on every single thing you do. You don't have individual player-agency to take your own turn like you do in pretty much every other cooperative game, ever, where players often have to split up to handle multiple objectives or optionally team up on the same space to work together on more difficult tasks. Even though those games can fall victim to quarter-backing, where one player might try to tell other players exactly what to do on their turn, you still at least get your turn to feel like you're playing an active role in the gameplay. You just don't get that opportunity in the exploration and encounter phase of the Gothic board game, and so I seriously worry about becoming detached and disinterested if playing in a group setting where someone is always going to have be steering the entire group towards one decision, and where multiple players are always going to have to defer to a Group Think mentality. For that reason, I really see this as being game that's best played solo, or maybe with two players, max. It's also not a game that really facilitates playing with multiple groups, due to component limitations with only having four player tuck-boxes and mutual exclusivity with card ownership, as well as marked location cards and NPC cards, which don't really allow you to switch groups or versions of the campaign on the fly. So you really need to be playing with a dedicated group. And I'm not sure how well it handles drop-in and drop-out gameplay in the progression system, if, say, one player has to miss a session will they be permanently behind on the progression curve which can affect future balancing, or will the other players be forced to play the missing player's character as essentially a dummy character. These are problems you don't run into when playing solo, and which might complicate things if playing in a group.
Furthermore, I question how much replay value exists in this game with everything being so heavily scripted, in the sense that every location card is always going to have the same encounters on it and every quest is going to lead to the same fights. Without some kind of randomization, I can see it getting a little predictable to replay the campaign knowing what you'll encounter every step of the way; even if some of them do offer different choices, they would need to have equally valid options for you to want to choose something different. Because like, replaying this version of the prototype, I would have no incentive to pick all these "no thanks" options where you basically just ignore the content altogether. It really makes me think some of the cards should have some randomized element to them, like the card might display Encounter #312 with a D6 symbol next to it, wherein you roll a D6 and add that number to it so that there could be up to six different options for that specific entry. I know that's a lot to do for every location, but they could also group multiple D6 results together in the encounters, like #313-314 are one entry, #315-316 are a second entry, and #317-318 are a third. That way there's a little more unpredictability in what you'll encounter, with more opportunity to discover entirely new things during replay.
The final thing I should mention is the component design, which I think is pretty good overall. Everything in this prototype is of course a work in progress, so numerous things are certain to change -- like the dials for the energy meter will presumably get fixed, the artwork from the original game will presumably be replaced with art from the remake to be more consistent in theme, and I believe I've read that even the battlefields will be completely redesigned to be more visually representative of the actual locations from the video game. It's worth pointing out, too, that I did run into a few errors in the campaign book -- like in one case with an encounter pointing me to an entry that doesn't exist, and another just omitting the next entry altogether so I didn't know where to go in the book or what to do to actually resolve the quest. That latter one was actually a main quest, which is somewhat problematic, so hopefully the final version will be proof-read better to weed out those kinds of issues. Other things could stand to be improved, of course, like making the cut-outs on the card stands better so as not to obscure important information, or making the tuck boxes more rigid, among other things, but the designers are already aware of these kinds of things and are planning fixes for them, so there's no point in me dwelling on them too much except to let you know that they know.
But otherwise, I like the magnetic cardboard health dials that double as the bases for the enemy standees; I like the character boards that give you designated slots for everything; I like the card boxes for the way they keep everything organized during storage as well as during play; and I'm actually really impressed by how easy the setup and tear-down is. Saving your progress and packing the game up is incredibly easy, cause you just close up your character book, put all your personal effects into your player tuck box, close the ring books, and drop the card boxes into the main box. There's very little that you have to disassemble and meticulously organize, and then setting the game back up is likewise a really simple process of just pulling a few important components out to start, and then you can pull out the rest as you need them. The ringbooks for the combat scenarios, in particular, are a huge blessing to cut down on all the tedious setup that used to happen before every fight in the previous prototype. The only real complaints I have here are that 1) the dry-erase markers wipe off a little too easily, and prevent sleeving certain cards which might be a deal-breaker for some people, but I like the idea of marking the components in a non-destructive manner -- it's just so convenient to mark the card itself and not have to fiddle around with extra components, or switch over to an immersion-breaking spreadsheet to keep track of what I have and have not done -- so I'd like to keep that spirit intact; and 2) I found that with the way energy costs are printed on the weapons and skill training tokens, it was really easy to forget that weapon attacks were actually costing more energy than what was printed on the weapon card, so I wonder if it might be possible to display the energy costs for all three levels of skill training on the weapon itself, and let you mark your character board somehow to show which one is currently applicable. Maybe that was just a personal issue for me, but it did take me a while to lock it in my brain that the energy costs were actually different than what was displayed on the weapon. I also kind of miss the special abilities and backgrounds from the previous prototype, since that gave you a little way to feel unique from the other players, so I'd kind of like to see that come back in some way or another. And this might be wishful thinking, but I think it would be cool to have a dice tower done up in the style of Xardas's Tower, which could be 3D sculpted or else made from folding cardboard like the tower of Barad-Dur in Fate of the Fellowship, if not as part of the base game then as an optional add-on.
To conclude my final thoughts, here, I will say that I like the ideas that this prototype is going for, even though the execution often leaves a little something to be desired. To be fair, it is just a prototype and so it's not meant to represent the final quality, which will presumably improve with further development time and play testing. It's just hard for me to guess and extrapolate as to how much things will improve. But I will say that the game has gotten steadily better with every iteration that I've seen; the original crowdfunding campaign made it look so lackluster that I steered away from it completely because I just didn't have faith that it would actually be any good; then the revised prototype made some key improvements to where I could see the potential in it if the actual mechanics could be streamlined and fleshed out better; and now this revised-revised prototype addressed several of my major criticisms from the previous version and expanded the encounters in an interesting way, to where I'm now actually tempted to back it. Following the designers' trend of iterative improvements with every update, then that means the next version should be even better, which I think is promising. I had rated the previous prototype as a 5/10 on the Board Game Geek scale, which basically means I would play it if someone else really wanted to but wouldn't look forward to it and wouldn't suggest it myself, whereas this prototype now feels like a 6.5/10, which means that it's decently entertaining to play if I'm in the right mood, and so the final version could become a 7.5/10 or better, which is where it becomes a solidly good game that I could actively want to play and would recommend to others.
My personal hang-up is simply that I don't feel confident that I could actually play this in a group setting, because Gothic is so unknown here in the US and none of my usual game group has ever played it before, so I'm not sure that they would be able to appreciate the Gothic IP of this board game, or if the board game can actually do an adequate enough job of conveying the Gothic IP to uninitiated laymen in an interesting way to justify playing this over any other fantasy-themed cooperative board game that we could play instead, which would be more accessible and more readily available. I really see this as a game that you play if and only if you like Gothic and want to experience a form of Gothic in a board game tabletop setting, because I'm not sure that it'll have a wide enough appeal between the campaign-style format and the niche IP to be playable with general board gaming audiences. And like I said earlier, certain aspects of the gameplay loop are really not suited for multiplayer in the first place, so to me, this is a game that I would play exclusively solo, and probably only one time through the campaign, but I don't really like solo board gaming in general so I'm not really all that enthused by that prospect personally. Still, I think if the campaign tells an interesting story that ties in with the established source material well, then it could be pretty entertaining for Gothic fans. So if you like the video game and are interested in a board game based around it, then this seems like a reasonable product that I think I could cautiously recommend.
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