The Divinity tabletop game is perfect for the most chaotic Baldur’s Gate 3 fans

Before it set the role-playing world on fire Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian Studios confused a significantly smaller, but still significant portion of video game roleplayers with its Divinity: Original Sin series. Itself a spin-off of the studio’s long-running Divinity franchise, Original sin and the sequel charmed players with tongue-in-cheek storytelling and a Rube Goldbergian approach to fantasy combat where swinging a sword wasn’t the way to go. wrong way of playing, but it certainly wasn’t the best An. Larian preferred his players to create gonzo chain reactions on the battlefield, throwing barrels to spill oil on enemies who had tripped over ice because you froze the water underfoot and now set them on fire.

Baldur’s Gate 3 fans know this feeling, and Divinity: original sin fans Real know it. It’s a big part of the appeal of Larian’s approach to RPGs: seeing the entire world as a violent series of magical dominoes toppling in an elemental cascade. It makes sense, then, that the first tabletop adaptation of Larian’s work would draw heavily on this experience.

Divinity: Original Sin the Board Game draws his inspiration from Divinity: original sin 2, in which the player can choose from several ‘Origin’ characters with tailor-made backstories to give their session a unique touch. These backstories were often more compelling than the main story – a generic magical crisis isn’t nearly as immediately interesting as the arrogance of a disgraced lizard prince seeking to regain his honor or a traveling bard who shares her head with a demon. You invent all these characters Original sin 2 here, with a few extra to choose from to form a group of two to four players.

But more importantly, you will find it DivinityThe tabletop incarnation of the game wants to hook you first with its chaotic combat and then with its narrative hooks (of which there are a lot). Thanks to a pretty good playable tutorial that instructs players to only get what they absolutely need out of the box, Divinity throws players into the middle of trouble and immediately orders the party to take on some guards on the prison ship you’re all trapped on.

Divinity is both comprehensive and elegant – every player character and enemy has maps, trackers, dials, an assortment of clunky bits and pieces that border on annoying until you cross the threshold of understanding (a blessedly quick trip), where all those trackers and tokens and maps range from administratively difficult to satisfactory tick-tick-tick of game clock. Each character’s basic skills and talents all cleverly fit together in a way that has immediate appeal delicious combinations.

An example: Let’s say you’re Sebille, a badass elven assassin with some Dark Shit in her backstory. Sebille’s starting weapon is the Assassin’s Dagger, which allows you to place one die on each face when Sebille is invisible. There are two ways to become invisible in Sebille’s starting hand: The first is the Cloak and Dagger card, which simply makes her disappear. There is also the Chameleon spell, which makes Sebille invisible, but Also lets you reroll two enemy dice if those enemies have the “blinded” status effect. You can cause the “blinded” effect with another spell, Tentacle Lash.

Image: Larian Studios

These are just the combinations possible with one character’s starting hand in the tutorial. Each character is built to deal damage in creative ways, applying one of several status effects, lighting a fuse that ripples through the party, allowing a clever group of players to devise a magical mayhem that just is. pleasurewith a less restrictive economy that honestly kept the video game version of it Divinity not to partake in that pleasure for too long. Wrap your head around it and enjoy the combat, and the considerable admin becomes a tactile chain of fucking and exploring.

Is more elegant Divinity‘s approach to the narrative part of the equation. Like Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, Divinity forgo the actual “planks” or collection of tiles in favor of a large, spiral-bound book called the Divine Atlas. This acts as the main campaign, with flowchart-style maps for your party to travel through, supplemented with narrative twists via a hilariously large library of maps.

I like this system. I love the dramatic reveal of a card, and the fact that I can flip through a big old card book without really spoiling myself, because the essence of the story is contained within a deck of cards. Divinity also has one of my favorite little narrative trinkets in the form of a diary envelope – an envelope for the party to keep diary cards they draw during the campaign, detailing plot beats and the way they will ultimately choose which of the branching paths of the campaign they will choose. will continue. It’s another way to make the roleplaying journey tangible in a game that occupies the tricky middle space between board game and classic pen-and-paper RPG, generating a story and meaning for the player where a classic TTRPG would give him the would do it yourself. .

That said, I haven’t played enough of it Divinity‘s campaign to have a big opinion on the story, except to say there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye. As substantial as it may be, I don’t think it’s a reason to care Divinity a swirl. There’s a reason why the game starts with a big old fight: it’s all about making a big mess with your friends, and looking really cool while doing it.

Divinity: Original Sin the Board Game was reviewed with a final retail release from Larian Studios. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions on products purchased through affiliate links. You can find Additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy can be found here.