At the start of The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, the player arrives in the game in shackles, as a slow cart meanders its way through mountainous terrain. NPCs with dubious voice acting bicker as you ride forward, and the game scrambles to establish the key story beats in a few precious seconds. Stormcloaks, Imperials, High King, Helgen, all of these ideas are thrown at you in a lump, and then youāre dumped out the other end to stop and fiddle with appearance sliders for half an hour. Itās only once youāve had your execution interrupted and you can flee the burning city that the game really begins. Well, not really, itās more that the game really begins when you find and kill your first dragon and get your first shout. I think. Itās hard to tell.
Skyrim is a game with a lot of false starts, and where as a player you spend an awful lot of time not doing much before you get to do anything really cool. Itās very much the Fallout 3 problem, and itās notable that there are plentiful popular mods to let you skip the opening.
When I tell you that The Elder Scrolls: Call to Arms is a painfully faithful recreation of Skyrim in tabletop form, you should understand it in that context. Skyrim is a beloved game that millions of people have spent hundreds of hours exploring and enjoying. So too in TES:CtA is there a fascinating, crunchy, exciting game, but just like with Skyrim itās walled up behind a painful slog to get to the interesting stuff. The end result is a game that itās hard to recommend to anyone except the most die hard Skyrim fans, because only they are likely to have the patience to push through.
First Steps to Adventure
The Elder Scrolls: Call to Arms is a tabletop miniature game that can be played competitively by two people (in battle mode) or cooperatively or as a solo game (in delve mode). Itās produced by Modiphius Entertainmentāwho also make the Fallout miniatures game we reviewedāas well as roleplaying games like Star Trek Adventures and Achtung Cthulhu. Itās designed for play with a handful of miniatures controlled by each player, with some wandering monster miniatures appearing. This puts it firmly in the skirmish scale category and itās played with 32mm scale miniatures with relatively realistic proportions (making them skinnier and a little taller than Games Workshop products).
The product selection is a little unusual, and youād be forgiven for assuming (as I did before it arrived) that the core rules box included miniatures and enough stuff to play; unfortunately this isnāt the case. The beautifully made, dense, heavy box of rules is literally just the rules. Tokens, cards, a paper battlemat and three rulebooks make up this package. Itās a huge mountain of stuff, more akin to the accessories you find in a lavish kickstarter boardgame (and weāll come back to that later).
The miniatures themselves you have to buy separately, and thatāsā¦ a bit rough. You basically need the Bleak Fall Barrows Delve set to even play the tutorials, so youāre going to have to pick that up. But thatās not actually enough to play a battle game, so youāll also probably want to grab some Stormcloaks and Imperials too. That makes the āstarter bundlesā that Modiphius sell with a rules box and the three most basic minis boxes included a sensible purchase but the price tagā¦ well, weāll come back to price later. The miniatures are also available in plastic and resin, and while I didnāt get any of the plastic miniatures provided to review, itās clear from other reviews and from the Fallout minis that we received that their quality is not fantastic. The resin miniatures on the other hand, are absolutely stunning butā¦ well, weāll come back to that too.
If you head over to the Modiphius store you might notice that Escape from Helgen (the tutorials) and the core rulebook are available as free PDF downloads, with the Quests (scenarios) being a download that costs the same as a fancy coffee. Thereās even a print and play file for the custom dice. You might even grab some minis and think that means you can get playing right away butā¦ no, you canāt. Because the entire game revolves around the plethora of cards, and those are only available in the core rules box. So youāre going to have to splash cash on that to even just play the tutorial.
So letās assume you have your Bleak Fall Barrows Delve set and the rules. Now we hit some good news, actually some great news. The Escape from Helgen tutorial booklet is absolutely fantastic. Itās a series of three linked tutorial scenarios using literally just a couple of miniatures, with premade decks. Each one teaches you some core concepts, introducing more and more of the game in each of the tutorials. By the end of the bookletāwhich doesnāt take more than an hour to set up and play throughāyouāll have the basics down of how checks work, how you move, what actions you can do, what the most important bits on each card do, and so on.Ā
Itās hard to fault this as a tutorial packet – itās evocative, narrative, well-paced and easy to read and play with. At the end thereās a little quick reference page which I continued to use the entire time I played. It also concludes with the words
āWhen all the tutorials are complete, itās time to open the core Rulebook. You are now ready to learn the full rules.ā
Which marks the point where the onboarding process of the game really falls down.
A Slightly Too Open World
When you look at the rulebook itself you might be forgiven for thinking that itās actually not too intimidating – after all, many wargames have a huge rulebook! This one is little, a half size paperback with only about 100 pages. Surely this will be a breeze, after all we just played through the tutorials.
What youāve not realised if you have these thoughts is that this little book is absurdly dense. First of all, unlike many rulebooks there is effectively no background or lore material of any kindāitās assumed you know what the setting is. This is a good indication of their target market in many ways. The game always presumes that you have played Skyrim and know what The Elder Scrolls is as a setting, and doesnāt spend any time explaining it to you. But that means that all 100 of those pages are rules.
Another way that these books can often end up looking lengthier than they are is in the inclusion of lots of spacers – photos, illustrations, chapter splash pages, all that stuff. Thereās very little of that here; probably less than four full pages of art across the whole book. You might not realise this flicking through though, because the pages are very colourful, packed with lots of diagrams and tables with coloured entries, and custom symbols and all kinds of other visually provocative stuff. That does pose some problems as well however, because with the cramped font, dense text and busy visual style it can feel pretty overwhelming. The best thing I can say about the layout of the rulebook is that the small form factor makes it easy to take places and carry around.
One of the challenges with reading the book is that it doesnāt really explain things in a top down way. It opens with giving you some basic information about the components and conventions used, but this quickly devolves into incredibly detailed and dense descriptions of all the element of a character card, or an upgrade card, and these are not simple components. We make it through here and we get to the skill test, and how that worksā¦ but then we stop for an overview of attributes, and then there are modifiers, and substitutes, and effect dice, and there are two half-page tables to explain what the custom dice results mean. Itās a brick wall of information, and weāre only on page 9 of 101.
If you fight your way through all of this though, you remember thatā¦ youāve already played the tutorial! You know this already! Right? Well, mostly. One thing that the tutorial does well is give you a sense that you know whatās happening, but one thing it does badly is mislead you into thinking that means you know whatās happening in the game proper. Sure, the basics are the same, mostly, but thereās so much stuff in the core rules that itās hard to tally the tutorial with them.
One of the biggest complaints of Skyrim is that it sometimes felt too big: too many options, too little direction. Lots of people loved that, wandering off, making their own fun, finding things in the world that werenāt the main quest, but others felt frustrated or overwhelmed at the sheer scale of options. Call to Arms replicates this sensation faithfully. Thereās just so much stuff in this game to get to grips with. This is a miniatures game with 5 attributes and 19 skills, with skills having a plethora of associated perks. Some of them have upwards of 15, and even the leanest has half a dozen. Each of these is a rule, listed in block text, that you have to reference. Theyāre not listed on the character cards. You have to know what the perk is and what the symbols mean and look them up.
You can do almost anything in this game that you can do in Skyrim, but that is actually a huge problem. The open nature of the game, the huge number of possibilities, will excite and thrill some players, but overwhelm and frustrate others. As a veteran of dozens of wargames, complex and simple, I found my head spinning at the sheer amount of stuff on offer. But if the idea of having a character who can smith an axe, enchant it, block a hit with a shield, then instantly eat a wheel of cheese to regain fatigue all in the game appeals to youā¦ this is probably a plus, not a minus.
A Slightly Too Empty World
Now weāve established that Call to Arms has a wild abundance of toys to play with, itās time for us to look at if doing that is actually fun.Ā
Those 19 skills donāt actually all tie into actions – just like in the video games, some of them (like light and heavy armor) are more permissions and buffs than anything else. Light Armor āallows the model to fight while wearing Light Armorā and thatās a pretty good description of what it does. Others are actually tied to specific actions, like lockpicking and block. These all have their own rules, kept with the other more generally accessible rules, and these are probably the best skills in my opinion – they give you more cool stuff to do. Equally, the magic skills let you cast spells, and thatās great, though they are much less available than it feels like they are when you play the video games, because you canāt dip your toes as easily into them.
Magic is of various flavours (alteration, conjuration, destruction and illusion in the core book) and spells cost magicka to cast from a pool. There are a variety of different ways of targeting them, and some specific subtypes of spell. I like these specific types the best, perhaps, but itās probably not necessary to go over them in detail on the grounds that these are the spells in the videogames. They work in basically the same way, have the same strengths and weaknesses, and do what you expect.
Dragon Shouts are another completely faithful adaptation of the video game lore. It feels oddly niche to include a whole system for something that literally one character in the game can do, but I guess you gotta hit that licensing button as hard as you can when you snap up something like this. Theyāre fine, but again they do what you think they would, and mechanically work basically exactly like spells but without a magicka cost (they cost a currency called Thuāum instead).
Now we come onto perks, and holy crap there are a lot of perks. You can be a sneaky character who is sneaky with daggers, or with bows, or that can walk over traps without setting them off, or which make it harder to hear them when theyāre walking, or which can run away really well, orā¦ you get the idea. Every single one of these things is a perk, and I havenāt listed all the effects by a long shot and thatās just one skill. Sneak doesnāt even have the most perks, not by a fair way!
There are so many of these and they can basically be broken down into two categories:
- Let you do a thing you couldnāt do, or gives you a special rule you couldnāt normally have
- Gives you a bonus or your opponent a penalty
Thatās it. There are not exciting subsystems, or new play opportunities. You want to be really good at sneak, and take all the perks? Youāll be able to hide really well and move fast when youāre hidden and your opponents will not be able to hear you and youāll be really good at sneak attacking in a bunch of ways. And thatās it. Which is cool, but it feels a little flat – the basic rules cover everything, and these little buffs and changes definitely make characters different, but I never felt joy at my characterās perks. I never went āOh yes, I have x!ā like I do in some games. I spent a lot more time going āOh, Iāve rolled the wrong dice on that test, because I have [insert four different perks here]ā.
So we have this dizzying array of not hugely interesting rules and oh no you thought we were done weāre not done. Not by a long shot. Because this is Skyrim I mean The Elder Scrolls and this game is going to faithfully reproduce everything in there whether you want it to or not. That means racial bonuses, that means equipment, potions, food, money if itās in the video games, itās in here. Every single one of these things has rules, and options, and the cards mostly just tell you the name of the thing and expect you to remember or look it up every time.
Hereās a character card for Hadvar, with upgrades in tow:
Now this is probably the most complex looking card youāll have in your party – less important models get less stuff, but they all get stuff and just look at how much stuff is on Hadvarās card! Itās overflowing with stuff. And this isnāt the most complicated a card can get – there are characters with special rules, more perks, more skills, all kinds of stuff.
And you can see here as well how the symbols and notations donāt help at all. Persuasion, Sword and Board, Nord, Frost Resistance, the little picture of a bow and the little picture of a lockpick, they all do stuff. They all have rules. Rules that I found myself looking up again and again. And so much of it basically amounts to āOh I should have rolled an extra die on that testā.
One of the major criticism of Skyrim was that it had this huge sprawling world, and it all felt very empty. It often felt like the same town copy-pasted again and again, to give the illusion of space and complexity, without really following through on much of it. In this way as well, Call to Arms is very much an authentic adaptation. Again, for many people they didnāt care and they wonāt here either. Lots of people get a real thrill out of counting up all the dice to roll, and pooling all your cool bonuses to get to win out, and if thatās you, youāre going to love this. If itās not, then youāre going to feel pretty exhausted by the entire affair, this huge hill to climb to find at the top thereās mostly more hill.
Comrades in Arms
One of the big appeals to me about this game was delves. Battle mode plays out a lot like most wargames – you have a bunch of scenarios, you have deployment zones, youāre trying to attack each other and thatās basically it. Thereās an interesting twist in that you might have some random baddies wandering around, and often youāre attempting to contest exploring something or taking some treasure, but ultimately itās the kind of fare youāve seen before.
Delves on the other hand are something more unusual – a true cooperative or solo enterprise. I donāt want to bury the lead here, so Iāll say right up front that this is the most responsive, most challenging and most consistently playable adversary system Iāve seen in a miniatures game. At no point did I feel like I didnāt know what to do with the enemies, and they acted in what felt like plausible, challenging ways. I really enjoyed my solo games, and a big part of that was the adversary system.
Now the bad news. The system accomplishes this by doing what it does in every other part of the ruleset: stuff. In this case, the stuff is mostly flow diagrams.
I donāt want to make it seem like I think this is a bad solution – itās not. The diagrams were helpful, and really helped modulate the game. But there are a bunch of them, for lots of different situations, and the rules for antagonists are one of the meatiest parts of what is a very protein rich book. I certainly wouldnāt want to try and play them with someone who wasnāt an experienced gamer, or whose tolerance for stopping and looking things up was low.
That said, when I got the hang of it, it was really good. It felt more organic and realistic than other systems, and soon I was slapping draugr with swords and nicking their stuff, and it felt pretty fun. As a coop game itās also a nice addition – I havenāt quite convinced my husband to play with me, but Iām definitely planning on roping in some boardgaming friends when lockdown lifts to give it a spin.
Overall, if you buy this game as a solo or coop project, that might be the way to do it. On your own youāre not waiting for other people to puzzle out what their models do. And played cooperatively you can help each other out navigate the jankier elements of the rules, and get things playing more smoothly. This really feels like how the game was supposed to be played, and it makes sense that Modiphius have consistently given it equal top billing, and not pushed the competitive angle too hard.
Modelling Adventure
In my big exciting box from Modiphius I was provided with the Resin Starter Bundle – thatās the Delve set, Stormcloaks and Imperials, all cast in high quality resin. Iām going to talk about them altogether because these are honestly some of the most consistent resin miniatures Iāve seen in terms of quality, and thereās little to pull apart between the sets (this is a good thing).
First of all the casting quality is absolutely stunning. Iāve only ever had resin miniatures this good from Atlantis (which, it turns out, uses the same caster), and those are my go to recommendation for people who arenāt sure if resin can be a good material for minis. The detail is crisp and fine, the casting is excellent, with minimal flash or slip. The pieces, once washed and cleaned up just a little, were ready for spraying without almost any fuss, and come as a couple of pieces in most cases.
The detail on these is absolutely breathtaking. As a technical sculpting and casting enterprise, Iāve rarely been more impressedāthese are some of the best miniatures from a pure quality standpoint Iāve ever worked with. They are so intricate and perfect that I found myself intimidated by the sheer task of doing them justice.
Which leads into one of the major negatives about them: they are too complex in some ways. As a veteran painter who doesnāt baulk at many tasks, I was absolutely overwhelmed by the detail on these. Each model was a serious undertaking, and there are few good easy surfaces that take washes well and give you a break. Every part needs careful, considered painting and detailing to really make it shine. I play every day and it was a challenge; for a new hobbyist I imagine it would simply feel impossible. Itās difficult to know who these are for, because they feel like the best possible quality display resins, but equally you need a bunch of them and the IP feels best geared to drawing in people who wouldnāt normally play minis games.
As I didnāt receive the plastics I canāt comment directly, but the issues with Modiphiusā plastic miniatures are well documented (including on Goonhammer), and the sculpts will remain the same, so I donāt see them getting easier to paint.
Iām thrilled to own these miniatures, and Iām very pleased with how they look painted up, but they were an enormous time and effort sink, and I canāt say I plan to pick up any more, even just as a hobby project.
Victoryā¦ but at what cost?
So we can conclude that Call to Arms is a complex, labyrinthine, vast miniatures game offering an insane array of possibilities. It is probably the most faithful adaptation of an IP Iāve ever seen in a game, offering you the ability to mimic the play of Skyrim in particular almost exactly. It feels like the videogames itās based on which is a real achievement.
Unfortunately, the big market of āpeople who really like Skyrimā that might be tempted to pick it up are likely to be put off by the complex detailed miniatures, the vast number of rules, and the uphill struggle to learn what everything does.
For people who are gamers first, I can really recommend this if you want something crunchier and more āminis gamesā than what most coop dungeon crawler boardgames can offer, but probably not for any other reason.
The true market is the small slice of the piece which is āpeople who really love Skyrim even a decade laterā and āpeople who are really into miniatures games and donāt sweat a lot of complexityā. If thatās you, then I cannot recommend this game more – you will absolutely adore it. But for anyone else? Itās a hard sell, particularly because of the price tag.Ā
If you want what I got, the Resin Starter bundle, youāre looking at Ā£115, and thatās a big wedge of cash for what is, out of the box, surprisingly limited. You canāt really do full sized battles with just that starter. Looking at what Iād want to play this competitively I totalled up another Ā£70 at the very least, and really you want to spend another Ā£70 on top for the extra stormcloak and imperial boxesā¦ that arenāt even out yet. Oh, and to play with those youāll need another card set and expansion, and that costs money too.
In the end then, this is a game for people who are dab hands with games, loved Skyrim, and donāt mind blasting money like a firehose now and in the future. Thatās a tough sell for me, but if youāre in the position to drop a lot of cash and Skyrim is one of your touchstone properties, I can definitely see why youād jump at it.
A review copy of the materials covered in this article were provided by Modiphius.