This puts it firmly in the skirmish scale category and it’s played with 32mm scale miniatures with relatively realistic proportions (making them skinnier and a little taller than Games Workshop products). It’s designed for play with a handful of miniatures controlled by each player, with some wandering monster miniatures appearing. It’s produced by Modiphius Entertainment-who also make the Fallout miniatures game we reviewed-as well as roleplaying games like Star Trek Adventures and Achtung Cthulhu. 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). The end result is a game that it’s hard to recommend to anyone except the most die hard Skyrim fans, because only they are likely to have the patience to push through. So too in TES:CtA is there a fascinating, crunchy, exciting game, but just like with Skyrim it’s walled up behind a painful slog to get to the interesting stuff. Skyrim is a beloved game that millions of people have spent hundreds of hours exploring and enjoying.

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. It’s very much the Fallout 3 problem, and it’s notable that there are plentiful popular mods to let you skip the opening. 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. Well, not really, it’s more that the game really begins when you find and kill your first dragon and get your first shout. It’s only once you’ve had your execution interrupted and you can flee the burning city that the game really begins. Stormcloaks, Imperials, High King, Helgen, all of these ideas are thrown at you in a lump, and then you’re dumped out the other end to stop and fiddle with appearance sliders for half an hour.

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.

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.

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