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

Before it set the role-playing world ablaze with Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian Studios sent a considerably smaller, but still sizable, portion of video game role-players into a tizzy with its Divinity: Original Sin series. Itself a spinoff of the studio’s long-running Divinity franchise, Original Sin and its sequel charmed players with tongue-in-cheek storytelling and a Rube Goldbergian approach to fantasy battles, one where swinging a sword wasn’t the wrong way to play, but it certainly wasn’t the best one. Larian preferred its players create gonzo chain reactions on the battlefield, throwing barrels to spill oil over enemies who had tripped over ice because you froze the water underfoot and will now set them ablaze.

Baldur’s Gate 3 fans know this feeling, and Divinity: Original Sin fans really know it. It’s a big part of the appeal of Larian’s approach to RPGs: seeing the whole world as a violent set of magic dominoes to tip over in an elemental cascade. It makes sense, then, that the first tabletop adaptation of Larian’s work would lean hard into this experience.

Divinity: Original Sin the Board Game takes its inspiration from Divinity: Original Sin 2, in which the player can choose from several “Origin” characters with bespoke backstories to give their session unique flavor. These backstories were often more compelling than the main plot — a generic magical crisis is nowhere near as immediately interesting than the arrogance of a disgraced lizard prince out to reclaim his honor or a traveling bard who shares her head with a demon. You’ll find all those characters from Original Sin 2 here, with a few extra to choose from to form a party of two to four players with.

Image: Larian Studios

But more importantly, you’ll find Divinity’s tabletop incarnation wants to hook you with its chaotic combat first and the narrative hooks (which are very much there) second. Thanks to a pretty great playable tutorial that instructs players to take only what they absolutely need from the box, Divinity throws players in the thick of things, immediately tasking the party with taking on some guards on the prison ship you’re all trapped on.

Divinity is both elaborate and elegant — every player character and enemy has cards, trackers, dials, an assortment of fiddly bits and bobs that borders on annoying until you cross the threshold of understanding (a blessedly quick trip), where all of those trackers and tokens and cards go from laborious admin to the satisfying tick-tick-tick of game clockwork. Each character’s starting set of abilities and talents all smartly fit together in ways that immediately evoke 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 lets you set one die to any face if Sebille is invisible. There are two ways to turn 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 turns Sebille invisible but also lets you reroll two enemy dice if said enemies have the “blinded” status effect. You can inflict 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 creatively, inflicting one of several status effects lighting a fuse that trickles through the party, letting a canny group of players concoct magical chaos that is just fun, with a less restrictive economy that frankly kept the video game version of Divinity from getting to that fun for too long. Wrap your head around it and relish the battles, and the considerable admin becomes a tactile chain of fuck around and find out.

More elegant is Divinity’s approach to the narrative portion of the equation. Much like Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, Divinity ditches proper “boards” or an assemblage of tiles in favor of a large spiral-bound book dubbed the Divine Atlas. This functions as the main campaign, with flowchart-like maps for your party to journey through, fleshed out with narrative twists and turns via a hilariously large library of cards.

I like this system. I love the dramatic reveal of a card, and the fact that I can thumb through a big old map book and not really spoil myself because the meat of the narrative is in a deck of cards. Divinity also has one of my favorite little narrative trinkets in the form of a journal envelope — an envelope for the party to keep journal cards they draw throughout the campaign detailing plot beats and the means by which they will eventually choose which of the campaign’s branching paths they will go on. It’s another way to make the role-playing journey tangible in a game that occupies that tricky middle space between board game and classic pen-and-paper RPG, generating narrative and meaning for the player where a classic TTRPG would have them do it for themself.

That said, I’ve not played enough of Divinity’s campaign to have much of an opinion on the story, except to say that there is a lot more of it than meets the eye. Substantial as it may be, I don’t think it’s a reason to give Divinity a whirl. There’s a reason why the game starts with a big ol’ fight — it’s all about making a big old mess with your friends, and looking real cool as you do it.

Divinity: Original Sin the Board Game was reviewed with a final retail version provided by Larian Studios. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.