Conquest of Nerath Review

Conquest of Nerath is WotC’s latest board game that takes a departure from their previous cooperation adventure games, instead pitting sometimes allied groups of 2-4 players against each other as they wage war across the implied setting. My previous experience with strategy board games is limited to basically, “that one time I played Axis & Allies like, six years ago or something”. Oh yeah, I tried to give StarCraft a shot, but the whole reverse order bullshit made it very hard to teach other people and eventually I just gave up and played StarCraft 2. At any rate Conquest of Nerath promises to rope me in through a combination of the D&D brand and simple, straightforward mechanics and game play that coincidentally reminds me of Axis & Allies.

I’m only going to go over things in brief, so if you want to check out the rules yourself, you can find them free (and legally!) here.

The map is divided into two land masses that each serve as the starting point for a pair of opposing factions, with an island plopped in the center, and both land and sea are in turn divided into territories or regions. Each faction begins with a set number of units and cash. Aside from starting composition the factions differ in the appearance of most units, their starting position, what their Event cards do, and on what turn they act (each faction has a set turn order). The rulebook makes it a point to sum up these strength and weaknesses, for example stating that, “Karkoth has an aggressive starting position but has the weakest Event cards”.

There are nine unit types: footsoldier, siege engine, monster, fighter, wizard, castle, storm elemental, dragon, and warship. Statistically each unit is the same between factions, though in most cases they are cosmetically different. For example, a Karkoth footsoldier is a skeleton, while Vailin has an archer. Some units have special traits, such as being able to attack first (and thereby thinning the opposing force so long as they don’t have First Strike units), or inflicting more damage while attacking.

Each player’s turn is divided into six steps; drawing an Event card, moving any units you want, fighting, repositioning, reinforcing, and collecting income:

• Draw: Drawing an Event card is exactly as it sounds; you get one, play it if it says to “Play Immediately”, or hold onto it for later. There’s no cap, so you don’t have to worry about discarding.
• Move: Each unit has a move value, usually 1 or 2 (dragons have 3). Obviously, you don’t have to move all your stuff, and you don’t have to move them the full speed.
• Fight Battles: Fighting is as easy as moving your units into a territory occupied by an enemy, and is resolved about as easily: both sides roll an associated attack die for each unit–from the lowly footsoldier’s d6 to the dragon’s d20–with a 6 or higher scoring a “hit”. Once a round of combat is over, you just allocate the damage taken to your units however you see fit. Most units die in one hit, though dragons can take two and fully heal after combat if they aren’t killed. 
• Reposition: Some units, namely dragons and storm elementals, get to move again. Also, dungeons get new monsters (meaning you can loot them again on your next turn).
• Reinforce: Once combat is wrapped up you can reinforce you forces by spending gold, training as many units as you want at your capital or four at any castles you’ve built in the field. 
• Collect Income: Finally at the end of your turn you collect gold based on the number of new territories you control and the number of starting territories that you don’t.

Despite all the fighting going on, you can still find time for adventure. Fighters and wizards can go into dungeon spaces and fight monsters, gaining additional gold and treasure cards for their efforts. Unfortunately the monsters aren’t pushovers and can also possess traits like First Strike (your wizards are useless) or making it so that only an eight or higher hits…and both types of hero units only use d10s for their attacks. On the other hand, being able to get an item that lets you do something like add in a free footsoldier once per turn (in addition to a one-shot addition of three) and a Victory Point can make the risk worthwhile.

Conclusion
This game looks very fun and easy to both teach and play, especially in comparison to other board games like StarCraft and Arkham Horror. Hell, even the other D&D adventure games are more complicated than this, but I don’t look at it as a drawback. Being able to go dungeon crawling for loot is a nice touch, which gives is a distinct D&D feel as well as a nice risk versus reward mechanic.

Wrath of Ashardalon, Wizard Solo

Castle Ravenloft had an adventure that you could solo, presumably to help learn the rules through actual play, as I couldn’t imagine surviving on your own for more than a few turns. Likewise, Wrath of Ashardalon has a small adventure in which you must navigate the halls until you find a secret entrance to escape. After reading the adventure, I noticed that the escape tile is always the seventh. I decided to give it a try today, figuring that having two healing surges to myself I could at least scrape by, especially considering that you don’t have to kill a boss monster: just get the fuck out and you’ll be fine.

To make this even more challenging, I went with the dragonborn wizard, taking the spells arc lightning, hypnotism, shock sphere, and mirror image. You automatically get hurled breath, which is a nice way to get a free ranged AoE attack. I’d considered taking wizard eye, but I’m not sure if it lasts only one turn, or forever.

With nothing to do on round one, I decided to cast mirror image and stay put to explore. Mirror image boosts your AC by six points, and is reduced by two each time you are hit. There’s no mention of duration, and figured I might as well do something interesting during my hero phase besides waiting for a monster to bum-rush me.

Ugh…why did it have to be snakes? Their bite adds the Poisoned condition, which ensures that you’ll lose at least two hit pionts if you get hit. To make things worse, I drew a black tile. Fuck. With no XP to cancel it, I also get sidelined with a whirling blade trap, which meant that now I got to eat two attacks during my villain phase. Thankfully, the snake missed, but the blades hit, meaning my mirror image bonus went from +6 to +4, and I took 2 damage.

Fast forward a few turns, and I’m down a healing surge, spawned a gibbering mouther, and mirror image is out. I didn’t get a chance to explore during turn two, and got nailed with an arrow (I think). Oh, and I’m dazed. The only upside is that I got lucky on disabling the whirling blades.

Cultists have never been remotely scary, except these guys carry poisoned daggers. When a single point of damage counts for almost a fifth of your total health, that’s a big deal. I manage to take them both out with arc lightning, and eat another encounter that I forgot about (but probably did damage). Down to my last few hit points, I’m fucked, but I keep exploring and hoping that a kobold doesn’t do me in.

Yay! A white tile. This just means I get to stand there while a monster skewers me, but which monster, I wonder?

I fucking hate duergar. With this guy, if you aren’t on the tile he’s on (and how could you be?), he explores. And draws a monster. Technically, it’s already my villain phase, so I don’t activate the cultists. I did, however, draw two long hall tiles, which means that now I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Unfortunately, I’ve got only three hit points left, and if I get hit by the cultists, I’m pretty much done for.

So, I dash by the duergar and kill the cultist first with arc lightning (also damaging the duergar in the process), and get a fucking tome of experience. Would have been handy a looong time ago. Since I didn’t explore, I draw an encounter card, which ends up spawning a goddamned bear with a treasure token thankfully some ways away. I’m not going to go for it, obviously, and you don’t keep the treasure, and I’m guaranteed to die even if I did get it. Also fortunately, the duergar doens’t move and attack, he just moves.

I just realized while writing this that I could have double moved and gotten out last turn. At any rate, I just cancelled the rolling boulder trap that I triggered with the plethora of XP I’d accumulated through this hellish trial and managed to walk out on the next turn. Fuck, that was bullshit. I only won through sheer luck. Had I not gotten a pair of long hallways back-to-back, I would have been screwed big time.

Wrath of Ashardalon Review

I picked this up tonight while running the second week of March of the Phantom Brigade. I really enjoy Castle Ravenloft so it’s a natural progression for me, as Wrath of Ashardalon is basically Castle Ravenloft, just with a different backdrop, heroes, monsters, etc. Mind you this isn’t a bad thing, because they both use the “D&D Adventure System”, meaning that you can mix and match the content–Dungeon Tiles, monsters, heroes, items, events, etc–between both games. So, it’s kind of like a product that is both stand-alone and expansion.

Game play-wise it runs mostly the same as its predecessor: each player picks one of the adventurers and associated powers, and then embarks on one of thirteen different adventures. These range from seemingly simple exploration/escaping, to stopping a ritual to open a gate to the Far Realm, to slaying Ashardalon himself. As before the basic format is that you explore the dungeon, fight monsters, accrue loot, and try not to die in the process…except that Wrath of Ashardalon has some new tricks up its sleeve.

First, characters can now be Dazed and/or Poisoned. Dazed thankfully lasts for only a turn, limiting you to either a move or attack action, while Poisoned causes you to take damage and is only discarded when you roll a 10 or higher at the end of your Hero phase (like a save in 4E).

The Encounter deck adds Curses and Hazards to its repertoire. Curses slap a condition on your character until you fulfill a specific condition, usually by rolling a 10 or higher at the end of your turn, though one requires you to not move for a turn. Hazards differ from traps in that they cannot be disabled. There’s only three in the box: Cave In, Pit, and Volcanic Vapors, which deal damage, deal damage and keep you stuck for a few turns, and inflict the Poisoned condition, respectively.

Some Dungeon Tiles feature doors. When you run into these, you draw a Closed Door token that, when revealed, lets you know if the door is unlocked, locked, or trapped. Locked doors can be picked by using your attack action and making a die roll, while trapped doors deal automatic damage before going away. If nothing else, its a touch of Gygaxian delving.

Thankfully, not all the new content is hazardous to your health. Some adventures award you with Boons, which are special cards that give you benefits when you overcome specific challenges, while others let you snag raw coin that you can use between adventures in order to buy more magical swag. You don’t get to pick, instead drawing some cards from the Treasure deck and picking from those (a similar mechanic to how Arkham Horror does it). Finally, at least one adventure (Free the Captives) lets you control NPCs that are actually useful.

If you like Castle Ravenloft, you’re going to love this. Even if you don’t feel like trekking through a fiery volcano to slay a dragon, you can port everything else over and add more monsters and rules. I’m curious to see how people will combine the games to create new scenarios.

Ravenloft Play Report

Late last night we cracked open Ravenloft to give it a shot. By “we”, I mean two people that have played a lot of D&D (Liz and myself), and two people who either had a long time ago or only once. I decided to start us out with the scenario where we had to find and kill Gravestorm, a blue dragon dracolich. As the only person that read the Rulebook I had to explain how things worked to the players, which at first was confusing but after a few turns they started to pick up on the routine.

There was also some *ahem* issues at the start of the game as everyone frantically ran into differing edges in order to avoid drawing Encounter cards, which backfired when they invariably dropped tiles with black triangles in addition to when everyone was in a separate corner fighting off hordes of monsters on their own. By about the fourth or fifth turn we’d regrouped and started sucking up Encounter cards since we were more likely to survive taking a random point of damage or getting a random shot at free treasure than tackling a 2 hit  point wraith or blazing skeleton. In the end we succeeded against the dragon, partially because I kept forgetting to remind the players that it activated on everyone’s villain phase, but also because we unloaded dailies on it while Liz ran around and broke the phylactery.

Having finally played it I can say that I really, really like this game. It’s a lot like D&D if it were abstracted. Hit points are reduced to around 6-10 (most attacks deal like, 1 damage), the only defense value is Armor Class, and monsters don’t have speeds, instead moving in “tiles” in order to close the distance and fuck your shit up. In a similar vein, powers with ranges also work the same way, allowing you to target enemies on another tile, or sometimes two tiles away. Many effects get changed as well, such as healing strike actually healing damage, or healing word working only once. I think this will be our new game of choice when someone can’t show or no one wants to run, instead of doing a delve.

There aren’t a lot of character options, and as I said before I’m hoping that Wizards releases an expansion in order to broaden the scope in terms of scenarios, characters, monsters, etc. Failing that, it looks like it would be relatively simple to create your own monsters and character cards. Hell, if you’ve got a massive minis library (or tokens)  you can directly use them since the game uses D&D Minis anyway.

The monsters are all pretty diverse: some of them are more dangerous when they are far away, such as skeletons with their slice attack or burning skeletons with their ability to nail everyone on a tile. Wolves are also nasty if they get a running start. Gargoyles are brutal in close quarters, able to hit everyone on the tile. Actually aside from villains the only thing we didn’t get to fight was rat swarms and howling hags. I’m not fond of the kobolds at all. They seem very out of place and I’d have been happier with having vampire minions or even devoted cult fanatics. Hell, dire rats would have made more sense and been about as scary. They could have replaced the kobold sorcerer with a wererat of some kind and BAM, instant theme.

Liz absolutely hates the leveling mechanic. As I said in my review, you have to roll a natural 20 on an attack or trap disarm attempt and have 5 XP worth of monsters in the bank. I didn’t mind so much as three of us managed to level before the game was over (only Devin’s ranger didn’t make the flip) and it was a fucking life saver. When you level your hit points and defense goes up and you get another daily attack. Not only is that a very potent boost, but it seemed to happened when we needed it the most: Devin was getting fucked up by three monsters, and thanks to my level-up was able to use an attack that hit all the monsters, dealing damage on a miss. That basically took care of two automatically and since I hit the last one, I was able to clear out all the monsters and save his ass.

A lot of fun. I was surprised that we’d managed to succeed, especially since my past experience with coop games like this almost universally ended in disaster. It wasn’t easy (and might have gone differently if we’d had the dragon go every time it was supposed to, but hey, first time and all). We’re going to play again today with a new scenario, so we’ll see how we fare this time around (and I’ll try to get pics this time).

Ravenloft Board Game Review

It’s late, but I finally managed to snag it a day before its new release date.

Ravenloft in its board game incarnation seems to be a rules-lite D&D-ized variant on Descent/Arkham Horror: you tour around a randomized dungeon layout killing monsters while trying to achieve one of many objectives, such as killing a specific monster (the “villain”) or trying to lift as much shit from Strahd’s castle as you can before he shows up. You can get the rules online for free, and I recommend checking them out before committing yourself to the $65 price tag.

(Don’t forget to look underneath the black plastic container; there’s another four sheets of tiles and tokens hidden there. I only noticed because I was trying to find the “start” tile and failed.)


As an overview of the components, all of the minis are unpainted reprints with the possible exception of four of the hero minis (so if you hate D&D Minis, you’ll hate these, too) and the tiles are as sturdy as your typical Dungeon Tile. The tiles have jigsaw-type edges so you can clip them together as you drop them to help fasten them into place. The tokens are made of the same shit and are legion: there’s tokens for hit points, tracking healing surges, recharging monster abilities (like breath weapons), items, monsters, etc. It reminds me a lot of Arkham Horror, except I don’t think it’ll take a weekend to setup and a year and a day to play.

I haven’t played the game yet and I won’t tell you in-depth (that’s what the freely available rules are for), but basically turns play out like this: you get to move your hero about and attack monsters, if you’re at the edge of a tile and not head-butting a wall you get to expand the dungeon by drawing a tile at random (or draw an Encounter card if you are busy head butting the wall), and then the monsters try to get their comeuppance by running at you like lemmings and frantically trying to pry off your hit point tokens like jawas snatching parts at a droid mosh. I joke, but having preprogrammed actions is probably good because monsters only have to take down one player in order to do the job proper.

The game handles somewhat similarly to actual D&D, but some things get changed to better accommodate the differing presentation. For example, attack rolls handle the same, but hit points are greatly reduced (the dwarf cleric has eight) and healing surges act more like a universal pool of extra lives: if a player goes down, you burn one and they get back up, but everyone has to share. Other mechanics are made even more abstract than before, such as the dragonborn fighter’s breath weapon being able to target every creature on the same tile regardless of position or being able to spend XP in order to automatically avoid traps and special events.

Some of the objectives are pretty lame if you attempt to append a story to them. One involves a hag isolating everyone in different parts of the castle so that she can complete a ritual, because placing the characters in locations that they can just walk out of never bites you in the ass. Another has Strahd for some reason kidnapping everyone and putting them directly outside his coffin. Oddly, the goal here is to try and escape the castle instead of dragging his slumbering corpse outside and tossing it into the sun. Why he didn’t just kill everyone or put them in an actual dungeon is beyond me. Some are more straight forward, such as barging into the castle to stake Strahd or prevent a specific number of monsters from escaping.

Like both Descent and Arkham Horror, you can also find treasures on the pre-rotted corpses of your enemies that help even the odds, in addition to leveling up if you have 5 XP in the bank and roll a nat 20. You can only do this once (since the hero cards only have two sides), but that’s okay because I think it’s humorous that 2nd-level characters can ruin Strahd’s day. At a cursory glance it looks like it’ll be a lot of fun. I’ve enjoyed other fantasy board games that have a similar play style and feel, so I’ve got high hopes for this. Personally I’m hoping for expansions that will add more heroes, monsters/villains, objectives, and environments (again, similar to how Descent did it).

Next up, an actual play report.