Castle Ravenloft Board Game

Castle Ravenloft Board Game

Over the holidays I had the chance to sit down and play the Dungeons & Dragons Adventure System board game, Castle Ravenloft.

I found it to be a lot of fun in general, however I think the “Adventure System” needs to be a lot simpler to appeal to a broader audience than hard-core D&D nerds like me.

The box weighs in at around seven pounds (oof! that's about 3.2 kg) and includes a lot of stuff, though I should say that a good portion of that weight turned out to be left-over heavy card stock we threw out once we’d punched out all the tiles and other bits and pieces from it.  The set includes a fifteen-page rule book and a similarly sized adventure book of single-page adventures plus a set of interlocking dungeon tiles (to build the board), a twenty-sided die, a large stack of playing cards (monster cards, encounter cards, power cards, treasure cards), several much heavier stock cards for the stats of the PCs (Heroes) and NPCs (Villains) and various tokens and hit-point counters in heavy card, and, finally, dozens of unpainted plastic miniatures (some recognizable from other sets).  A full inventory can be seen on the D&D Adventure System Wiki.

We played with a varied group of experienced D&D and board gamers over the course of a few different gaming nights.  The games ranged anywhere from a solo game to a full group of five with ages ranging from eleven to sixty-eight.

The game plays a lot like the D&D 4th edition games I’ve sat in on, complete with ability cards (At Will, Daily, and Utility powers) and healing surges with the exception that it's totally playable by a solo player — the game’s rule set, essentially, takes the place of having a Dungeon Master in the game, and each monster and villain comes printed with a set of “tactics” to let you know just what they do each turn with no decision making on that level really necessary.  The games take roughly 40 to 90 minutes to play depending on how many people are involved and how complex the chosen adventure is.  A simple adventure might be “you wake up in the dungeons of Castle Ravenloft and that can’t be good, so try to get out before the sun sets” while a more difficult one might be “you’ve got a brilliant get-rich-quick scheme: get into the dungeons of Castle Ravenloft and escape again carrying twelve treasure items”.

Game play is fully cooperative meaning that the players either win together or lose together: if one player's Hero dies, then the game is lost for all players regardless of how well they've done individually.  (This caused some drama during one game when the party rogue claimed their share of the treasure and quickly escaped the dungeon, leaving the rest of the Heroes there to pull their own weight; the rest of us didn’t fare so well so, despite the rogue getting out of the dungeon and having done their “fair share”, they still lost the game.)

The game requires a seriously huge amount of table space to play: not only are you building a random dungeon out from tiles that are fairly large themselves, but you need to have several decks of cards out on the table to draw from, and each player also needs the space to lay out their Hero’s card, their various power cards, their treasure cards, and the cards of any monsters, encounters, and traps they're controlling on the board, all in an organized way so they know the order in which they received them.  We played with five people at a table made to comfortably seat eight and just barely had room enough to see an adventure through.

If I had one major complaint it’s that the game is just too complex: there is just too much to keep track of.  For a full game of D&D it seems sort of normal but for someone expecting a board game, they may feel quickly overwhelmed (or in the case of younger players, bored).  For example, each Hero has some effect on nearby heroes such as giving them bonuses on their attacks or being able to heal them if they themselves do not attack on their turn.  In addition to this, each player may be controlling a monster or three, a trap or two, and an encounter.  Each player's turn then consists of the Hero Phase (them moving their Hero and attacking or not), the Exploration Phase (in which they may turn over new dungeon pieces and spark new encounters as well as causing new monsters and traps to appear), and the Villain Phase (in which any monsters or traps controlled by that player take their turns).

What that results in, when you get all five players going, is a chaotic mess with a lot of people saying things like “Oh wait!  He should’ve gotten a +2 on that roll because of …” and then a lot of back-tracking to try to sort out what really should have happened, if you’d managed to remember all the myriad details you needed to track to make the game work.

As a minor complaint: the rules are extremely vague in some places which either leaves room for argument and rules lawyering, or requires make-shift patchworks to cover those situations the rules gloss a little too lightly.  Example: the rules never say whether the Cleric Hero may heal himself and all the wording seems to indicate that he’s supposed to only heal others — but that really makes no sense in the context of actual playing so we just said “OK, the cleric can heal himself, duh.”  There are numerous “how to play” videos and such around the place, but I'd argue a board game really should not need you to take an online class in order to learn how to play.

The Good: the game can be reasonably paced if you learn the ropes well and just move it along.  We found the best way to do this was to have one person who wasn’t playing a hero, but was really just “minding the rules” for each player and saying what needed to happen next — you know, a DM.  The game materials are generally of very good quality (except that one of our gargoyle miniatures came sans head, which was odd) and there’s a lot in that box to make the game worth the price, especially if you can get a good deal now that it’s a few years old.  The game has got a nice D&D 4e flavor to it, without all the extra set-up of building characters, reading an adventure, lugging around rules books, and getting a DM, and so on.  It comes with a series of varied adventures for you to try, and you can download the rule book from Wizards of the coast if you want a taste of what you're in for before buying.  (Sadly, the extra adventures they published for the game can no longer be found on their site.)  It’d be exceptionally easy to use the materials in the box to write and play your own adventures as well.

I'd recommend the game for D&D fans who can digest complex rules quickly and don’t mind a lot of bookkeeping — it’s really a quick way to have a D&D game without a lot of the usual fuss and muss.  I’d not recommend the game for anyone who wants a quick board game as a simple diversion.  It might be a slightly-simpler-than-D&D gateway for introducing a new player to D&D but, for me, that would miss a large part of the appeal of the actual table-top role-playing games, namely the role-playing, by reducing the game to simple goals and plastic pieces on a board.