Note from Video: Joe has been playing Dungeons and Dragons since 2nd edition and is experienced as a DM and player. Here's his take of the game Castle Ravenloft from Wizards of the Coast. Check back for reviews from the other players, including my own, from our gaming session with it!
I've played Dungeons and Dragons games since I was very young, and enjoyed the complexity, freedom, and adaptive nature involved with the game. I was thrilled to hear about the Castle Ravenloft game and figured it would be a kind of "D&D Lite" of sorts.
This isn't D&D Lite. It's like, Off-Brand Diet Caffeine Free D&D. It's not BAD, just not what you're expecting.
The characters are unimpressive. I immediately recognized the same recycled artwork Wizards uses for their D&D characters. The Dragonborn fighter, the dwarven cleric, the eladrin mage... They act like their real D&D counterparts in having an AC, HP, Healing Surges, and a handful of cards representing their
at-will, utility, and daily powers.
The game starts off easily enough. You have a entry tile and a few more tiles placed off to start to represent your line of sight. You run about the dungeon, spawning new tiles as you hit board edges. You continue in this manner until you flip the tile with your objective on it, clear it out, and head home victorious.
The Castle Ravenloft experience is accurate enough when comparing to the setting it's supposed to represent. EVERYTHING is trying to kill you. You spawn a tile, you spawn a monster. You DON'T spawn a tile, you get an event which might as well be called "Bad Omen" or some such because it's always bad. And if you kill a monster you get a treasure... which is often times useless. Useless is better than bad though!
The fact that the dungeon is actively trying to kill you definitely gives the party a sense of dread and urgency, as I noticed our party haphazardly barreling through the dungeon spawning tiles, as generally spawning monsters is better than an event. At one point, we spawned a trap which instantly did two damage to everyone on the tile. And it would continue to do so every round until disarmed.
The "boss" fights were a bit unimpressive for the two adventures we did. For the first boss of a room full of monsters, I hurled a fireball into the room and everything died except one monster who was lucky enough to have fled the tile the turn before mine. The second adventure we had an actual boss monster, who actually
took a fireball and another player's daily ability to down.
In summary, the game was fun, but I have a few problems with it. It completely feels like a gateway product to play real D&D, and I think the product actually is geared towards this. For someone who plays and enjoys D&D already, this isn't the full experience. Also, it felt a lot more like a board game along the lines of Heroquest or Descent than D&D. And honestly, those games did it better.
