Some time ago I had heard about Wizards of the Coast's upcoming board game, Castle Ravenloft. The idea of an adventure cooperative board game is always interesting to me, and adding to it that nobody has to sit back and run the adventure because it randomizes itself is what made me want to buy it. So I head to GenCon fully expecting them to be pre-selling their game there, and to my disappointment, couldn't even find them demoing it at their booth (they were running demos around the con which I was able to watch part of, though).
So not being able to get my hands on it, and seeing the price tag at a steep $65, I put in an order with
Cool Stuff Inc where it could be found for only $42. Toss in a few more items and I had a nice $100 that gave me free shipping. Unfortunately one of those items was Dominion: Prosperity, and the order wouldn't ship until they had everything. Last week, however, I got everything in!
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| Yay! New game! |
First off, this box is big. While the length and width of it is pretty normal for a board game, check out the depth:
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| WOTC Product, meet WOTC Product |
That's a Magic The Gathering card that I'm holding up next to it, about the size of a playing card for anybody who is still wondering. There is going to be a lot of stuff in this box. So let's get this thing open already!
Nothing surprising here, the rule books, and a bundled pack of punch out pieces for the board and life counters and such.
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| More Plastic |
Underneath is a black plastic card holder, with two decks of cards, a bag full of minis, and a large undead dragon.
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| Anything Else? |
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| Ah! Quite a few more punch out pieces underneath the black plastic! |
Ok, now that everything is out of the box, let's dig into some of these things.
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| Minis first! |
Tearing open the bag of minis actually yielded several other bags inside, with each piece divided by color, as well as a 20 sided die.
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| There are many colors in the Undead Rainbow, come on and let your color shine |
Opening up the pieces, it became obvious that these are pretty much just unpainted DnD mini figures cast in certain colors. Anybody who is looking for some minis might find what you're looking for here, but there's probably cheaper alternatives.
Like D&D Minis, each piece has its name on the bottom of it, so there's no mistaking what you've got on the table. Here's the pictures of the rest of them:
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| The Dragon! |
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| These are pretty nifty, actually. |
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| He-ro! |
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| The bad guys |
I found it interesting that the skeletons had an additional layer of plastic around them, this seems to be pretty common in plastic collectible games that contain skeletons.
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| He's very delicate, like a undead flower. That wants to kill you. |
Next up are the tiles. The first thing I noticed about them is that they are very thick cardboard and have a nice finish to them. The tiles interlock with each other, and having played games with tiles like that before, I was worried that they might easily get stuck together or not fit right or something. I was pleasantly surprised to find that they fit right together, and leave enough space where you don't push them together to connect them, but keep it tight enough so there's no worry about accidentally becoming disconnected. Well done on this one, WOTC.
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| Front |
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| Back |
Along with the tiles came tokens, and there are a LOT of them. And many of them aren't small.
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| This is a little over two pages worth, and there's a lot of pages. |
The last few cards were the character sheets, healing surges, entry hall, and a card for the big boss vampire himself.
So everything is punched out, and put into its container.
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| Hrm, this isn't going to fit.. |
There's a problem with the black plastic container they give you to keep everything in. Wizards tried to make a container that would hold everything, and for the most part they did a pretty good job. They unfortunately still run into the problem that many other token heavy games run into, in that despite having a large number of tokens of differing kinds, there's only a few places where they can go. There's a couple spots under the card which I utilized, but the pits below where the tiles go just aren't enough, and there's no place that I found to put the large double sized tiles. Maybe I need to see a picture to see how I'm supposed to be doing this, but this isn't it.
I left the cards packaged up for now. We'll go over them more later. For now, what's important is that I'll be doing a review game session with some of my group this weekend, and will have a full review of our experience, including input from the players, up early next week, just in time for Halloween. We'll see you then!
