So we've seen what the players thought about Castle Ravenloft this week, and it's time for me to chime in. As I said before, I bought this game because I had been looking for a multi-player dungeon crawling board game where nobody had to control the monsters on the board. I bought Tomb for this, I bought an electronic Dungeons and Dragons board game to serve as inspiration in maybe designing my own, I bought Arkham Horror, and finally Castle Ravenloft. So how's it hold up?
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| Inspiration! |
The rules included with the game read very well, and it seems like they would cover everything that could happen in the game, that is, until you sit down and wonder what half the stuff you're looking at is. There's monster cards and monster tokens, trap tokens that are labeled as coffins, and trap tokens that are 2x2 squares with trap descriptions on them. Rules for treasure and encounters are briefly mentioned and not made a big deal of. We figured it out, but you shouldn't have to figure out a brand new game. The manual needed a page explaining what everything was for and what adventures you would use them with.
There were some other problems that were in the rules where they didn't spell out how some interactions work. I understand that this is DnD light, but toss in an FAQ page of some of the weirder things that can come up, like what if players are equal distance from a monster, which one does it consider "closest"? Are those tombs on the board something the players can step on, or not?
The tiles on the board worked very well as a mapping system, but falls flat on what they could have been. Every tile spawns a monster, and some of them cause encounters to go off as well. The monster will undoubtedly come and hit you, and nearly every encounter was something terrible about to happen. Good call on not causing every tile to spawn an encounter, but how about not having every tile spawn a monster? Create a few sanctuary spaces where players can rest, heal, and regroup to press onward without worrying about having to spawn encounters for not doing anything.
The monsters are easy to kill, most requiring one or two hits, but have no problems hitting you with their extremely high to hit scores. A +11 on a kobold is ridiculous. What's more, the monsters will always get the first chance to hit you, as they don't appear until the end of your hero phase, way too late to get an attack off. But since the order of operations for them is "spawn room, spawn monster, activate monster", it kinda sucks. In addition, some of those guys hit hard, and for low level adventures, maybe WOTC should have considered pulling them out of the deck and allowing them to get ramped up a little more over time. Our first two monster pulls were a gargoyle and a burning skeleton, two of the hardest random monsters in the deck.
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| Seriously. That's how it went down. |
The players have some interesting abilities pulled straight from 4th edition that you can customize your character with. It adds a bit of flavor to the game, although some of the abilities almost seem required, making going too much outside of a comfort zone a dangerous decision. They also have the ability to level up by pulling one of the rare treasure cards, or by rolling a 20 and spending 5xp worth of experience from the pool used to negate encounters with. It actually happened a few times in our games, so it's not unheard of.
With all of this said, how does the game come together? Well, the game is trying to kill you every step of the way. There's no downtime. It's an attempt to get as deep into the castle as you can and do anything to get your goal tiles to spawn. The rewards aren't enough to bolster any kind of confidence, the abilities that might be considered awesome or game breaking are balanced by constantly hovering at death's door, and the healing surges given are there not for when things go wrong, but for when the inevitable happens.
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| I rolled a 1, 1, 2, and 1, in that order before I got new dice |
