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Product Description
Dungeons and Dragons: Castle Ravenloft Board Game
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #6121 in Toys & Games
- Brand: Wizards of the Coast
- Model: 5511231
- Number of discs: 1
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 11.50" h x 5.50" w x 11.50" l, 6.56 pounds
Features
- For 1-5 players
- Challenging quests
- Tons of replay value
- Multiple scenarios
- Cooperative game-play
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Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
119 of 124 people found the following review helpful.
A Mist is Rising...
By Dhampire
Caveat: I played this game at GenCon (Indianapolis; August 4 - 8, 2010) however, as of this writing, the game is not yet available. At the time it was a complete shrink-wrapped game box and package as one would purchase and I am inclined to believe that it is the finished product, pending any severe issues that may have come up during the course of people playing it at the convention.
Now, on with the review:
The components of this game are many. There are several sheets of punch tiles that comprise the game boards, character cards, status modifiers, health pips, coffins, etc. The box, itself, makes for a poor means to store all of these bits and pieces and you may consider baggies, counter trays, or other means of keeping certain tokens from intermingling between sessions to make set-up go a little more smoothly. The parts themselves are very sturdy wood-stock bits (similar to those used by Fantasy Flight Games - for those familiar with their board game offerings) and are therefore quite robust and will last you many-many years without damage or loss from being blown aside by a mild cough. There are several plastic miniatures, of excellent quality (unpainted), that are conveniently color coded by type. Undead (skeletons, zombies, etc) are white, animals are brown, spectral undead (ghosts, specters, etc) are a translucent blue, notorious villains (Strahd, werewolf, etc) are a dark grey, and the heroes are alight grey. I found this distinction to be very helpful in taking quick glances of the board and seeing how monsters were grouped versus the distribution of the PCs as well as seeing where any allies were located and obstacles between without having to examine every mini on the grid. This also makes monster placement simpler in that you are now examining a smaller pool of minis to locate rats, versus having to search though all of them at once.
The game `board' is crafted through the course of play. Several tiles represent rooms and corridors of the castle and as you and your fellow heroes move, more of the castle is revealed. This is similar to the Avalon Hill game "The Betrayal at the House on the Hill". Unlike that game, heroes do not need to enter the tile/room to place it but simply be near the edge of a tile. With each tile enters a new monster, and possibly an encounter based on the mark on the tile, who goes under the control of the player that drew it and it will perform certain specific actions on the monster turn of the game. Defeating monsters gains the heroes equipment and experience points. The experience points go into a community pool and can be used to level up your hero or negate certain encounters.
Aside from the rule booklet, there is also a scenario booklet. The scenario you choose will determine the victory conditions for the game. The game itself is cooperative and either the entire group wins or all of the heroes lose. Some of the scenarios seemed capable of being linked together (the scenario we played was "Hunt for Strahd, part one") and can become part of a larger and longer game played over several weekends. I should also think that one could also invent new scenarios not included with the original book.
While the hero cards are definitely crafted with the current Dungeons and Dragons rules set in mind (4th edition) they only seem to have a 1st level and 2nd level power set. This makes the bookkeeping minor and even someone (like myself) who has not played the fourth edition of the game is capable of comprehending and understanding their hero.
I found this game quite enjoyable and useful. It serves perfectly well as a board game by itself. For those Table-Top RPG gamers, its beautifully printed tiles, tokens, and the included minis, can very easily serve as dungeon mapping for your home campaigns. This game would also do well for those parents out there looking for a way to let their children experience RPG style play without delving into the morass of character sheets, race selection, statistic generation, and all of the bulk of the RPG system. Definately worth the price of admission.
69 of 72 people found the following review helpful.
Fun was had by all!
By ROBERT J STJACQUES
After reading many positive comments about this game and watching the "unboxing" video on the WotC web site [...] I decided that this would be the perfect introduction to DnD for my daughters (ages 11 and 12). The general consensus that I got from reading up on the game was that it plays very much like DnD 4th Edition with the role of the GM played by the careful, but brief rule system. The box contains a rule booklet (available as a PDF download from the game site), and an adventure booklet that contains several 1-page adventures, each of which customizes the rules of the game towards a specific scenario. Additionally, WotC provides a couple of supplemental adventures as downloads from the Castle Ravenloft site.
the only drawback to the game is that it requires a LOT of table space. Depending on the adventure you choose, and the direction that your players choose to explore throughout the randomly generated dungeon, you can quickly create a large, unwieldy dungeon that stretches to the very edges of your table surface (and beyond). This leads to making decisions about which directions to move based not on where you want to go, but where there is room on your table to expand.
In addition to the ever growing dungeon, each player also has to deal with the many cards required to play. Every player gets a "hero card" which is a heavy stock cardboard card that measures about 6x6 and features the essential stats for their chosen hero (cleric, rogue, ranger, fighter, or mage). Each player also gets 5-6 power cards that describe their at-will, utility, and daily powers. As players defeat monsters they acquire treasure cards, and as the game progresses they may acquire any number of monster or encounter cards. There are also 40 plastic figurines for monsters and players, and decks for treasure, encounters, and monsters that must be accessible to all players. With a game featuring 3 or more players, things can quickly devolve into a chaotic mess if you're not careful. In our second game, which featured a villain that could cause the dungeon to randomly expand) we were forced to move the dungeon and our cards several times to make room for the expansions and keep track of the monsters that were spawning on every turn.
Despite the apparent complexity with so many game items to keep track of, both of my daughters were able to quickly pick up the basics of the d20 system and, by the mid point of our second game, were quickly and easily calculating the necessary rolls with specific attack bonuses to hit the armor class of the monsters that they had targeted. It made this father very proud to hear my 11-year-old say: "OK, so my tide of iron has a +8 to attack, and that skeleton has an armor class of 16. But I'm on the same tile as the level 2 mage, so I get a +1 bonus to my attack roll. I need to roll a 7 or higher to hit him." As an educational tool it definitely teaches kids to quickly do simple mental arithmetic, and keep track of lots of variables (treasure, traps, encounters, hit points, and bonuses).
Overall, it's a fantastic game that's fun for everyone, and is a great on-ramp to more open ended DnD sets in the future. I'm very satisfied!
67 of 74 people found the following review helpful.
A fantastic but incredibly hard game
By Terry Mesnard
Years ago, during my junior high and high school days, I was a connoisseur of tabletop RPGs. I had my gang of players and we would spent hours and weekends playing whatever RPG we had in front of us, from D&D to White Wolf to Gurps and beyond. As I grew older and grew apart from my old friends, my books have gone into storage. I always want to get back into those games, but my friends, even my geeky ones, don't normally have the patience, drive or desire to really dig into a campaign setting. And finding the time to both create massive adventures on my part but also finding the discrete amount of time each week or so to sit down and play for a few hours is difficult now. When I heard about Castle Ravenloft (one of my favorite campaign settings), I immediately perked up. Here, I thought, was a chance to dig back into the game in a way that wasn't as complicated or time-consuming (or, let's be honest, as geeky) as a full-fledged campaign. After I ordered it, I became very worried because most of the reviews I've read across the internet have said it's too hard. I was afraid that it'd turn of my fellow gamers and the box would languish like my 2nd edition D&D books.
Here is my experience after a couple playthroughs:
Castle Ravenloft is a huge box. It dwarfs all other equally large board games I own like Betrayal at House on the Hill and Last Night on Earth. It also comes with a ton of pieces (a good thing, considering the price of this monster) for you to punch out. As listed above in the product description, there's dozens of miniatures, an equal amount of interlocking dungeon tiles, around 200 encounter and treasure cards, a rule book, a scenario book (with about a dozen scenarios) and a 20-sided die that I'm pretty sure is out to kill. What it doesn't explain is the amount of other punchable tiles to indicate hit points, conditions (like slowed and immobile), traps, treasures, monsters, character and "boss" stocks (i.e. Strahd) with stats and other assorted items you'll use in the scenarios. I spent a good amount of time punching out the dungeon tiles and the other tiles, skimming the cards and just admiring how awesomely designed the entire thing is. It's not cheap materials in this box. Wizards did a terrific job making this stand out, from a workman perspective. The only complaint I'd level is that the dungeon tiles are kind of mundane. The art is pretty typical "dungeon tile" and lacks flair.
The Rulebook is very slim and sometimes ambiguous. I've read through it a couple times and it took running a game and coming up with house rules to deal with ambiguity to really understand everything. For example, it mentions the white and black arrows on the dungeon tiles and tells you that if there's a black arrow, you have to draw an encounter card. But it doesn't tell you what the white arrow means, except that it's the difference between a difficult situation and an easier one. The implication is that you don't draw an encounter card when the white arrow is there (or, I discovered later, some scenarios explain a specific thing to do if the arrow is white), but it doesn't spell it out. And it can be confusing the first few times you play through the game. Likewise, some dungeon tiles have skulls on them and some don't. I couldn't find in the book exactly what those mean, so we just decided that it meant you had to draw a monster card. I'm sure there will be an errata online to address the nebulous rules but you'd think that the game you purchased would have the rules clearly laid out. Sifting through the forums shows that a lot of people have made up house rules to address some of the ambiguity.
For our first game, we went with the second scenario (the first scenario is for one player). It was the most straightforward and presumably easiest: the goal was to locate the chapel, find the Icon of Ravenloft and escape with it. The game comes with five characters/classes (fighter, wizard, priest, rogue and ranger) and each character has a selection of power cards that they can use once in the game or at will. Thankfully, the game suggests specific cards if you don't know what you're doing. We went with those and it was fine. The game is split into three phases for each player: Hero, exploration and villain. During the hero phase, you can move a set number of spaces on a tile and/or attack. If you reach the end of a tile, you draw another dungeon tile and set it down. The tile will indicate whether you have to draw an encounter card or not and whether to place a monster. If you have an encounter, you have to draw an encounter card and it'll tell you what to do. Most of the time, some random monster will attack you or everyone on your tile. You roll the dice, add their attack to it and see if it's above or below your armor class. If it's above, you take the damage listed on the card. If it's below, you either take no damage or, more often than not, take one damage regardless. Encounters are 90% mean. You don't want to deal with them.
After the encounter, you draw a monster card and place the miniature on the bone pile in the room. Because the game doesn't have a game master to control the monsters, if you draw the card, it's your monster to control. Castle Ravenloft intelligently deals with this by using the monster cards. Each monster has a specific tactic that you use, which follows a "If the monster is within one tile of you it does this" or "if the monster is next to a hero, it does this." Some monsters, like gargoyles, won't move if you are over one tile away from them. But most of them will move towards you and attack. The difference is which attack they'll use. As an example, a spider will bite you if it's next to you. If it's within a tile from you, it'll use its web attack to slow you and then move to you. If it's over a tile away, it'll simply move towards the closest hero. Killing the monster means you keep the card which in turn acts as experience points. Experience points are very important because you can spend five points to cancel out an encounter; or, if you roll a natural 20, you can spend five experience points to go up to level two...obviously this doesn't happen very often.
Castle Ravenloft can be a very intense game. Because there is no game master and in order to prevent heroes from taking their time and just slowly taking care of monsters, waiting around and healing up (using a cleric ability, for example) before continuing on, Ravenloft throws encounters at you with wild abandon. If you don't explore (reach the end of a tile and place another), you have to draw an encounter card. Likewise, if you are fighting three monsters and it's not going well (meaning, you can't continue on and explore), you have to draw an encounter card. This can quickly spike the difficulty and overwhelm you to the point that you won't win. You only get two healing surges (we played with three, as was recommended in the rulebook for "lowering the difficulty") and all of the scenarios end if even one player is dead. In case it's not evident: Castle Ravenloft is hard and often punishing. Once you add in traps that can smash you into walls, shoot arrows, or immobilize you among other crazy cards you can pull, your chances of survival seem almost nil. The game is stacked against you. That said, we managed to barely survive our first game based on right-timed skills (the fighter's dragon breath at the end which ended up hitting all three monsters and killing them) and luck. But we had fun the entire time.
With twelve wildly different scenarios and two available to download from Wizards' website, there's a lot of replayability in Castle Ravenloft. I will end with a little anecdote about our first playthrough. I was playing with two friends. One had a bit of experience both with computer RPGs and some table top experience. The other had absolutely no experience. At the beginning, she just took what power cards were dealt to her, looked them over and said "I have no idea what any of this means." She didn't really care what was going on. But something interesting happened. As the game progressed, she grew more and more into it, and at the end when we were faced with three monsters and it looked grim she excitedly and animatedly jumped up, yelling, "OH! I can use my dragon breath skill and kill them all!" It made me smile. While Castle Ravenloft is geared towards pen and paper geeks like myself, it is simple enough that someone who has never played through a module (let alone know what a module is) can pick it up and have a great time.
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