Castle Ravenloft boardgame questions ...

[Agamon]

Ah. When making my post, I was wondering if I had perhaps done something wrong in set up (thus the post in this thread). Admittedly, I only glanced through the actual rules, though I did pay the most attention to set up (not enough, apparently).

I don't own the game, so I can't reread it. We put the 4 shuffled tiles at the bottom of a 12 tile pile. Were we supposed to put it on top of a 12 tile pile and then put the rest in top of that? Sounds like a long game, but that's what I've deduced from the previous three posts. Feel free to enlighten me otherwise.

 

[Flatus Maximus]

Snip.

Most of the scenarios have you: take a special tile and shuffle it into a very small pile, say with 3 others; put 8 randomly selected tiles on top of that small pile; then put all the remaining tiles under the small pile. This way, the tile you typically want to get to is somewhere between 9 and 12. As was previously mentioned, drawing from the bottom of the entire dungeon tile deck is bad. BTW: Apologies for the previous snarky post.

 

[Agamon]

Okay, that makes sense. I wanted to draw from the bottom of the rest of the tiles, because that was all that really made sense to me. Thanks for the clarification, I'll have to give it another try.

 

[Holy Bovine]

Finally got a chance to play CR this weekend. Overall I am pleased with the game play and the rules were mostly clear and straightforward. One question I did have - if the monsters have a choice of whom they attack (ie 2 or more heroes are equal distant from them) who do they go after? Is it just done randomly? Attack Active Hero first, others second?

I was thinking to just go with attacking the closest, most wounded Hero first then Active Hero (assuming it and another hero are equal distant from the monster) then random roll if neither of those conditions resolves it.

Any official word on this?

 

[Treebore]

Nothing official that I know of, if the PC who is holding the monsters card is closest, that is who they attack by default, otherwise we roll a d6, or whichever dice is most appropriate for the number of PC's "closest", and that is who the monster attacks.

 

[MerricB]

Whoever's turn it is chooses what happens when more than one thing can occur.

Cheers!

 

[DevildogSC]

Villians vs Monsters

Been playing fairly regularly recently and decided to try the 2 part adventure actually involving Strahd. An interesting snag hit. We had to fight the Flesh Golem (strahd's bodyguard) on about tile 4, defeat him, and then continue. He's a 10 hp, level 5 monster and provides no discernible xp bonus when defeated. We weren't even 100% sure if the hero gets a treasure card when defeating the Villain. It started an unsolvable discussion about the game seemingly differentiating monsters and villains. (Villains have their own phase!) There is still no errata or any official clarification that we could find, so any thoughts on this from you guys? Separate entities? Subsets of the same class? Villains go once, then again when all monsters activate? XP based on Villain level when defeated? If Villains are separate, all attacks specify monster targets. This seems like a big hole to me.

 

[Marius Delphus]

One rule that's worked fairly well for us so far is, "Villains are Monsters, except when they're not."

Villains aren't activated like Monsters; they have their own step in the Villain Phase. (We rule that they aren't actually "controlled" by any single player, as regards card effects.) However, they *are* targeted as though they're Monsters (anything else would seem silly and contrary to the RAI, IYAM).

The rules don't seem to provide a treasure draw for defeating a Villain, and Villains aren't worth XP. However, that's easy to house-rule if it's frustrating your group. (We allow every character to draw a Treasure Card when a Villain is defeated, and we toss the Villain's token on the XP pile and declare it worth a number of XP equal to its level.)

Have fun!

 

[Samurai]

Thanks for the XP everyone, I'm glad you liked the pictures. I have some new painted figures, so here they are... is anyone else painting their figures? If so, let's see them!