Castle Ravenloft: My first game

[MerricB]

I'm kind of surprised, MerricB won. We found that since events were happening almost every single turn(any turn you don't reveal a tile and every turn you don't reveal a tile with a white arrow...and as far as I can tell 90% of the tiles have black arrows), and the tiles were things like "TRAP: affects all players on this tile and all adjacent tiles. +7 vs AC for 3 damage, 1 damage on a miss"

You played not knowing the rules, on your first experience of the game, with someone doing a very bad job of explaining the rules and you're surprised you lost?

I played the game four times last Saturday. We won the first two, lost the second two. Luck has a part to play, but so does skill. (The group changed each time, so skill didn't have much of a chance to increase).

Slain monsters are placed into a communal XP pile. Although it occasionally gets used to level someone up, far more often you use it to cancel the really nasty Encounter cards. Part of the skill at playing the game is knowing when to do this. If everyone is on a tile that is about to get hit by a trap, cancel the trap! (You're experienced enough not to trigger it... or to hide, etc.)

Most of the encounter cards, however, tend to hit only one character - the character whose turn it is.

To level up, you needed to roll a 20 on a d20 when attacking, then spend 5 XP. This only happened a few times. (You can also draw a treasure card that allows you to gain a level).

I found the rules exceedingly clear. The one problem in them is that the set-up rules don't list "take 2 healing surges"; it's buried later in the book.

Cheers!

 

[bennyhobo]

It probably would have been more fun if we'd had good instruction, if we weren't rushed to finish within a specific time limit, and if we'd been allowed to play it again after we figured out the rules the first time. So for all that, it was mainly just presented to us poorly at the event. That's not the game's fault. It's the fault of the situation and the guy running it. Still, I can't help feeling that if it was a great game, it's own merits would have overcome those problems. Or at least they would've come through enough to make me say, "This situation stunk, but I'd like to try it again."

But whatever. It just didn't click for me. It sounds like most of you had a better experience than I did, and that's good.

 

[erf_beto]

I've seen them before in the D&D Miniatures line. (I'm pretty sure I can field prepainted versions of all the minis here except for the new Dragonborn). I think they're pretty good, but I'm not the best person to ask about quality of minis - I look at the more to utility than appearance.

Cheers!

Hmmm...
After the hype fades and the dust settles, I wonder how the community will react to the unpainted minis.

IMO, for a boardgame with a set number of pieces, yes, I'd like to have them all painted. But as a rpg player, just gimme 15 orcs and I'm good!

I value utility as well, so I think I'd be pretty happy with a non-randomized Monster Vault or D&D Heroes set of unpainted minis instead of tokens. They once said this would be too expansive, but maybe they'll be able to make them cheaper by releasing them unpainted.

Might be just me, though. :/

 

[MerricB]

Hmmm...
After the hype fades and the dust settles, I wonder how the community will react to the unpainted minis.

IMO, for a boardgame with a set number of pieces, yes, I'd like to have them all painted. But as a rpg player, just gimme 15 orcs and I'm good!

I value utility as well, so I think I'd be pretty happy with a non-randomized Monster Vault or D&D Heroes set of unpainted minis instead of tokens. They once said this would be too expansive, but maybe they'll be able to make them cheaper by releasing them unpainted.

Might be just me, though. :/

Strangely enough, I'm pretty sure what makes them doable as a product is the board game component. Monsters just by themselves have a problem, but the boardgame makes it much more saleable!

Cheers,
Merric

 

[Traveon Wyvernspur]

When is this being released for sale?

 

[Peraion Graufalke]

When is this being released for sale?

From what I've seen it has been postponed to August 31st.

 

[MerricB]

The fourth and final report on my Castle Ravemloft experiences last Saturday is now up on BGG:

Game 4: Daylight Assault (pictorial) | Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft Board Game | BoardGameGeek

Daylight Assault... a scenario where we discovered how bad we could be at combat!

Cheers!

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

You played not knowing the rules, on your first experience of the game, with someone doing a very bad job of explaining the rules and you're surprised you lost?

Well, we did have the problem that we played a game at around 10 pm. By that time, apparently we had no WOTC rep at all. They simply handed the game out to anyone who asked and we were expected to figure it out by reading the rule book. By that point, apparently the WOTC rep had been gone for some time. There were 4 or 5 tables playing the game at once and not a single person at any table had been taught the game by WOTC.

Slain monsters are placed into a communal XP pile. Although it occasionally gets used to level someone up, far more often you use it to cancel the really nasty Encounter cards. Part of the skill at playing the game is knowing when to do this. If everyone is on a tile that is about to get hit by a trap, cancel the trap! (You're experienced enough not to trigger it... or to hide, etc.)

It's possible that I didn't read the rules well enough(as the one player who played the game before put himself in charge of the game and kept discouraging me from browsing the rulebook). However, I read through the XP sections 4 or 5 times in order for it to be clear and even brought it up to the whole table who read through those sections a couple of times each in order to see who was right about the XP. Not a single one of them could come up with the explanation that there was a communal XP pile.

In fact, I've just reread the rules that are posted on the WOTC site and it never once says there is a communal XP pile. It just refers to putting the XP in "the XP pile" and taking XP out from the "Heroes' XP pile". The exact quote is "When you defeat a Monster, the Hero who controls it puts that Monster Card in the Heroes’ Experience Pile."

Now that I'm aware there is a communal XP pool the sentence makes sense. When we weren't aware of that fact, we kept asking "Which Hero's XP pile?" This certainly could have been made more clear.

Now that I know we should have had a communal pile of XP this probably would have helped a lot. It was fairly often when we encountered a really nasty trap that nearly killed us all that we would have loved to have avoided using XP, but the person who encountered the trap didn't have enough XP, while 2 or 3 other players DID. If we had been pooling XP, we would have had enough to easily avoid a nasty Encounter or 2 each round. That would have helped a lot.

I found the rules exceedingly clear. The one problem in them is that the set-up rules don't list "take 2 healing surges"; it's buried later in the book.

Yeah, this was another area they were unclear in. In fact, the guy who was showing us how to play had just assumed you used all of the healing surges in the box (of which there are 6 or 8 of them). I managed to catch the starting with 2 healing surge section right at the beginning of our game, but the guy teaching us said the game was way too hard and even with all the healing surges they had lost...so he wasn't about to try playing with only 2.

Maybe the XP issue is a big enough deal to make the game winnable. I hope so. I'm going to buy it and try at any rate.

 

[Baphomet]

This game looks and sounds so awesome, very excited to pick this up

 

[MerricB]

Not a single one of them could come up with the explanation that there was a communal XP pile.

I'm going to say that it just shows you that people's grasp of grammar is lousy.

The exact phrase is "The Heroes' Experience Pile". It isn't "The Hero's Experience Pile". No, it's one pile that belongs to all the heroes. When monster death is covered on page 10, the player discards the monster card in to "the Experience Pile". Not "his experience pile", but "the".