Castle Ravenloft: My first game

[WheresMyD20]

removed the movement to be more like Betrayal in the House on the Hill

Good point- I've played it twice now and I think you're spot on - the dual squares/tiles movement scheme doesn't seem to add anything to the game. I think it would work better if they just dropped the squares and went with only tiles like in Betrayal. The only rationale I can see for keeping the squares is to make the game "feel" more like 4e.

Overall, my experience with the game has been good... not great... but good. About a 7/10. It's confirmed my suspicions, though... 4e requires very little change and works pretty well when converted into a full boardgame. I'm a little concerned about replay value, but only time will tell in that case.

The only really bad experience I had was the overly pushy game store employee (maybe owner?) who, when I went to purchase the game, repeatedly tried to get me to sign up for the 4e Essentials game night in the store. I'm still not interested... please take no for an answer, ring up my game, and let me leave. I may be a "lapsed gamer", and I may be buying the Ravenloft boardgame, but I'm not coming back... at least not to the current (or any recent) edition.

 

[MerricB]

You could drop the square-based movement... but if you did so, you'd lose differentiation in character speed. Running away when you're the dwarf is sometimes really hard because of that limited movement speed - it has been noticed in the games I've played. "Slowed" wouldn't work without squares, either.

Note that the game uses a fraction of what makes up 4E. It has the basic 4e, but not all the depth the game has. (No Opportunity Attacks for one thing, or marking, or...) Consider how AD&D would be if changed to a boardgame... not all that dissimilar to Castle Ravenloft, except the fighter would only have one power!

Cheers!

 

[Frostmarrow]

I really really like this game. And I haven't even tried it with other players yet. I get a kick not unlike the one I got as a teenager playing Space Hulk for the first time. It's a new experience.

 

[WheresMyD20]

You could drop the square-based movement... but if you did so, you'd lose differentiation in character speed. Running away when you're the dwarf is sometimes really hard because of that limited movement speed - it has been noticed in the games I've played. "Slowed" wouldn't work without squares, either.
Cheers!

You're right- you'd lose some granularity in movement (6 vs 5 squares for some heroes) and you'd have to combine "slowed" with "immobilized", but I think the resulting streamlining might speed up and simplify the game a bit. I'm going to have to try this out.

The nice thing about the Betrayal tiles are that: (1) They're 1/4 the size of the Ravenloft ones, so they use considerably less table space (2) Each one is named and has individual artwork, which gives the tiles more character so you don't feel like you're going down yet another generic dungeon corridor.

Note that the game uses a fraction of what makes up 4E. It has the basic 4e, but not all the depth the game has. (No Opportunity Attacks for one thing, or marking, or...) Consider how AD&D would be if changed to a boardgame... not all that dissimilar to Castle Ravenloft

It's interesting that when TSR converted OD&D into a boardgame they came up with Dungeon! (not a bad game). I think comparing the two boardgames shows to some degree of how the overall style of the D&D game has changed over the years.

except the fighter would only have one power!

I can think of three: attack in melee, attack with a ranged weapon, grapple. You could even split attack in melee to attack with weapon/shield and attack with two-hander. However, I don't think combat in AD&D is at its best when played in grid-and-minis style. Sure, the option to do so is there in the RPG if you want to do it, but every group I ever played with (and that's a lot of groups in several different cities) used fast-and-loose combat and only used minis for visualizing positioning, if they used minis at all.

 

[Strum]

Yeah that communal XP rule is never detailed, but is definitely in the grammar. Good pick, something I missed on my reading of the rules, but lucklily read here before running my first game.

I think it's a bit of a lesson to the person who wrote the rule book, maybe instead of explaining the diagonal movement differences of tiles and squares six times (we got it after the first), use that extra space cleanly list a procedural set of rules. Also put in a sentence that "Not all tokens are used in all scenarios", because I don't want to spoil future scenarios to work that out.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

It's just strange that in one of the few instances where the rules explicitly state what to do, it leaves a gaping hole. If it is just burnt to the bottom of the deck, then what was the point of stating which player discards their card? It's irrelevant. XP pile one, burn the other. That's a paragraph in the rules slimmed down to six words.

The reason this is important is because the only reason there would be 2 cards out is because 2 of the same monster is on the board. Since there are no labels on the miniatures to tell which one is the Skeleton being controlled by the Fighter and which one is the Skeleton being controlled by the Rogue, the rules make BOTH Skeletons act on both the Rogue's turn and the Fighter's turn.

And if one dies, the rules specify who discards their card, since you aren't expected to remember if you killed the Rogue's Skeleton of Fighter's Skeleton. The other card stays in play because there is still one Skeleton left.

 

[Hawke]

I agree with the game love - my girlfriend got interested once I opened it up and insisted we play a second game. We enjoyed it.

I think a more bullet point version of some of the rules would work - the diagonal rule for instance was explained a bunch in several paragraphs but a bulletpoint could've done a better job and taken up less space.

The other thing that made it confusing was the need to glance through future adventures to see that you don't use a lot of the game in the initial adventures. For instance, we weren't sure if there were terrain rules, then we got even more confused once we saw coffins and I remembered I punched out some. We looked through the rulebook to see if there was anything about how they worked and nothing. Same thing happened when we noticed some tiles had skulls and others didn't.

All makes sense once you read ahead, but before that we burned spent half our game time looking through the rules to see if we'd missed something when in reality they were just neat additions for future adventures.

 

[MerricB]

There are a few interesting gaps in the rules: very few things are actually missing altogether, but they well could have made a few clarifying statements which would have helped enormously.

Cheers!