Review: Dungeons and Dragons Adventure Board Games

Wizards of the Coast has released three different board games (well, really one game with three different settings) that are essentially D&D Lite - Castle Ravenloft, Legend of Drizzt, and Wrath of Ashardalon.  These games have the same feel as Descent: Journeys in the Dark, but instead of one player versus the rest, these games are entirely cooperative.  They split up control of the monsters/adventure between players so everyone is involved and the adventure is even more of a team event.

The game starts with players selecting an adventure to go on with its own setup, goals, and villains.  Then they each select one of the five heroes to play.  Each hero has a whole slew of abilities that they must trim down to their starting set.  With the board and heroes all set up, any player can start the game (usually the fighter-type character should start).  On every turn, players can either move and attack, attack and move, or move twice.  If the players end their turn on an unexplored edge of a tile, they reveal another tile and a new monster (they might also have an encounter).  If they did not explore, then they draw an encounter card (which are usually pretty rough for the players).  That player then activates the monsters they control (such as they one they might have revealed on their turn) and play continues clockwise until the players achieve their victory condition or one character has no health left and there are no health surges (extra lives) left.

One of the first complaints most D&D players have with this game is that the monsters almost always get an attack off on the players before they can do anything.  However, if players got to attack first, this game would be way too easy.  As it is, they are perfectly challenging games.  I have yet to play a game where a player has not had 0 health and had to use a health surge.  There is a good balance between randomness and protection from losing/winning streaks on rolls.

My only problem with the game is that since everyone is working together, it's very easy to interpret rule ambiguities in the players favor, which sometimes felt like cheating to me.  For example, monsters generally move from one tile to another, but on each tile are 16 squares that they can be placed on.  I couldn't find any rule that says which square they should go on and having them adjacent to heroes will change what attack they do on subsequent turns, so deciding which square a monster should go on is up to the players and can drastically alter the difficulty of the game.  (My friends and I have made a house ruling that monsters will go on the monster spawn points on each tile when they enter a tile from moving so it's always a set location.)

All in all, if you don't have time or a DM for a proper D&D romp, these are a nice alternative with quests taking a couple hours each and an option to play a campaign of multiple quests.