If you wanted a lightweight entry into actual role playing via a board game, you might want to check this out if/when it launches some time this year: Waterdeep shares the theme, fantasy locations, artwork asserts, lore and characters of D&D, and references the idea of quests, magic, certain kinds of monsters etc, but it is very much a board game, not even a board game pretending to be an RPG. Waterdeep is at a remove - the ‘heroes’ here are just assets/cubes you get and spend, the only ‘character’ you are in the game is your ‘hidden Lord’, assigned to you randomly at the start, and staying the same throughout. Great fun, for sure, but a very different experience. Real RPGs are all about building up a character, improving it over time, and ‘getting into character’ as your personal hero. Unfortunately, the pre-eminent Lovecraft gaming IP is owned by a rival to the D&D franchise, so I guess that is never going to : you can obviously tell I’m a fan of Waterdeep ,:) but I must stress it isn’t at all an RPG or even RPG lite like the old Heroquest (but see below).ĭ&D, Runequest, Call of Cthulhu RPG etc all play very differently from Waterdeep. In my dreams, someone decides to do a Cthulhu- themed version of Waterdeep, and then my gaming bliss would be complete. You don’t have to be a D&D geek to get it either - it works fine purely on it’s own terms as a standalone, finely tuned hybrid of Eurogame and Ameritrash, excellent (and thrillingly different at each level) as two, three or four player, (wouldn’t recommend 5, it’ll drag) with many excellent opportunities to stuff your friends in despicable ways en route to victory. Practice against the not-bad AI, then take it online to play your friends head to head - it has been a regular online date for me with gamer friends I couldn’t meet in person through This Present Hell.Īs you become more familiar with the game, you’ll appreciate the synergies possible between a Lord and their agenda - do you go for war, with Barbarians and warlike buildings galore, rely on the slow subtle working of Arcana for your wizard Lord, grab the cash as a Commerce orientated Lord? Every Lord always has at least two paths to maximum points, so it’s always a question of yet more difficult choices… Great as a real board game, also plays brilliantly as an iPad app. Meanwhile, out in the open you can see your Lord sprinting ahead on the victory point track, but don’t celebrate too soon - at the end of the game, with secret agenda conditions revealed, the ‘obvious winner’ might be in for a nasty shock…Įasy to learn, deep to master, no dice involved, endlessly variable due to the interplay of Quest and Intrigue decks, buildings, and Lords, played over 8 rounds in anywhere from 40 minutes to two hours depending on number of players. Always, too many choices and not enough Agents… Along the way you’ll have to make tough choices about when, or if, to grab cash, play Intrigue cards for your benefit or to do down an opponent, recruit adventurers to complete your quests, and so on. hiring a wizard, two clerics, and spending six cash - you get it’s victory point value to tot up at the end of the game. This happens ‘off board’ as it were - you claim a quest, and once you can fulfill it’s completion criteria, e.g. Great theme, you are one of the ‘hidden lords’ of the fantasy medieval-like D&D port city of Waterdeep, each with your own secret agenda, not going on the typical Role Player dungeon crawls yourself this time, but sending out your ‘agents’ to the various and varied buildings of the old city in order to hire and deploy the teams of warriors, clerics, wizards and rogues (alright, coloured wooden cubes) who’ll do all the fighting, healing, wizarding and thieving on quests for you. Lords of Waterdeep, but, I insist, with both expansions:
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