Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft Board Game

Product Information

The active hero (that is, the person whose turn it is) can either attack and move, move and attack, or move twice.

The best example of this is the tile-based movement system that all monsters (and occasionally some of the heroes) use: rather than plotting at path across squares, it involves simply moving to a different tile, and this being a co-op game the players get to choose which square on the tile the piece gets moved to.During the exploration phase a new dungeon tile may be placed, along with a new random monster or possibly a random encounter like a slime attack, a crossbow trap or perhaps a haunting mist filling the dungeon. Scott Taylor of Black Gate comments: "I have to give the designs props for creating a fresh version of an old concept and if you're looking to have a few hours of fun on a weekend night".

I remain unconvinced that the mechanics for increasing difficulty when more characters are in the game really works since it’s reliant on more than one player drawing the same monster card, and that monster type then acts twice per turn.

It gets to attack you on the Villain phase, and then you don't move again till the Hero phase of your next turn. And if I ever need a Male Dragonborn Fighter armed with an Axe, I guess I’ve got the perfect model to fit that unlikely event…. The first is that this quite possibly does the best job ever of capturing the spirit of those old-fashioned role-playing game dungeon crawls that were so much fun in the days of my youth. Or perhaps the treasure will be something less tangible like the blessing Guided strike or fortune of a blessing. As with any role playing game, in Ravenloft you represent a hero that is trying to save the world, kill the evil bad guy, rescue a princess, get piles of treasure, etc.

It would certainly help you to feel that you’d found a cool item to see it pictured instead of just a line of text telling you that it gives you +1 to attack rolls. I recognized early on that this made it very easy for us to see what was what on the board, but I still found it disappointing. That flat probability curve and all those checks for action success also mean that, obviously, there’s a fairly high level of randomness in the game generally because to accomplish many actions in the game beyond moving, you need to roll the dice. Once the scenario is chosen you lay down the starting tile, which is the dungeon entrance, and put your minis (included) on it.There’s nothing mold-breaking involved here, just a real sense that people worked hard to do as much as the could with relatively little. The light rules weight and the well-known nature of the license also leaves ample scope for both official and fan-generated extra content to be squeezed in. Designed for 1–5 players, this boardgame features multiple scenarios, challenging quests, and cooperative game play, English as Subtitle.