Years ago, during my junior high and high school days, I was a connoisseur of tabletop RPGs. I had my gang of players and we would spent hours and weekends playing whatever RPG we had in front of us, from D&D to White Wolf to Gurps and beyond. As I grew older and grew apart from my old friends, my books have gone into storage. I always want to get back into those games, but my friends, even my geeky ones, don't normally have the patience, drive or desire to really dig into a campaign setting. And finding the time to both create massive adventures on my part but also finding the discrete amount of time each week or so to sit down and play for a few hours is difficult now. When I heard about Castle Ravenloft (one of my favorite campaign settings), I immediately perked up. Here, I thought, was a chance to dig back into the game in a way that wasn't as complicated or time-consuming (or, let's be honest, as geeky) as a full-fledged campaign. After I ordered it, I became very worried because most of the reviews I've read across the internet have said it's too hard. I was afraid that it'd turn of my fellow gamers and the box would languish like my 2nd edition D&D books.
Here is my experience after a couple playthroughs:
Castle Ravenloft is a huge box. It dwarfs all other equally large board games I own like Betrayal at House on the Hill and Last Night on Earth. It also comes with a ton of pieces (a good thing, considering the price of this monster) for you to punch out. As listed above in the product description, there's dozens of miniatures, an equal amount of interlocking dungeon tiles, around 200 encounter and treasure cards, a rule book, a scenario book (with about a dozen scenarios) and a 20-sided die that I'm pretty sure is out to kill. What it doesn't explain is the amount of other punchable tiles to indicate hit points, conditions (like slowed and immobile), traps, treasures, monsters, character and "boss" stocks (i.e. Strahd) with stats and other assorted items you'll use in the scenarios. I spent a good amount of time punching out the dungeon tiles and the other tiles, skimming the cards and just admiring how awesomely designed the entire thing is. It's not cheap materials in this box. Wizards did a terrific job making this stand out, from a workman perspective. The only complaint I'd level is that the dungeon tiles are kind of mundane. The art is pretty typical "dungeon tile" and lacks flair.
The Rulebook is very slim and sometimes ambiguous. I've read through it a couple times and it took running a game and coming up with house rules to deal with ambiguity to really understand everything. For example, it mentions the white and black arrows on the dungeon tiles and tells you that if there's a black arrow, you have to draw an encounter card. But it doesn't tell you what the white arrow means, except that it's the difference between a difficult situation and an easier one. The implication is that you don't draw an encounter card when the white arrow is there (or, I discovered later, some scenarios explain a specific thing to do if the arrow is white), but it doesn't spell it out. And it can be confusing the first few times you play through the game. Likewise, some dungeon tiles have skulls on them and some don't. I couldn't find in the book exactly what those mean, so we just decided that it meant you had to draw a monster card. I'm sure there will be an errata online to address the nebulous rules but you'd think that the game you purchased would have the rules clearly laid out. Sifting through the forums shows that a lot of people have made up house rules to address some of the ambiguity.
For our first game, we went with the second scenario (the first scenario is for one player). It was the most straightforward and presumably easiest: the goal was to locate the chapel, find the Icon of Ravenloft and escape with it. The game comes with five characters/classes (fighter, wizard, priest, rogue and ranger) and each character has a selection of power cards that they can use once in the game or at will. Thankfully, the game suggests specific cards if you don't know what you're doing. We went with those and it was fine. The game is split into three phases for each player: Hero, exploration and villain. During the hero phase, you can move a set number of spaces on a tile and/or attack. If you reach the end of a tile, you draw another dungeon tile and set it down. The tile will indicate whether you have to draw an encounter card or not and whether to place a monster. If you have an encounter, you have to draw an encounter card and it'll tell you what to do. Most of the time, some random monster will attack you or everyone on your tile. You roll the dice, add their attack to it and see if it's above or below your armor class. If it's above, you take the damage listed on the card. If it's below, you either take no damage or, more often than not, take one damage regardless. Encounters are 90% mean. You don't want to deal with them.
After the encounter, you draw a monster card and place the miniature on the bone pile in the room. Because the game doesn't have a game master to control the monsters, if you draw the card, it's your monster to control. Castle Ravenloft intelligently deals with this by using the monster cards. Each monster has a specific tactic that you use, which follows a "If the monster is within one tile of you it does this" or "if the monster is next to a hero, it does this." Some monsters, like gargoyles, won't move if you are over one tile away from them. But most of them will move towards you and attack. The difference is which attack they'll use. As an example, a spider will bite you if it's next to you. If it's within a tile from you, it'll use its web attack to slow you and then move to you. If it's over a tile away, it'll simply move towards the closest hero. Killing the monster means you keep the card which in turn acts as experience points. Experience points are very important because you can spend five points to cancel out an encounter; or, if you roll a natural 20, you can spend five experience points to go up to level two...obviously this doesn't happen very often.
Castle Ravenloft can be a very intense game. Because there is no game master and in order to prevent heroes from taking their time and just slowly taking care of monsters, waiting around and healing up (using a cleric ability, for example) before continuing on, Ravenloft throws encounters at you with wild abandon. If you don't explore (reach the end of a tile and place another), you have to draw an encounter card. Likewise, if you are fighting three monsters and it's not going well (meaning, you can't continue on and explore), you have to draw an encounter card. This can quickly spike the difficulty and overwhelm you to the point that you won't win. You only get two healing surges (we played with three, as was recommended in the rulebook for "lowering the difficulty") and all of the scenarios end if even one player is dead. In case it's not evident: Castle Ravenloft is hard and often punishing. Once you add in traps that can smash you into walls, shoot arrows, or immobilize you among other crazy cards you can pull, your chances of survival seem almost nil. The game is stacked against you. That said, we managed to barely survive our first game based on right-timed skills (the fighter's dragon breath at the end which ended up hitting all three monsters and killing them) and luck. But we had fun the entire time.
With twelve wildly different scenarios and two available to download from Wizards' website, there's a lot of replayability in Castle Ravenloft. I will end with a little anecdote about our first playthrough. I was playing with two friends. One had a bit of experience both with computer RPGs and some table top experience. The other had absolutely no experience. At the beginning, she just took what power cards were dealt to her, looked them over and said "I have no idea what any of this means." She didn't really care what was going on. But something interesting happened. As the game progressed, she grew more and more into it, and at the end when we were faced with three monsters and it looked grim she excitedly and animatedly jumped up, yelling, "OH! I can use my dragon breath skill and kill them all!" It made me smile. While Castle Ravenloft is geared towards pen and paper geeks like myself, it is simple enough that someone who has never played through a module (let alone know what a module is) can pick it up and have a great time.