Customer Reviews

Wrath of Ashardalon: A D&D Boardgame

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I got the chance to play this board game last night, and I found it to be a much polished follow up to their earlier board game, "Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft Board Game". You do not need to own or have plaid Ravenloft to play and enjoy this game. In fact, I consider this a superior product.

First and foremost it comes with a wide variety of plastic miniatures, these are the same soft minis they release for their separate miniatures line meaning they won't chip or break, but also are unsuitable for traditional miniature painting. They are unpainted, but the plastic color for each is chosen to denote the power and theme of the monster (red for demons, grey for duergar and so forth).

The artwork on the tiles is well done, and the tiles themselves are solidly constructed. There is a huge variety of tokens and cards for all situations in the game, these are all competently put together. If I had to pick 1 complaint, and it would be minor, it is that there are too many different varieties of tokens, and unless you put together some sort of sorting mechanism (plastic baggies work fine) it's easy to get the things you are looking for lost in a pile of tokens.

Gameplay starts by choosing a scenario from the included booklet, which includes everything you need to know to set up this particular adventure. The scenarios increase in difficulty as you go along, but do not require continuity to play, so if you have a favorite you can jump right there. Everybody plays, there is no person running this game for the players, it is entirely player driven. Exploration occurs by drawing random tiles, which are accompanied by monsters and random encounters.

One fun touch are environment cards which are ambient effects that remain in play until another is drawn. These range from an increase in the number of monsters drawn to walls of magma. Players control the monsters they place, which are driven by simple scripts telling you what they do in clearly defined situations (if they are far away, move them up, if they are near attack, etc, etc.)

The rules system will be very familiar to anybody who has played 4th edition D&D, but simple enough for newcomers to grasp. Once the game gets going, it quickly cascades giving a real feel of desperation without becoming unmanageable. The random encounters and events are fairly well balanced, and I found this to be a solid game.

Plays between 1 and 5.

Disclaimer: Bought this from a local store. Paid list value, but supporting local game stores helps keep them in business, and it's a rough market to keep a gaming store running. Also, I do not own, nor have I played Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft Board Game, the first D&D Adventures Board Game. Regardless...

Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of Ashardalon Board Game (WoA) is a fantastic value at $65 (list). You get 42 (plastic, unpainted) minis (1" scale), you get a nice set of cardboard interlocking(!) dungeon tiles, and you get a fun, very random, board game playable either by yourself or with up to 4 friends.

What it is:
WoA is, in gamer terms, a roguelike in tabletop form. In layman's terms, WoA is a dungeon crawler. You start at the entrance, and have a specific goal (rescue the villagers, survive the dungeon, destroy the altar, slay the dragon). The adventures are built randomly based on shuffling the tiles, and they are played individually as you explore. You can go for a massive linear dungeon based on a little luck and careful planning, or you can attempt to condense yourself in a larger swarm interconnected tunnels.

Some of the adventures feature "chambers", special larger rooms that are all placed at once and filled with enemies and a specific goal that the team must complete to win the adventure.

It's a great way to introduce someone into tabletop roleplaying gaming, it's the perfect medium between a board game and an actual pen and paper RPG.

It's a fun, quick* game to run a quick adventure for some friends taking anywhere between 20 minutes and an hour per adventure.

What it isn't:
A deeper roleplaying game with a full interconnected series of quests over a grand campaign.

A completely accurate representation of 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons rules.

Overly complicated (as most roleplaying games will seem to be for most people.)

What's in the box:
* 42 plastic heroes and monsters
* 13 sheets of interlocking cardstock dungeon tiles
* 200 encounter and treasure cards
* Rulebook
* Scenario book
* 20-sided die

Miniatures:
The game includes 42 minis, including 7 villan, 5 hero, and 30 monsters. The minis are of nice quality. They're clearly just mass produced, but they put some effort into modeling them, just not so much into trimming the leftover plastic in places. Some of the swords will be bent from being in the box. And they're unpainted. However, I don't mind the unpainted state, and I plan on using them during D&D Encounters I'm DMing at a local store. The Ashardalon figurine is very detailed, my *only* (and the only real) gripe is that none of them are painted.
4/5
Cardstock Dungeon Tiles:
They're one of the nicest parts of the set. They're very high quality, the art is nice, and the interlocking design can't be beat. Purchasers of D&D Dungeon Tiles will know how hard they are to keep together without tape, these lock together like puzzle pieces. Wouldn't be hard to use them in a real D&D game, except for the fact that they're somewhat limited, and they're not large open spaces. There are a lot of tokens and HP markers and other things all made out of the same cardstock (including cards for the Villans, your big bad guys, and the Heroes)
5/5
200 Encounter, Monster & Treasure cards
These are drawn during the different phases of the game (there are 3), and they certainly add to the randomness of the game. Everything scales nicely so that you can attempt to run the party adventures solo and it'll still work nicely.
5/5
Rulebook:
The rulebook is the only real downfall I've seen of the box set. It does an alright job at conveying the basics, but other questions I have are just non-existant. Can I spend a healing surge without being dead just to heal? The book itself has card errata on the back page, which is crazy. Other than that, it's not a bad rulebook for being only 15 pages.
3.5/5
Scenario Book ("Adventure Book")
This has 13 adventures to run using the set, each of them varying based on how things shuffled, what magic items get drawn and if there's a chamber, what chamber card gets drawn. The adventures essentially play themselves as you follow the turn orders. There's very little fluff for each of the adventures, but that's what make it D&D, you get to set your own motivation for the adventure, your own background. It's enough to get you going, and you let your imagination take it from there.
4.5/5
20 sided die
AKA, the d20. THE iconic D&D symbol. You roll it, add a modifier and compare it to a set number. That's pretty much it. It's just as nice as the D&D Red Box dice or any chessex dice I've bought. But it's just a d20, nothing special. Nice if you don't have any, throw it in the bag with all your others.
5/5

Overall, I would have liked to see more adventures (that's not to say more aren't coming, the official ones available at time of review require Castle Ravenloft as well, which I don't have yet.) There's only one "solo" adventure, but I played through it and adventure 5 solo. Not sure if a single player could take on Ashardalon himself, but half the fun is seeing how well you can do.

I actually wouldn't mind running a full D&D campaign with similar designs; it's a perfect format for a Megadungeon delve, it's fast, and it's exciting due to the randomness. I'm glad the cards aren't collectable, there's 200, that's all there is.

All in all, if you're into RPGs, or if you've ever wondered if a Roguelike could work in a tabletop format, it can, and it's called Wrath of Ashardalon.

*Edit* I forgot to mention, the initial setup (punching out the cards) takes a considerable amount of time. Like close to 20 minutes. Setup per adventure doesn't take nearly as long (maybe 2-3 minutes)

its amazing, actually. Wrath of Ashardalon has taken the basic themes and source material of the new edition of Dungeons and Dragons and distilled it into *something better*. not only is this a must own gem of a board game, i'd even say its the best thing Wizards of the Coast has released in years. highest recommendation.

(no dungeons and dragons experience necessary to enjoy this game.) also, this is fully playable as a solo experience.

Here is my review, cross-posted from boardgamegeek.com:

I have fond memories of D&D from my youth, that I occasionally attempt to recapture. I remember the sense of vague foreboding conjured by RPG-like board games such as Runequest and Spacehulk. I had read some favorable reviews of the new "RPG-as-boardgame" series promoted by Wizards on the Coast, and I was excited to try this. I splunked down my hard-earned cash and amazon duly delivered a hefty box of dreams to my doorstep.

Wrath of Ashardalon and I had some good times initially. My friends and I gamely punched all the cardboard pieces out of the sprues. We love punching pieces out of sprues! It inspires a sense of childlike wonder and anticipation in us! This tile has a Horrid Chamber on it! That dungeon tile has dead bodies! Ooh, I wonder what a flaming sphere does? These cards all have various powers and spells on them! Look, you can play a dragon character! And the plastic figurines were enjoyable, similar to those plastic dinosaurs we all had as kids. Whee!

Sadly, that was the best part of the game. Everything went downhill when we actually started to play.

The game itself is a reductionist vision of a dungeon crawl. It is, unfortunately, so reductionist that is effectively a game of Munchkin, but without a sense of humor. I think the game designers must have sensed this, and to try to add a sense of danger and urgency to the game, they created a deck of sadistic Encounter cards to punish us for playing. (But more about those later.)

The players progress through the dungeon together. At every unexplored edge, they "kick down the door" and grow the dungeon by one (1) new dungeon tile, guaranteed to contain exactly one (1) new monster, and possible an Encounter card (which is invariably unpleasant). This game might have been interesting if every new corner of the dungeon had produced a novel challenge for the players to make strategic decisions about together. Instead, the players typically have one power which is the min-max best option for any given monster, and they use it, over and over again. The twenty-sided die is rolled. The monster advances. It does a hit point of damage to the wizard! And then it dies. And drops a treasure.

It's difficult to be heroic in this game. The characters are punished for pushing forward into the darkness. They are also punished for standing still. They are punished for gathering together on one tile, and they are punished for spreading out. There are precious few strategic decisions to be made in this game.

All of this is incredibly tedious and dull. I magic missile the darkness.

The power cards feel poorly thought out, poorly worded, and disappointing. The "Hypnosis" card, seems promising: it can cause one monster to attack another! My goodness, a card that allows the players to turn the dungeon against itself! Strategy! But no. Unlike the Scroll of Monster Control item, which replaces a monster's attack on the players, Hypnosis simply supplements the monster's action with it's "hypnotized" attack. But can the power at least let the players turn the Cave Bear's awesome Claws attack against the Kobold horde? No, not really. The monster's attack is reduced to a standardized "Attack +9, Damage 1," as printed on the card. Really, this card is a +9, 1 damage attack that only works if two monsters are in the same room. Is this what the game designers intended? Who knows! But hey, that's what it says on the card.

If the player's powers are boring, at least the game designers also gave us Encounter cards. We scrubbed through the rules multiple times, certain we were misinterpreting them. But no: every player will typically draw at least one encounter card every turn. Thus, a four-player band of characters fighting a monster will typically draw four encounter cards every round of combat. Sadly, the encounter cards aren't terribly creative. They all seem to be variants of "Random thing happens! And everybody takes a point of damage." Your band of fearless heroes has just spent a turn vanquishing a kobold, and you're feeling pretty good about it. But wait, you turn isn't over until you draw an Encounter card. Oops! The room you're in just turned into a pit! Most of the players fall into it. You do the heroic thing and stay in the room with the pit to help your friends climb out. But lo, on the next turn the pit rolls to attack again and sucks you in!

Many of the encounter traps seem more malevolent that is actually necessary. The spinning ball of blade trap will follow you from room to room. The walls turn to magma! But on the next turn the magma reverts to stone while an alarm sounds, alerting the orcish horde to our presence! A cage falls on your head! Poisonous gas fills the room! It's so zany! The Encounter cards prove to be far more lethal than any monster encountered in the dungeon. The players will come to dread having to take their turn.

We were certain that we missed some part of the game on our first run-through. Maybe we were playing it wrong. Maybe we had misinterpreted the rules. So we played it through a second time, and lo: the game as written is truly terrible. At least, we knew that with a few rule changes, we could fix this game. Instead of making the monsters and traps follow unrealistic instructions printed on cards, we decided it would be better to designate one of our number of administrate all the monsters. And, instead of using the limited characters provided with the game (and, no doubt, soon-to-be-available expansion packs), we would create our own characters ourselves. And, instead of plastic figurines and delightful cardboard squares, we would use our imaginations.

The game is much more fun that way.

I recently bought Wrath of Ashardalon for my son's 10th birthday. He's been wanting to play pen and paper RPG for a few years now and I thought this would be a nice entry way into that, it's not only that, it's much more. The sheer volume of pieces that are required to play were are their own form of treasure. The rules took a few hours of going over, but once we had it all figured it out the the games were going fast and furious. He has to do his own math in determining if he "hit" a monster or not and I have noticed that this making him much quicker in calculating simple subtration in his head. This is definitely a family game my wife and 12 year old play as well and we have a great time. We are firm believers in the saying, "the family that plays together, stays together". I am an old school pen and paper RPGr as well as computer and everything else in between, I love this game and always have a great time playing. The designers have really created something unique and excellent here - I highly recommend to anyone that calls themseves a gamer and enjoys gaming no matter what the medium is!

I've only played full D&D adventures a few times, and although I loved the concept, my main problem with D&D was the time investment and my noobish lack of understanding of the exact mechanics of the rules since I never had the opportunity to play with seasoned players. Wrath of Ashardalon streamlines the entire process, simplifies the rules, and makes the game mechanics very clear. Although I did need to look up a few rules clarifications on a couple of FAQs, it was easy to dive right in with a couple of friends and start playing immediately.

I can completely understand why veteran D&D players might be disappointed with this game, but I would propose that a veteran player could simply change the rules and add in whatever elements from the core D&D rulebook he or she wanted to use (including a DM) and simply treat this as a dungeon building/scenario pack with options for streamlining where desired. That's my plan at least as I have a fun time using this game to ease myself into full-blown D&D at my own pace.

I'm more of a video game player, and to use an example from the video game world, take the classic game Civilization and its sequels. You could play a full game that could take more than one day to finish, and sure it was a lot of fun. However, Civilization Revolutions was later released as a streamlined, faster paced version of the classic, and I really enjoyed it as much as the original because sometimes I just didn't feel like committing many hours to a single game. My impression is that Wrath of Ashardalon is to D&D as Civilization Revolutions is to Civilization. One key difference of course is that you can adjust the amount of streamlining in Wrath of Ashardalon to make it as involved or not as a full-blown D&D adventure based on your personal preference.

I am an old role playing fanatic form the late 70's and 80's. Dungeons and Dragons from TSR was one of the first role playing games I enjoyed. Although, GDW's Traveller and the more recent versions are my favorites. My young son is getting to the age that these games are of interest, and the personal interaction can't be beat by video games - at least if you are an engaged father. Anyhow, Wrath of Ashardalon turned out to be a gem of a role playing game in a box for quick action play, and little complexity. We took it on vaction and played in the evenings through the first few adventures (realize the first adventures are to learn the game play). We had a really good time, even my wife played. The components are of very good quality. I did laminate and bind all the manuals and adventure book, so it will hold up with the neighborhood kids playing too. There are additional adventures you can download and print. Since this purchase, we are also proud owners of many new D&D 4th edition books.

The short, short, version: Wrath of Ashardalon is exactly what it says on the box--a D&D boardgame. If that seems too obvious to be worth stating, read on.

Like probably millions of other aging geeks, I have fond memories of loooong nights at the game table with friends in high school and college, roleplaying until our eyes bled. But now I have a real job and a family and I'd be lucky to get a group together monthly for half an evening. So I was pretty excited when I saw Wrath of Ashardalon, because I was hoping that it would deliver the sugar high of a good dungeon crawl without the prep work or running time of the RPGs I used to play.

Now, in its defense, the game does pretty well. The bits are very nice, the rules are mostly clear, and the DM-less play works okay. It's not perfect. Occasionally you may run into situations you have to house-rule. I'm okay with that, but YMMV.

This game is sort of the epitome of Ameritrash (and I say this fondly, as someone contemplating buying a 3rd version of Risk): loads of theme, loads of violence, and loads--LOADS--of randomness. I realize that's part and parcel here, but it really sucks to work your way into a great (or at least survivable) tactical position and then watch your carefully hoarded powers and hit points disappear in a flurry of bad rolls (come to think of it, that sucks in Risk, too).

One thing I did not expect is that the game can drag on for hours. Except for a few special powers, no-one can kill more than one monster per turn, but you often get one monster per turn. Several of the encounter cards grow the dungeon for you whether you want them to or not, which keeps adding monsters. Then there are sentry monsters, which can open up new areas and thereby bring more monsters into the game. More than once we've had to retreat to a narrow hallway, bottleneck the ghastlies, and just pray we could mow 'em down before we got Walls of Magma. But if you're careful, and a bit lucky, you can just barely stay alive by clever use of powers, especially if you have the cleric and the paladin in play to keep healing folks. Again, part and parcel--"stay alive until you just barely win (or just barely lose)" ought to be the definition of suspenseful, dungeon-crawly satisfaction. But in actual practice it feels more like, "stay alive until the dice finally kill you (or fail to)".

At which point you may think, "why am I playing this instead of an actual RPG? I could use all the same bits, do all the same stuff, take just as much time, and have more options and more fun?"

So, in the end, that's what I did. This game drove me back to roleplaying games, first by tricking me into feeling like I was playing one for a while, and then by grossly running over its stated duration of play on more than one occasion. WoA is just what it says on the tin, a boardgame rather than a roleplaying game, and it is certainly cleverly done and has high production values. I like it. But I don't love it.

I play traditional D&D and have tried to teach friends how to play. Most of my efforts have been frustrated by the amount of time needed to prepare a proper character. This is D&D for the uninitiated. I taught several friends the rules in about 10 to 15 minutes. They had no idea they were learning the d20 system. The game is very similar to 4th ed. rules, but much more manageable.

The one-hour game also provides enough time to learn without being totally overwhelmed. The lack of a DM also serves as a nice bonus, especially for someone who ends up on the "wrong" side of the table from time to time.

This preserves the flavor of D&D much better than any video game and yet provides a good amount of accessibility. Plus, there are minis to paint.

Great game and great replay value. Play alone or with up to 4 friends (5total players). Takes from 30mins to 120mins tops so not all night and if you want to play longer u can play another adventure. Clean-up can be a bit of a pain but not a big deal.