Seasoned board gamers shouldn’t necessarily be put off by its simplicity, though, as there are still hours of fun to be had here. That said, it’s probably most appealing as a way to integrate new gamers into the group, or the wider D&D universe. The Legend of Drizzt includes two monster cards that do not correspond to a monster, but rather a monster event. There are two of each for a total of four such cards. They are: Moving on, there’s the Boon cards, which are a neat new type, although there’s only six of them. These cards are given at varying times, in a scripted manner, when the players do something amazing, like killing a major menace to society. These allow you to skip pulling certain types of monsters and draw new tiles without monsters. Not a real…boon…to the game, but I can see them being useful to dungeoneers who wish to create a campaign.

Those that like to get their money’s worth won’t be disappointed with Wrath of Ashardalon. The huge number of tiles, random gameplay, and 12 different Adventures mean there’s the potential for multiple games without it getting repetitive. There’s also a Campaign Mission, which ties several Adventures into one. Heroes • Monsters • Villains • Powers • Treasures • Encounters • Chambers • Adventure Cards • Boons Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft Board Game – Contest Adventures Designed for use with Castle Ravenloft. (2011) Had my regular Cthulhu Wars crew over today. We usually try to start with something else (we've been playing a fair amount of Tiny Epic Crimes lately) and when talking about a couple other games, I...From the Castle Ravenloft rule book: [When you draw a monster card] If you already have the same Monster Card in play in front of you, discard that Monster Card and draw again. If there is more than one Monster with the exact same name in play, activate each of those Monsters on your turn. So, if you have a Kobold Monster Card and another player has a Kobold Monster Card, you activate both Kobolds during your Villain Phase. If both Monsters survive until the other player’s Villain Phase, that player will activate both Kobolds again!

Great review! Nice to see a writer who can overcome their prior gripes and give a new game from a company that has “burned” them in the past a chance. Difficulty and variability of monster encounters can be controlled by simply including or excluding the Stalagmite or Hunting Party monster cards. However use of these cards may be mechanically redundant if monster tokens are also used.The cooperative game nature also adds an extra element of teamwork not seen in many other games. Cons: You lose if any one of your characters is at zero HP at the beginning of their turn and they have run out of Healing Surges. There may also be other rules in your Adventure that could mean you lose the game. Your First Game of Wrath of Ashardalon

However most of the monster types listed on these cards only appear in Wrath of Ashardalon. Below is a table listing these cards, the corresponding monster types and the games in which these monsters appear. Event Card If you don’t like Ravenloft, you may not like this, because the two games are a lot alike. That being said, it’s deeper, both thematically and strategically, and the game is just downright fun to play. Those who found Ravenloft too shallow, I maintain, are not seeing it for what it is: a game system that allows you to not only play what’s been printed in the book, but that allows you to create epic adventures on a grand scale if you so desire. If you want a game where you need no thought or creativity, try Container; I hear it’s a hoot. If you want to slash and incinerate fiends and fell beasts until your boots are soaked to the knees with blood of differing shades, then Wrath of Ashardalon is what you’re looking for. The idea of the game is that one to five adventurers has to romp through a dragon-infested cavern system, hunting the King Dragon, Ashardalon, while saving villagers, recovering artifacts, helping a little person find his gear, or my favorite, laying waste to an entire room because it’s “mysterious”. Essentially, each turn you will be asked to explore a new tile when you’re at a tile’s edge, which boils down to placing a new tile and drawing a new monster to inhabit that tile, or potentially having an Encounter, which means drawing an Encounter card and resolving the effect. This game is just as nasty as its predecessor, and all manner of bad things will happen to you. The campaign mode actually looks fairly uninteresting. The game doesn’t really support character growth in any serious way, and so this aspect pales even to the character advancement of a good adventure boardgame like Prophecy or Runebound. It doesn’t even begin to approach the sophistication of its RPG cousin. The rating of Love it is tentative. Ravenloft dropped in my view over time, but this one seems to deal with most of my issues with the original.

Customer reviews

Breaking into the hefty box, you’ll notice there are a lot of pieces to become acquainted with – most notably, the red dragon himself, Ashardalon, standing high above the rest. Make sure you look below the plastic tray, too, where you’ll find a whole extra pile of tiles and tokens hiding away. Components