Amongst other things, I got this game for my birthday:
It’s the third of the Dungeons & Dragons boardgames released in the past few years. I’ve read almost every one of the the Drizzt novels, so I was interested to see how this game worked out. Of course the fact it can be solo played only made it more interesting…
It took some time to get it ready for play. There are a lot of tokens to punch out of 15 pieces of thick cardstock:
Some of these are adventure specific, and therefore are not used in every game since you play one of many adventures included in the box. But a good amount of these are required, and punching them all out, then sorting them and getting ready for play took an hour at least. In addition to the above there are also two decks of cards that represent abilities, items, or contain monster statistics.
Here are all the miniatures that come with the game:
Lots of beasties! Again, you’ll only use a few of these each adventure, but it’s cool there is such a variety. You’ll note in the above and later photos that some of mine were a bit squished (look at the dragon in the photo above). If I wanted to straighten them I suppose I’d need a hairdryer…
I chose one of the beginner adventures: ‘Secrets of the Underdark’, which was for 2-5 characters. I chose three: Drizzt himself, as well as Catti-Brie the archer and Wulfgar the barbarian. Familiar names, if you’ve read the books. My adventure was a standard ‘dungeon crawl’ until I reached a particular spot in the Underdark which would trigger a battle with a random villian (chosen from the Drizzt novels baddie roster). If I defeated the villian, I would win. If any of my guys died, I would lose.
Gameplay consists of drawing random dungeon tiles and placing them onto the board, forming an increasingly larger playing surface as the game proceeds. When you draw tiles all sorts of things can occur, from revealing a monster (common) to setting off traps or finding items (less common). Any monsters on the board are hostile, and must be defeated before they kill you. The player controls his characters as well as the monsters, using specific commands on each monster card as a form of rudimentary monster AI.
Played proceeded smoothly for the first few rounds, with any monsters I revealed being 1-hit-wonder goblins. Then this guy turned up (the monster deck is random):
The little green guy is a goblin (who was ineffective by now; read the AI on his card) but the purple drider was bad news! A streak of apalling dice rolls led to the drider actually reducing Wulfgar the barbarian – my guy with the most health – to 0 hitpoints. He wasn’t dead yet, due to a ‘healing surge’, but the use of one of my (only!) two healing surgers was unexpected and unwelcome. The drider dead, I moved deeper into the dungeon…
Combat is fun. All resolutions are done with a single die, and there are many items and abilities and tactics that can be used. I tended to have it somewhat easy against the majority of foes since I focused 3 vs 1, but I imagine in a multiplayer game where everyone goes off on their own things would get hairy very quickly. In my case this didn’t happen until I revealed the ‘Drow Glyph’ dungeon tile, which triggered the endgame. Here’s what the board looked like when legendary assassin Artemis Entreri made his grand appearance with a cadre of drow combatants:
This was bad, bad news. Suddenly I was 3 vs 4, and one of those 4 (Artemis) had a sword that let him regenerate 25% of his health every successful attack! I focused on his lackeys and took them down mostly using Wulfgars berserker attack which hits multiple foes.
Here is the state of the board at this point from a longer angle. My one criticism of the game is the large amount of space needed to hold all the cards that are used. Although this wouldn’t have been as much an issue were I not soloing the adventure. You can see though if I had played 5 characters I wouldn’t have had the room.
In the end I defeated Artemis and won the adventure. It was hard fought though, since Artemis concentrated on Wulfgar and took him to 0 again quickly, requiring use of the final healing surge (and also a healing potion). Wulfgar fled after that, and led Drizzt and Catti-Brie finish Artemis off, which itself took many more turns than I would have expected due to the healing sword. But, a win is a win!
Overall a good game, and well worth the reasonable cost (I got it for about $35) I think. Now what about the third game they released…
