Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.

At the risk of being my nerdiest, most boring post ever (and there are some real contenders) I thought I’d share this with you all. I found this stat log of earlier games of Castle Ravenloft over the past couple of years - about 90 games’ worth (or approximately 4 days of solid gaming )! These are mostly before introducing our Complete Campaign Rules with event cards, etc and use 2 surges unless stated otherwise. Whilst some of you might be bored until you’re sick in the mouth I figured some of you might find it interesting so here goes – please excuse the disparate, scatty layout...



WARNING: You may 



SOLO CASTLE RAVENLOFT ADVENTURE 1 - TOMB

1. Ranger: LOST – killed by zombie on 10th tile (careful, hunter, bounding, unbalancing)
2. Fighter: WON – 3hp + 1 surge, Sword +1, Crystal Ball & Wand +17xp (start skills)
3. Rogue: WON – faced Strahd on last tile, 1hp + 2 surges + lvl 2, Boots, Amulet + 5xp
(start skills)
4. Cleric: WON – faced Strahd, 1hp + 2 surges, Wand, Avenger, Tools, Amulet, Holy Water +13xp (start skills)
5. Wizard: WON – 1hp + 0 surges, Ring, Tools, Sword, Amulet +12xp (start skills)
6. Ranger: WON – 2hp + 1 surge, Tools, Amulet +8xp (Careful, Hunter, Split Tree, Parry)
7. Ranger: WON – 3hp + 0 surges, 3 Items, lvl 2 + 3 xp 
8. Fighter: LOST – killed by Strahd on penultimate tile, Sword, lvl 2, 0xp
9. Rogue: WON – 1 surge, Wand, 2 Rings, Charm, lvl 2 + 7xp

CUSTOM HEROES:

10. Samurai: LOST – found stairway, all monsters in play, Alarm Trap
11. Samurai: WON – lvl 2, 0 surges, 8hp + 3xp, Sword, Amulet
12. Ninja: WON – 0 surges, 1hp + 9xp, Boots
13. Bard: LOST – 4 tiles away from finding the stairs!
14. Avenger: WON – 0 surges, 5hp + 1xp, Charm

15. * Ranger WON – lvl 2, 1hp, 0 surges, 8xp, Tools, Sword CAMPAIGN * A2 ICON NEXT



SOLO CASTLE RAVENLOFT ADVENTURE 2 - ICON

1. Ranger: WON – 0 surges +21xp
2. Wizard: WON – 1 surge, lvl 2, Accuracy Ring, Protection Amulet, 8hp + 11xp
3. Cleric: WON – 2 surges, Necklace, Tools, 6hp + 3xp
4. Rogue: WON – 0 surges, 8hp + 10xp, Ring, Boots, Charm, Ward, Avenger
5. Fighter: LOST – 4xp, Boots, Crystal Ball, Holy Water
6. Fighter: WON – 1 surge, 10hp + 4xp, Glyph

CUSTOM HEROES:

7. Barbarian: WON – 2 surges, lvl 2, Sword, Glyph, 12hp + 2xp
8. Paladin: WON – 1 surge, lvl 2 Sword, Amulet, Glyph, Ring, Wand, 8hp + 13xp
9. Warlock: LOST – 3xp, Tools, Holy Water, killed by Fire Trap
10. Assassin: LOST – 0xp, lvl 2, Amulet, killed by Strahd’s Hunger
11. Assassin: LOST – 2xp, killed by Wraith
12. Assassin: LOST – 3xp, Amulet, Avenger, killed by Blazing Skeleton
13. Assassin WON – 0 surges, 7hp + 4xp, lvl 2, Sword, Necklace, came back from 1hp!
14. Warlock: WON – 12xp, Boots, Crystal Ball, Ring, lvl 2, 1 surge + 8hp

15. * Ranger WON – lvl 2, 10hp, 0 surges, 15xp, Tools, Sword, Avenger, Used ICON CAMPAIGN * A3 KLAK NEXT




SOLO CASTLE RAVENLOFT ADVENTURE 3 - KLAK

1. Fighter: LOST – Avenger, Amulet + 22xp, Klak on 5hp (of 6)
2. Ranger: WON – 0 surges, 1hp (!) + 0xp, no treasure left (lost Regeneration Ring)
3. Cleric: WON – 2 surges, 2hp + 4xp, lvl 2, Striding Boots, Regeneration Ring
4. Rogue: LOST – Accuracy Ring, Avenger + 4xp, 1 turn from certain victory!
5. Wizard: WON – 0 surges, 2hp + 6xp, lvl 2
6. Fighter: LOST – Regeneration Ring, beat Klak but not machine, killed by Blazing Skeleton
7. Rogue: LOST – Sword + 2xp, beat Klak, 1 turn from destroying machine, killed by Spear Trap
8. Fighter: WON – 0 surges, 1hp (!) + 5xp, 1 turn from certain failure!
9. Rogue: LOST – Protection Amulet + 3xp, Killed by Patrina before even finding lab!
10. Rogue: LOST – Avenger, Protection Amulet + 2xp, beat Klak but not machine,
killed by Cackling Skull
11. Rogue: LOST – 10xp, Amulet, Boots, Klak on 1hp
12. Rogue: LOST – 4xp, Regeneration Ring – used 3 surges!
13. Rogue: LOST – 0xp, beat Klak, machine on 1hp – used 4 surges!
14. Rogue: WON (finally) – 1hp + 0xp, Protection Amulet, used 3 surges

15. * Ranger WON – lvl 2, 4hp, 1 surge, 21xp, Tools, Sword, Avenger, Amulet, Boots CAMPAIGN *




SOLO CASTLE RAVENLOFT ADVENTURE 5 - KAVAN

1. Cleric: WON – 0 surges, 4hp + 6xp, lvl 2, Avenger, Boots, Tools, Charm, Amulet
2. Fighter: LOST – 7xp, Kavan on 3hp
3. Fighter: WON – 0 surges, 4hp + 3xp, Sword, 2 Charms
4. Ranger: LOST –6xp, Sword, died 6 tiles in!
5. Ranger: WON – 2 surges, 2hp + 17xp, lvl 2, Avenger, Sword
6. Rogue: LOST – 10xp, lvl 2, Sword, Ring, Kavan on 2hp
7. Rogue: WON – 0 surges, 4hp + 5xp, Sword, Boots, Amulet
8. Wizard: WON – 1 surge, 3hp + 3xp, lvl 2, Regeneration Ring



SOLO CASTLE RAVENLOFT ADVENTURE 6 - DRACOLICH

1. Wizard: LOST – 0xp, Sword, Boots, Gravestorm on 20hp!
2. Ranger: LOST – 8xp, 7 Items, Gravestorm on 4hp!
3. Cleric: LOST – 6xp, Necklace, Gravestorm on 12hp
4. Fighter: LOST – 1xp, Wand, Gravestorm on 14hp
5. Cleric: LOST – 2xp, Regeneration Ring, Gravestorm on 4hp
6. Ranger: LOST – 1xp, Gravestorm on 1hp! Accuracy Ring, Protection Amulet, Necklace
7. Ranger: LOST – 2xp, Wand, Gravestorm on 1hp!
8. Ranger: LOST – 8xp, Scroll, Gravestorm on 20hp and not even found yet!
9. Ranger: LOST – 2xp, Gravestorm on 20hp and not even found yet!
10. Ranger: LOST – 25xp, Wand, Boots, Crystal Ball, Holy Water, Gravestorm on 20hp

11. **Cleric: WON – 2 surges, 4hp, 11xp, lvl 2, Protection Amulet, Holy Water CAMPAIGN ** A8 HAG Next



SOLO CASTLE RAVENLOFT ADVENTURE 7 - IMPOSSIBLE

1. LOST – beat Golem and Vampire but killed by Werewolf (is he invincible against solo?)
2. WON – Fighter and Cleric killed against Hag and Vampire, Rogue went on to finish Werewolf (not invincible then!)



SOLO CASTLE RAVENLOFT ADVENTURE 8 - HAG

1. Fighter: LOST – 9xp, Hag on 1hp, 5 Time Tokens
2. Ranger: WON – 1 surge, 1hp, 2xp, lvl 2, Regeneration Ring (unused)
3. Fighter: LOST – 2xp, Hag on 3hp, 0 Time Tokens
4. Fighter: WON – 0 surges, 4xp, lvl 2, 5hp, Holy Water x2

5. ** Cleric lvl 2: WON – 7hp, 6xp, 0 surges, 1 power, continued from A6 Dracolich, Amulet Protection CAMPAIGN **




2 PLAYERS ADVENTURE 2 - ICON

1. WON: Cleric (Sam): WON 0 Surges, 4hp Accuracy Ring, Wand, Boots +10XP (start skills)
Fighter lvl 2 (ND): Brute Strike, Regeneration Ring, Sword, Amulet
2. Rogue (Bob) + Ranger (ND): LOST – reached Chapel
3. Wizard (Bob) + Ranger lvl 2 (ND): WON – 10xp, Sword, Avenger, Icon
4. Fighter (Kris) + Wizard (ND): LOST – 0xp, died at the Chapel



2 PLAYERS ADVENTURE 3 - KLAK

1. Rogue (Sam) + Ranger (ND): WON
2. Wizard (Bob) + Ranger (ND): LOST – 4xp, Avenger, Ring, Wand, Klak dead, Machine: 2hp
3. Cleric lvl 2 (Bob)+ Ranger (ND): LOST – 2xp, Boots, Tools
4. Fighter (Ant) + Wizard (ND): LOST – 6xp, Necklace, Sword, Crystal Ball
5. Ranger (Wife) 3hp + Cleric (ND) 3hp: WON – 10xp, 2 surges



2 PLAYERS ADVENTURE 4 - ASSAULT

1. Cleric (Sam) + Fighter lvl 2 (ND): LOST 10 Items, 0xp


2 PLAYERS ADVENTURE 8 - HAG

1. Fighter (Sam) 2hp + Ranger (ND) died: LOST 4xp, 0 time tokens, Hag on 3hp
2. Cleric (Sam) died + Wizard (ND) died: LOST 0xp, 0 time tokens, Hag on 2hp
3. Cleric (Sam) 1hp + Ranger (ND) 4hp: WON 1 surge, 2xp, Accuracy Ring, Tools, H Potion




3 PLAYERS ADVENTURE 2 - ICON

1. Ranger 7hp (Sam) + Ranger 9hp lvl 2 (Dan) + Wizard 3hp (ND): WON - 7 xp + 2 surges#
2. Rogue (Ant) + Ranger (Wife) + Cleric (ND): WON – 0 surges, 2 XP
3. Ranger (ND) 2hp + Cleric lvl 2 (Ant) 5hp + Wizard (Bob) 3hp: WON – 0 surges, 4 XP



3 PLAYERS ADVENTURE 5 - KAVAN

1. Ranger 6hp (Sam) + Ranger 5hp lvl 2 (Dan) + Wizard 5hp (ND): WON - 14xp + 2 surges
2. Fighter lvl 2 (ND) + Ranger (Ant) + Cleric lvl 2 (Bob): LOST – 0 surges, 5 XP, Kavan on 3hp
3. Assassin (Ant) 0hp + Fighter (Dan) 3hp + Ranger (ND) 0hp: LOST – 0 surges, 1 XP
4. Assassin (Ant) 6hp + Fighter (Dan) 1hp + Ranger (ND) 3hp: WON– 1 surge, 5 XP



3 PLAYERS ADVENTURE 6 - DRACOLICH

1. Ranger 2hp (Sam) + Ranger 6hp (Dan) + Wizard 1hp (ND): WON - 3 xp + 0 surges
2. Ranger (ND) 0hp + Cleric lvl 2 (Ant) 3hp + Wizard (Bob) 3hp: LOST – 0 surges, 2 XP
3. Fighter (ND) 1hp + Ranger (Ant) 0hp + Cleric lvl 2 (Bob) 0hp: WON – 0 surges, 2 XP, Holy Water, Regeneration Ring, Sword




Quick Observations:

For solo single hero play the first 8 Adventures are pretty well balanced, except for the huge drop off with Adventure 6 - the Dracolich Adventure. My only victory against it was using the Cleric, who levelled up and then went on to play a successful two adventure ‘campaign’.

The Werewolf can really screw a solo Hero over if you don’t have boosted damage powers, potentially becoming invincible.

Castle Ravenloft does seem easier with more players, but it probably balances out on the whole, depending which characters you pick. Which brings us to...

The Rogue is still awfully weak. The worst Hero in the series. Luckily the Rogues from Drizzt and Ashardalon are much cooler.

Lords of Waterdeep - NinjaDorg gets his arse kicked

Her irony loaded words filled me with a heady mixture of expectation management but also pride:

“Okay then, let’s get this boring board game over with so we can watch another episode of The Walking Dead.”

My wife is not a gamer. Not by any stretch. And I wouldn't have it any other way. She kind of benignly sees my board game addiction as a much more preferable alternative to me getting sloshed down the pub every Saturday watching footie with the lads. So once every blue moon she’ll indulge me when a new title lands and I can’t wait until Thursday game night to break it out.

After struggling to resist a nebulous magnetism in Merric’s early preview reports on Lords of Waterdeep - and failing miserably it has to be said - I pulled the trigger on an Amazon pre-order. When Lords of Waterdeep arrived at my FLGS and sat there taunting me after Amazon had said it would be two more weeks before delivery, I paid the extra few quid and picked up a copy of LoW there and then, and cancelled my Amazon pre-order.

As an ardent Brit-trasher I’d been looking for a decent Euro for a long time and the theme of this one was irresistible. Especially considering the many hours of my youth I’d given over to travelling this imaginary city or indeed hosting adventures in it. Or reading books about it. Yeah Waterdeep figures pretty heavily in that respect. So when I laid out the map board for this new game I got a weird nostalgia rush for the old City System Waterdeep boxed set, and an old AD&D campaign I ran where the players invaded the city’s keep. Great days.

Well here we were now fighting to save the city and exercise control over it. My wife was blissfully oblivious to all of this back story of course, it was just coloured cube gathering and card playing. I ran through the simple rules quickly and dealt out the Lord cards, then had an ‘oops’ moment. I’d drawn Larissa Neathal – the one ‘different’ Lord who gives bonus points for Buildings at the end of the game.

“So you’ll see you’ve got two types of quest there that you need to aim for without telling me what they are. Oh, and by the way there’s also a Lord who gives bonuses for building buildings too, just so’s you knows...”

I briefly mulled over the consequences of beating her mercilessly by just buying buildings the whole game whilst she struggled for quests. Well if off the back of that she decided never to play again we’d always have Forbidden Island (which went over quite well that one time we played it all those months ago) or, um, Walking Dead season 2. In any case it was her first game of LoW but I decided not to hold back as it was my first game too.

As first player I* decided to try and grab gold to get some buildings going, so I popped a little wooden dude down at Aurora’s and added four gold to my supply.

With her first move she bought a building.

D’oh!

Okay, not a problem, there are seven more rounds to go yet, and other ways to get buildings too.

As the game moved swiftly on we took turns to place our little guys and grab coloured cubes and the ‘theme’ of the game slipped away pretty quickly – I still don’t know which coloured guys are which. Although the fighters all inexplicably wear orange iirc. Basically, it may as well have been a bunch of farmers and sheep, though I probably would not have bought the game if it were...

My wife was completing an alarming number of quests, and especially plot quests, and seemed to somehow be getting cubes faster than I could. Her VP token was ahead of mine for the whole game and I realised I still needed to complete regular quests to win. As I focussed on questing she handily yoinked the first player token from me and kept it for the rest of the game.

So I hit her back with a few intrigue cards as and when I could to keep her in check.

“Bam - give me your purple cube!”

Then she started to hit me back with her own intrigue cards, nicking my guys and plopping annoying mandatory quests on top of me.

“Bam yourself – stop being a dick!”

Suddenly it was round 5 and our fifth agents came into the game – time was really flying. I only had a couple of buildings and gold was hard to come by, so I focussed almost exclusively on dominating the Builder’s Hall. As I got increasingly desperate for effective moves she seemed to be breezing through and completing quests which had really big requirements and gave really big rewards. Soon she had her 100 VP token whilst I straggled behind. I took solace as I put the finishing touches to my fifth building, completed another quest and passed the 100VP mark myself. I decided my game would come together in the final scoring stages.

Soon enough the game did come to an end in under an hour and we totted up the final scores. I made a sort of ‘sorry’ face as I revealed my Lord, explained her bonus and bounced along the VP track, over-taking her marker and landing on 139 total Victory Points for the game. Un-phased she revealed her own Lord: Durnan the Wanderer, whose principal interests were Commerce and Warfare. For dramatic effect she revealed her quests one by one. Every single one of her completed quests had been Commerce or Warfare. She hopped along the VP track and landed on 141 Victory Points!

I checked and re-checked the final scores about four times and realised with growing trepidation that I had just been soundly and thoroughly arse-whupped.

“That wasn’t bad - it was a bit like Forbidden Island, not one of those long boring ones you always play. Shall we go and watch the season finale then?” she smiled.

I need to step up my skills before game night on Thursday!



Some notes on Lords of Waterdeep...

Pros:

The box is great, the insert is fantastic – probably the first insert that I will not throw away. You can turn the box upside down and shake it about and everything stays in place (except for the 100VP tokens, no big deal though).

Cards seem great, the linen texture is fine, another game that I don’t think I’ll need to sleeve any time soon, which is nice. Plus they have artwork on the cards! After the disappointingly bland D&D Adventure System games’ cards this was a lovely step up in quality.

The layout of the game feels very organic, it’s easy to see what goes where on the map and the map itself is good. Although fairly colourless it serves its purpose beautifully and speeds the game up too.

The gameplay is easy to pick up, we didn’t have any rules questions in this first play, and it goes by very quickly.

The art for the locations is really nice, and the players’ Tavern cards look sweet.



Cons:

Generally, the art itself is not really great however. I’d have loved to see some of the old 1st and 2nd edition D&D art recycled for this, or just good art generally in that style. But it’s all very cartoony and Magic: The Gathering-y. In fact my wife was crying laughing at Durnan’s ugly mug but couldn’t tell me why she was laughing until after the game finished. In fact pretty much all of the characters are quite ugly. Even the pretty ones. FFG has spoilt us in this respect.

Wooden cubes! I don’t see the attraction, or the need, or the why, or the how. They’re supposed to be people? I don’t get it!!! Surely potential Euro gamers attracted to the wooden cubes will be put off by ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ written on the cover! Even the agent meeples look a bit dumb. But they stand up well and are durable as hell.

The theme is nice and everything - it's what drew me in after all - but it's a struggle to keep it in your head as you play. For example, you'll be much more concerned about how many oranges and whites you have and how many blacks and purples you need.



Finally:

I really enjoyed Lords of Waterdeep and it sped by at a great pace. I can’t wait to break this out with my group and see how they take to it. Might even be able to get my wife to play again some time...






* what? it’s not an etiquette thing, I’d just got back from a shoot in London, it’s in the rules dammit, whoever went to another city most recently goes first!! 

Dungeons & Dragons Official Home Page - Design Article (Lords of Waterdeep)

Lords of Waterdeep

Design & Development

Rodney Thompson and Peter Lee

Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Official Home Page - Article (Lords of Waterdeep):


'via Blog this'

ords of Waterdeep is a new strategy board game set in the world of Dungeons & Dragons, debuting this month. In this Euro-style game, players send off their Agents to recruit Adventurers and recruit Quests. In this article, designers Rodney Thompson and Peter Lee describe the prototyping process and how the early, simple prototypes evolved into the high-end board game you can find in stores now.

Prototype Design

Rodney: Today we want to talk a little bit about the prototyping process for Lords of Waterdeep, and give you an idea of just how far the game has come from those early days.

One of the most important things I've learned from the process of working on Lords of Waterdeep is that, until it's time for the game to go to press, you should focus most of your efforts on perfecting the game's design. Function beats form during design and development, and our early prototypes really reflected that.

Our very first prototype consisted of an 8" x 10" dungeon tile covered in stickers, several 4" x 4" dungeon tiles with stickers on them for the Buildings, a bunch of Star Wars and D&D miniatures for the Agents, and the scoring track from Carcassonne to monitor our scores during play. Our card decks made by layering stickers over foreign language Magic and Duel Masterscards. To say it looked "cobbled-together" would be putting it nicely. However, I think this lack of polish early on actually helped a lot in that we never got too attached to the design's physical form.

Pete: When we started work on Lords of Waterdeep, I was playing weekly board games with my Dungeon Command co-designer Kevin Tatroe and his family. Earlier in the year, they gave me a gift from a local teacher supply store, a box of one thousand plastic cubes in ten different colors—a prototyper's dream! These became the Adventurers we needed for the game. I also had a supply of yellow tokens that we used for Gold.

Rodney: In this first prototype, we used red cubes for Rogues (because Rogues create blood splatters), black cubes for Fighters, green cubes for Clerics, and blue cubes for Wizards. Now when we play the finished game, Peter and I both still sometimes mix up Rogues and Fighters, because Fighters were represented by black cubes for so long that it became ingrained in our minds.

Rodney: That first game was playable to completion and, despite the speed with which the eclectic collection of prototyping materials had been put together, we were able to jump right into the iterative design process. As I mentioned earlier, not getting too attached to the game's components was very, very important to iteration. When Peter or I would make a suggestion for how to fix something, we'd take a pen and write on the sticker immediately, and then play with the change. In my mind, that kind of rapid iteration is critical to the design of a board game, and one of the reasons the Waterdeep design and development process went so well.

So, if there's some advice I'd give to any budding board game designers out there, it's to save the fancy prototype design for after your game is done. You need to be able to write on everything, change rules on the fly, and be ready to throw out entire groups of components if need be, so don't spend too much time making things pretty.

Pete: We knew we had a kernel of a good game, but we had a long way to go. For the next version of the game board, I was interested in usability. In a perfect world, the game board has enough visual cues that you can look at it and understand how to play. While such an ideal is nearly impossible for a game with any complexity, I still wanted to get as close as possible.

Rodney: In fact, one test I ended up putting the board through near the end of the process was to take the board, show it to a friend who was a board gamer but had not yet played (or even seen) the game, and asking him to tell me how he thought the game played. Based on his reactions, I was able to make some slight tweaks to the board to make sure the game board communicated to the player more intuitively. Thanks to the work Peter put in at this stage of the process, my friend was able to guess about 80% of the game play just by looking at the board, which was a great start.

Pete: Rodney and I also discussed how we imagined the board. We both wanted an isometric view of the city. I found a map of Waterdeep from the 3rd Edition Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, photocopied it, and taped it to the back of half anAxis & Allies board.

I quickly constructed board elements on the computer and printed them out. Using the highly technical skills I learned back in kindergarten, I created the second board.

This is the board we played on the most. The elements were all attached by tape, making it easy to update and modify after each game. Working on this board taught us a lot about how the components needed to be laid out for the best play experience.

• Quests for drafting needed to be at the top to make it easier for the players whose spot at the table might force them to read cards upside down.
• Basic and Advanced Buildings needed be close together to make it easy to see all the available actions.
• The Quest-drafting Building needed to be close to the Quests.
• Likewise, the Building-drafting Building needed to be close to the Buildings that could be purchased.
• The turn tracker needed to be near the Buildings availabl to be purchased.
• For story reasons, the basic Buildings needed to be located in approximately their canonically correct places in the city.

Rodney: Around this time we were also starting to consider color issues. Color blindness is something we wanted to be aware of in the design of the game, so we needed to get rid of the green color for Clerics (a color that many color-blind people have difficulty distinguishing from shades of red). Likewise, we knew at this point that having our Agents (and, thus, Faction colors) the same color as some of our Adventurer resources was problematic; sometimes people would lose track of their Agents when Adventurers of a similar color were nearby. That's why, in the final game, only one Faction shares its color with an Adventurer color.

Pete: We were getting ready to start discussions with our graphic production team, so it was time to take all the things we learned from this version and update the board. So far, both Intrigue cards and Quest cards were handled in a landscape form. This worked great for the Quests, but it didn't make as much sense for the Intrigue cards since you hold them in your hand. We decided to change the orientation of the card.

At 14.5 inches by 19.5 inches, this board was too small. We were still using the separate Carcassonne board to keep score. Purchased Advanced Buildings sat on the side of the board, putting them a short distance from the central Building squares. Quest cards sat above the board.

A lot of space was taken up by having the resources on the board. It made round preparation easier as all the players could help move resources to the proper Building spaces. Each yellow arrow showed how many cubes needed to move. When we decided to remove the resource accrual mechanic, it was time to design the next major board iteration.

The new board increased to about 20 inches by 24 inches. Everything that we wanted on the board now fit. We brought in art director Keven Smith to work on the final version.

Rodney: I can't say enough good things about the work Keven did taking out primitive prototypes and transforming them into something visually impressive. One of the first things Keven did for us was to create a "wire frame" version of the board, which had the action spaces, blank spots for Buildings, and so forth, but contained no art and only some very limited graphic design. This was a critical step in the prototyping process, despite actually being a step in the game's graphic design process; because we were able to take the wire frame and play on it, we were able to quickly identify any areas that would produce an unsatisfying or unclear experience. We could move different action spaces around, and it was at this time that we started matching up action space names with city locations, which further helped us figure out where to place things. For example, Aurora's Realms Shop was placed where it was to continue the circular arc of basic resource spaces that starts with Blackstaff Tower and moves clockwise around the outer areas of the city, creating a better information flow for where to find basic resources.

As we reached the end of the design process, we had to make some decisions about what our final components would be. Peter and I discussed it and decided that we wanted wooden pieces for the game, specifically cubes for the Adventurers, because we were trying to create a specific type of experience. Fans of strategy board games (aka Euro games) are accustomed to high quality games having wooden pieces, and we wanted to deliver components that met their expectations. For our Agents, Keven's team managed to create a shape that evoked the human form (that of your Agent moving out into the city) that also was exceptionally stable and had some heft to it, so that it was unlikely to tip over during play or be lost while setting up or putting away the game. From there, all that remained was to convert our primitive cards into their final form, and then let Keven and his team construct the gorgeous game you see today.

Dungeons & Dragons Lords of Waterdeep Design Article

Interesting design article on Lords of Waterdeep, looking forward to this one...

Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Official Home Page - Article (Lords of Waterdeep):


'via Blog this'

ords of Waterdeep is a new Dungeons & Dragons strategy board game, debuting this month. In this game, players send off their agents to recruit adventurers and recruit quests. In this article, designers Rodney Thompson and Peter Lee describe how this new D&D board game was designed.

Two Halves Make a Whole

Peter: Immediately after Gen Con 2008, I was travelling back to Wisconsin for the first time since joining Wizards. On the car ride between Indianapolis and Madison, I was discussing a few board game ideas with my old gaming group. The only game that stuck in my subconscious was a music producing game. In this hypothetical game, a player took on the role of a music producer tasked to create music hits. A hit song would be made by recruiting musicians. For example, a rock song might require a drummer, a singer, and three guitarists.

Fast forward to early August 2010. Castle Ravenloft proved we were able to create compelling board games set in the D&D universe. I was finishing up development on Conquest of Nerath and starting to lay the plans for the design of Legend of Drizzt. I was chatting with Rodney about board games we'd like to do, and I mentioned the music game and how we'd be able to easily put a D&D spin on it by changing it to a game where you were hiring adventurers to send off on quests. Unfortunately, it was only half a game. Every system has inputs and outputs. I had the resource output but I didn't have the input. How does a player get adventurers and quests?

Rodney: During that same conversation, I'd been talking with Peter about the kinds of games I'd like to see. At the time, I really was into action drafting games, with Agricola sitting at the top of my list. However, nothing I was playing at the time was fully satisfying me, and I wanted something that used the core action drafting mechanic I liked, but had less set-up time and a shorter play time.
Unfortunately, Peter and I didn't have a lot of time to talk about our ideas before I got on the Game Train to GenCon. This was the first year that some of us traveled by train from Seattle to Chicago (and then on to Indy for GenCon), so we were just playing games and enjoying the scenery going by. Still, the ideas that Pete and I had been chatting about stuck in my brain, and one morning after breakfast I found myself sitting in a train car speeding through somewhere in Montana, typing furiously on my laptop as I designed the basics of an action drafting game using the quests idea that Peter had. Once I started typing, the design quickly fell into place.
One thing I don't love about some action drafting games is their lack of interaction; many can feel like you're playing four-player solitaire, and I wanted a game that felt like you were really interacting with other people. Another thing I really wanted was for the players, not the game, to introduce more actions into the game. Yet another goal was simple set-up and break-down; I wanted people to get into the game quickly and start playing, rather than spending a lot of time figuring out which component goes where on the game board.
I'd also recently been working on the Dark Sun campaign setting for the D&D roleplaying game, and so naturally I was thinking all about that world. The initial design that I cooked up on the train was called Ambition of the Sorcerer-Kings and was set on Athas, the world of Dark Sun. The adventurers were fighters, rogues, psions and druids, not clerics since Dark Sun doesn't have divine magic. The psion also replaced the wizard, as they are more common in Dark Sun. Your agents in the city would be your templars, and you took on the role of a sorcerer-king.
By the time I got off of the train, I had a design document and sample cards, buildings and quests that would form the foundation of the first prototype. There was only one thing missing: I needed to build the math behind the game.
Pete: Any game like this is deals with a lot of resource transmutation. To facilitate design, we need a base resource; if you figure out the math of the game first, the design process is so much easier. For this game, we chose victory points (VP). Every action that you took was worth some number of VP. I felt rogues and fighters needed to be more common, so you'd get two of them for one action. You'd only get one cleric or psion per action, so they'd be worth more VP each. Finally, gold was assigned a value less than any of the adventurers. Surprisingly, this formula remained the same for the entire lifetime of the design process.

The First Prototype

Rodney: Once we'd figured out the math behind the game, I had a real urge to get a prototype made. Over the course of a single weekend, I took the math that Pete had helped work out, along with my initial design document, and created a full prototype for the game. The first prototype was primitive, to say the least; stickers on dungeon tiles made up our base board and buildings, and the cards were leftovers from another game I'd been working on earlier in the year.
That weekend, all of the components really started falling into place and had a strong purpose. Quests are how you score victory points; they are the driving factor in winning the game. Intrigue cards are how you interact with other players directly. Buildings bring new actions into the game, but they also provide their owner with some benefit so that choosing to take a building's action is a calculated risk.
Another piece of the puzzle that fell quickly into place was the issue of play time. I wanted a target play time of about an hour, and Pete and I had noodled around in our heads that the game should take about 8 rounds to play to hit that hour mark.
That Monday I grabbed Pete and made him sit down and try out the prototype. A couple of rounds into the game, Pete was scowling at the board, and for about five rounds neither of us said a single word other than those necessary to communicate with each other as players of the game. We played through the full game, and then both of us sat back and looked at each other. There was a long silence during which I was convinced that Pete hated the game, and that I'd wasted a weekend putting it together.
Pete: It turns out my "I'm thinking" face looks pretty much the same as my "I hate it" face. Normally, the first time I play a design of any new board game, it falls apart pretty quickly. I was amazed that we were able to play through a whole game and that it was fun!
While I like Dark Sun, it didn't thrill me as a location for the game. I really felt this game would be more exciting as a core D&D experience. I felt it should focus on the core D&D classes: fighters, rogues, clerics, and wizards. I also felt it needed to be in the Forgotten Realms, and we quickly determined Waterdeep would be the best location.
Re-theming the components were pretty easy. Instead of assigning Templars, you assign Agents. Instead of taking on the role of a sorcerer-king, you were one of the Lords of Waterdeep.

Preliminary Design

Rodney: Luckily, Pete didn't hate it, and I was amiable to the idea of making it a Forgotten Realms game. We were both a little shocked that we had a fully functional, playable game. In fact, that first prototype was so solid that we probably could have published it unchanged and had a decent, if not memorable game.
Pete: Our wheels immediately started to turn. Since this didn't start as an assigned project, we found time during lunches to play and talk. Many meals were spent at the "secret cafeteria" (a cafeteria in a building across the street from the office) discussing this game. There were quite a few fundamental differences at the start of the design from what you see in the final game.

Quests and the Tavern

Pete: Lots of things changed throughout the design process. One of the biggest changes was how you gained resources. At first, the tavern didn't exist. Instead, when you gained an adventurer, you placed that adventurer directly on one of your quest. Whenever you had enough adventurers on a quest, you immediately completed it—even if it wasn't your turn!
Rodney: In the very first design, Quests were both the objective and the "holding pen" for adventurers that you had recruited with your agents. They were like buckets that, as soon as they filled up, emptied out. This created a couple of problems; first, there was no real sense of progression, since you were just obtaining, and then spending, resources with no real potential for building up any kind of engine for yourself. Additionally, other people we recruited into playing the game wanted to move adventurers from one quest to another. We realized that trying to assign adventurers to quests as you take them was creating a layer of distraction that pulled you out of the main action drafting strategy of the game. People were spending too much time figuring out which quest to put adventurers on, which created a lot of static when added to the choice of what space to draft.
To address the first issue (the lack of progression), we created some quests that provided ongoing benefits once you completed them. The problem we kept running into was that, since you completed so many quests (and not always on your turn), you would end up with these cascading benefits every time you completed a quest. This slowed down the game as everyone had to stop while you resolved the quest completion, sometimes in the middle of another player's turn.
At this point, we removed all quests with lingering benefits from the game and instead created a new mechanic, the tavern, based on an idea we had from an early quest—Summon Aid from Luskan (see below). The way the tavern worked at first was that every time you completed a quest, you got to pick one adventurer from that quest to "save" and put into your tavern. Depending on the type of adventurer you saved, you got some small benefit. If you saved a fighter, you also got to save a second adventurer. If you saved a rogue, you got two gold. If you saved a cleric, you got to draw a quest. If you saved a wizard, you got to draw an Intrigue card. The adventurers in your tavern could be moved out and onto a quest at any time, but not vice versa; once an adventurer was on a quest, it stayed on that quest until completed.
With the tavern mechanic in place, we also created a number of new quest rewards that played off your tavern; for example, one quest gave you 1 VP for every cleric in your tavern at the time when you completed the quest. Unfortunately, this was having another side effect: people were hoarding adventurers, and then completing quests all in a rush at the end of the game. We tried to compensate for this by creating Intrigue cards that removed adventurers from the opponent's tavern, but too many of these ended up creating a lot of "feel-bad" in the game, where the game clearly encouraged you to do one thing (hoard adventurers) while punishing you for doing that via Intrigue cards. Plus, too much direct conflict was pulling us away from the strategy board game roots we wanted to adhere to.

Pete: After the original three-month design, we had to wait a couple of months to start development. During the design period, I often functioned as a development sounding board for Rodney's design, so I also joined the team of the developers led by Joe Huber, one of the guys on the Magic side of R&D.
Allowing the game to sit for a couple of months let me clear my mind of the design. We realized that placing Adventurers directly on quests actually lessened the draft tension. For example, if you were the only player that had a quest requiring Wizards, you knew that no other player would take the Blackstaff Tower location. About the same time, Joe realized that there was one major mechanic too many in the game, and something had to be removed.
When iterating on a game design, whenever I am faced with a list of issues, the solution that solves the most issues is usually the correct change. At this point, here are the problems we were facing:

• Too many quests were being completed at once, slowing down the game with long action resolution steps.
• Placing Adventurers directly on quests lessened draft tension.
• Saving an Adventurer after each quest also lessened draft tension.
• Gaining a boon after saving an Adventurer caused the game to slow down with nearly inconsequential analysis. Games were starting to go longer than an hour.

We made three changes to solve most of these problems:

• We cut out the mechanic that allowed you to save an Adventurer after each completed quest.
• When you drafted adventurers, they now went straight to your tavern.
• At the end of each action, you could complete one and only one quest.

Unfortunately, this meant that all the quests that gave you bonuses for things in your tavern had to be removed—it was too easy to get things in your tavern, after all!
Fortunately, I remembered the lingering-effect quests that we had done in an early design. The game had evolved a lot since then, so we thought it would be worth trying them again. We designed three for each quest type, renamed them "Plot Quests", and the game finally gelled into what you see today.

That's it. . . for this week!

We have a lot we can talk about it—and trust me, if you get us talking about this game, we can't stop—so there will be more next time!