Wizards of the Coast | Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of Ashardalon | Board Game | Ages 12+ | 1-5 Players | 60 Minute Playing Time

Product Information

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.

Pre-pub link is up, and the game is getting great numbers to start. https://www.gmtgames.com/p-1083-wings-for-the-baron-deluxe-gmt-edition.aspxHeroes • Monsters • Villains • Powers • Treasures • Encounters • Chambers • Adventure Cards • Boons 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.

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. That’s why I’ve been a bigger fan of the D&D strategy game DDM. It only has two books (one for the basic Battles Game and one for tournaments). Instead of sheafs of character sheets, you have a single stat card for each creature in your warband. We’ve been making “Dungeon Runs” and scenarios using DDMGuild’s rules for some time now. These dungeon runs (which are like a campaign boiled down to just the most exciting parts: killing monsters, rescuing maidens and finding treasure) have been my favorite form of D&D. At least up until Castle Ravenloft and Wrath of Ashardalon came out. I’m a long-time player of other board games and really enjoy them. Wrath of Ashardalon is a well-made game – there are no buts about it. Ashardalon comes individually bagged (who’s going to say no to that guy if he wants his own room?) with your heroes, monsters, and other villains jumbled in together separately.You have the option to level up your hero throughout the game, which greatly improves their attributes. There’s a total of two levels.

Now that you know what kinds of happy stuff is in the box, let’s look at how the game plays. I’m into Wrath of Ashardalon 5 adventures deep now, and I’ve already got the wheels churning on how I’m going to build my next Campaign for this awesome game system. This plays almost identically to Ravenloft, so there’s not a lot of new learning you’re going to have to do if you want to jump into this, but if you, like me, were a Ravenloft Denier, then you definitely want to get Ravenloft before it goes out of print. Anyhow, enough about my aspirations and onto the game. 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. As your character progresses through the game and your dungeon expands, you’ll eventually find yourself reaching the game objective. Each Adventure has different rules for winning – although it goes without saying that most of them include dispensing with a whole host of Monsters along the way – so make sure you read these carefully before you pop open the champagne!There’s a big red Dragon, which was to be expected, but now there’s a lot more interesting critters to slay with no regard for their litter of demon spawn, such as the ever-beloved Beholder and the Otyugh, which is the equivalent of how many perceive their Mother-In-Law to be. There’s an Orc Shaman, a Drake that gets more powerful as you beat on it, a Kobold Dragonlord, and all kinds of other nasties. All in all I am very impressed with the collection of stuff in the box, and they went above and beyond my expectations with all this new stuff. When you combine all this stuff with the Ravenloft stuff, you’re talking about being able to craft amazingly deep, narrative, complex adventures and campaigns that will keep you entertained for years. To top it all off, Wizards just announced a third sister to these tantalizing twins, The Legend of Drizzt, so we’re talking about nearly 140 figures, 30+ sheets of tiles, and more cards than a poker room at the Mandalay Bay. I simply could not be more excited about the epic Dungeon Crawling that I will be doing in 2011, and that’s a fact.

Since each set of three miniatures are identical there is no way, short of player memory, to distinguish which of two identical monsters is controlled by which player should more than one be on the board at a time. This problem is solved by having each player who controls a monster of a given type control all of that monster type, while not allowing any individual player have more than one monster card of each type in play. 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. A promotional card was also produced for each of the first three games in the series. These cards allow level 5 boss villains to be used alternatively as standard level 4 monsters. These cards are each designed to expand one game in the Adventure System, utilizing a specific miniature from each. However, since the components and mechanics of each game are compatible with one another, some players may use proxy miniatures and expand any of these games with any of the promo cards. These cards are each listed as expansions to all four games in the BoardGameGeek databases.A heavy shadow falls across the land, cast by a dark spire that belches smoke and oozes fiery lava. A cave mouth leads to a maze of tunnels and chambers, and deep within this monster-infested labyrinth lurks the most terrifying creature of all: a red dragon! Designed for 1-5 players, Wrath of Ashardalon features multiple scenarios, challenging quests, and cooperative game play. 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 As you can see from our Wrath of Ashardalon review, this game is an overwhelmingly entertaining cooperative dungeon-crawler for gamers of all levels. You’ll find yourself battling orcs, defeating cave bears, evading traps, and (hopefully), achieving your objective. This event card only has the potential for deadly impact if combined with an arsenal of other events and monsters that poison. If you moved your character to the unexplored edge of a tile in the Hero Phase, this is when you can bring a new tile into play and see what’s there. (If you didn’t reach the unexplored edge of a tile, then move on to the Villain Phase.)