Thoughts on Wrath of Ashardalon:

• It’s an awesome multiplayer Crawl experience in boardgame form.

• The tiles are an unexpected pleasure to handle. The cards need sleeving (and they are now).

• This game was made to be house-ruled. For instance, House rule: If you’re on a flying carpet, the pit trap has no effect on you (although it still lands a pit marker for anyone unfortunate enough to not be on the carpet).

• House rule: I’m thinking the number of tiles downwards that a special goal tile is buried (like the Vault) should scale to the number of players. Maybe 5 tiles + 1 per player, so 1 player = 6th tile is the vault, 2 player = 7th tile vault, 3 player = 8th tile vault, 4 player = 9, 5 player = 10.

• House rule: Natural rolls of d20s are far and few between, and mean that some players may never level their hero in a game. Rule: when the amount of experience reaches 5 more than that needed to level the remaining heroes, the active hero may choose to level automatically.

• Tip: Unless you have an incredible utility power, don’t wait until endgame to use them. Potion of Rejuvenation and Pearl of Power will be useless if you or some member of your team hasn’t used them yet. Healing Surges should definitely be saved to endgame if possible.

• Tip: Strike a balance between exploration and banding together(ish) to move through the dungeon. Staying 1 tile apart is still useful for most teamwork while avoiding tile area effects affecting multiple adventurers for the most part.

I bought Castle Ravenloft as well. Goodness, there are some quite useful player character power cards to use, so I’ve permanently moved the Ravenloft characters and power cards to their new home in the Wrath of Ashardalon box. Also, I’m probably going to use some of these rules and some of my own to combine the two games. In particular:

• All Treasure cards shuffled together.

• Encounter deck list with specific cards from both sets.

• Monster deck of the same. Except I’ll tune it for different themed dungeons, along with the “Hall of the X”/”X Warren” cards. It’s just kind of sad to turn up a Kobold Warren Encounter card and only have one Kobold show up, maybe a Snake instead.

And now more pictures.

.flickr_group p.flickrTag_container { display: inline !important; }