Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of Ashardalon Board Game - Review

This past weekend our Dungeon Master was MIA, so we decided to try Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of Ashardalon Board Game. It was reasonably quick to get started, for 3 ancient veteran gamers, that is.

You select a premade character, and select from a few spells or abilities. These are laid out on cards. Then, you shuffle various decks of cards: encounters, monsters, treasures, etc... as well as dungeon tiles. The dungeon tiles fit together like puzzle pieces revealing the next sections.

We were up and running in about 30 minutes of reading the rules, but we were also drinking and eating at the same time, so it could have been a bit shorter.

You run through an adventure that specifies a few rules and an objective. The first one was simple: kill 12 monsters. The next was to recover an item and escape the dungeon.

Game play is turn based, each player can move, attack, explore in their turn. Then the villains get their turn. The rules for how they react is written on the cards. Spells are few but varied enough to provide flexibility.

As you kill monsters, you gain experience. As a party, you decide how to spend that experience. This can be to avoid a problem that is plaguing the party, a curse for example, or it can be used to level up characters. You can level up from level 1 to level 2 in the course of the adventure.

All in all, we had a good time. The mechanics are well thought out, it's as close to D&D as you can get without a Dungeon Master, or spending a lot of time rolling up characters, and planning an adventure.

We didn't die, all 3 of us having 30+ years of gaming experience apiece, though there were 2 close calls. I think if we replayed it, we would tweak some rules to make it harder for us, but for the average player it should prove a good challenge.

Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of Ashardalon Board Game | Board Game | BoardGameGeek

Video of gameplay: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9qswc21DKs