4e board game

Thymos · Post by **Thymos** » Thu Sep 23, 2010 11:54 am

So they just went the extra step and made a 4e board game. I don't know what to think really.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010 ... mments-bar

Honestly I'm kind of surprised it took them this long to just remove the DM and out of combat stuff entirely.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Sep 23, 2010 12:36 pm

I'm surprised they made it 4th edition compatible, because that sounds really clumsy. For a board game I genuinely don't want to sit around and buy daily powers or whatever, because that's more setup time than I want to deal with. I also don't want to track XP in such a game, since I could much more quickly deal out Arkham style skill cards or something when defeating bosses or whatever.

It sounds like bad, or at least rushed, design. A design is complete not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

-Username17

Wesley Street · Post by **Wesley Street** » Thu Sep 23, 2010 12:57 pm

Has anyone here actually played the Ravenloft Board Game? I'm considering this as a Christmas present for the wife and myself as something to play together.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Thu Sep 23, 2010 1:17 pm

I thought there already was a 4th Edition board game. Called, you know, 4th Edition.

TOZ · Post by **TOZ** » Thu Sep 23, 2010 2:07 pm

This thread belongs in the Department of Redundancy Department is where this thread belongs.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Thu Sep 23, 2010 2:28 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:I'm surprised they made it 4th edition compatible, because that sounds really clumsy.

It has little to do with 4th edition rules. It's just a generic dungeon-crawling board game.

Doom · Post by **Doom** » Thu Sep 23, 2010 3:26 pm

Definitely hoping to see some reviews or something...nobody around here has tried it?

Windjammer · Post by **Windjammer** » Thu Sep 23, 2010 4:56 pm

There's plenty reviews around. Watch the replies. Sound familiar?

Oh wait, here is more.

Only topped by this: the fanboyz kept trolling the reviewer until he deleted the original review (called "A bland dungeon crawl that could have been something more ") and aptly retitled the thread.

Doom · Post by **Doom** » Thu Sep 23, 2010 6:23 pm

Lordy, seems like WoTC just have a gift for making polarizing games.

I just bought Runewars, so it'll be a while before I plunk down more bux for another closet-filler...and I might be holding off, since my 80's Dungeonquest seems to be the "one hour dungeon crawl game" that Ravenloft tries to be, and it does it clearly well (no idea how good the recent FFG version is, but I reckon it's fine).

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Thu Sep 23, 2010 6:25 pm

Windjammer wrote:There's plenty reviews around. Watch the replies. Sound familiar?

Oh wait, here is more.

Only topped by this: the fanboyz kept trolling the reviewer until he deleted the original review (called "A bland dungeon crawl that could have been something more ") and aptly retitled the thread.

This really stood out to me:

Guido Gloor wrote:While that is quite true, it shouldn't stop us from attempting to write unbiased reviews.

Which, in part, is why I rarely write reviews at all, because I know that I have a hard time letting go of my bias (and I'm too easily swayed by the cult of the new-to-me).

'I don't have opinions, and neither should you!'

Doom · Post by **Doom** » Thu Sep 23, 2010 6:27 pm

I have to agree with WJ, many of those counter-arguments against the negative reviews sound much like what 4rries say when anyone says anything negative about 4e.

Manxome · Post by **Manxome** » Thu Sep 23, 2010 7:22 pm

hogarth wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:I'm surprised they made it 4th edition compatible, because that sounds really clumsy.
It has little to do with 4th edition rules. It's just a generic dungeon-crawling board game.

Yeah, I read through the online rules for the board game, it really doesn't look like it's particularly compatible with anything from 4e. It doesn't have the standard/move/minor system (instead, you can "move, then attack", "attack, then move" or "move twice"). It's got damage/HP numbers in the low single-digits, and damage isn't random. There's no cover or line-of-sight, you can't block monsters' movement, and a lot of distances are measured in tiles (4x4 chunks of the map) rather than individual squares. Healing surges are shared by the party and are used automatically when you would otherwise die, so they're actually more like Descent's conquest tokens than anything I know of in 4e.

I'm not especially familiar with 4e, but it looks like it just cannibalized concepts without making even a passing attempt at mechanical compatibility. So I'm not sure why the linked reviewer thinks its compatible, unless his definition of "compatible" is "someone could invent new rules for it."

I'm also not sure why the linked reviewer thinks the party needs to stay together. The game supposely works with a party of anywhere from 1 to 5 heroes, and it looks like 5 heroes that spread out and each explore in a different direction should each face about the same difficulty as a solo hero (except that they'll explore 5 times as fast and can choose how to distribute treasure and XP). So if 5 heroes do better as a group than spread out, that suggests the game has some serious scaling issues.

I also noticed about a dozen significant errors or ambiguities while reading through the rulebook. My favorite is monsters that go after the "closest hero", but they have two different ways of measuring distance (by tiles or by squares) that can give conflicting results (e.g. hero A is 1 square away, but 2 tiles away, while hero B is 1 tile away, but 7 squares away) and they don't tell you which one to use.

Of course, I only read the rulebook, so I haven't seen the cards or the adventures (beyond what they include as illustrative examples). Still, I'm not particularly tempted to buy it.

DragonChild · Post by **DragonChild** » Thu Sep 23, 2010 9:09 pm

I have played this game, if anyone has any questions about it. It's moderately interesting, mostly because the games are fairly short - maybe an hour or so. If anyone has any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Fri Sep 24, 2010 3:53 am

The local gaming group has gotten a copy, with more incoming. Will give impressions once I've gotten to play it.