Wrath of Ashardalon game session

Played two games yesterday with a couple of friends, the 4th scenario called "the Mysterious chamber" which was about the heroes finding their way through the dungeon towards the "Dire chamber". The contents of the chamber were randomly determined by drawing one of the "chamber cards"- we got a Gate ceremony - an average difficulty target.

The bad thing was that my Wizard had been beaten senseless twice over and spent both Surge Health tokens so when the chamber appeared he was swarmed and killed at its doorstep resulting in a failure for the whole group.

We proceeded to play the 5th scenario after that, "The closed doors" which was a dungeon that held the "horrid chamber" at the end filled with monsters and a beholder/Gauth boss monsters to be slain. This time we actually fared rather well until discovering the horrid chamber. At that point we were surrounded by monsters and had to fight an epic fighting retreat through the dungeon corridors laying out traps to slow down the enemy advance being attacked from front and behind at the same time. In the end the amount of monsters that had "attack all heroes" characteristics became too great and on top of that we had a hilarious moment when we turned a corner to regroup and just as we had made our strategy we drew the Encounter card with the "pit" locking us in on the current tile! Our adventure ended as two characters died pretty much at the same time from poison (I died first and the player to my left would have died right behind me at the start of his turn).

This game is hard but really fun. I think learning the tactics of the hero power cards and knowing when to stay together and when to explore on your own is the key to victory - as well as weighing the option of exploring and putting one more monster on the table and simply avoiding more monsters but risking an Encounter card instead.

We're going to play this game again today, this time a 5 player session to see how different it will be. Up to this point we've played 1-2-3 player games and I think 3 is really pushing it. More heroes would equal more "targets" for the monsters and perhaps somewhat decrease the lethality of the dungeon.

Something that I started to think about a couple of days ago was if the dungeon tiles themselves could be used for something else. The grid system is just a bit smaller than 30mm so most of my "Lovecraft collection" of models would fit work. It would be interesting to come up with a dungeon crawl using Pulp adventurers against lovecraftian horrors and weirdo villains, maybe a hybrid between Incursion movement/shooting rules, using the tiles of Ashardalon and item cards and everything else that one would need from the Arkham Horror boardgame (health/Sanity tokens, money, items, spells etc). It would be a frankensteins monster of a game but I think it could be cool. I'll have to think about that.

I also got a game as a "throwaway gift" from my buddy Calle yesterday. A western themed worker placement game called Carson City which took my 3 hours to understand because the rulebook was written by halfwits - only after finding a crib sheet online made by a fan the game made sense. I will review it next week.

The Swedish Secrets of the third Reich tournament is being held this coming weekend so I might post some stuff related to that prior to and after the tournament.