Wrath of Ashardalon - the longest dungeon crawl

We played D&D Wrath of Ashardalon down at the club this weekend, another 3 player experience. And the "Against the mountain clans" scenario where the heroes search the dungeons for the lair of a mountain clan of orcs/duergar/kobolds.

This game is crazy hard as it is, but it did not help that we were almost wiped out from the start by triggering poison dart traps, poisonous gas and rolling boulders within just two turns!

Once we had cleared the deathtrap of an entrance, we were in for a crazy long dungeon crawl. Our efforts hampered by constant events and monsters expanding the dungeon and the dungeon deck with tiles from the bottom (making our goal of reaching the lair more and more distant). We had 4 neutral/non-quest specific Dungeon tiles left when despite a valorous fight our dwarf fighter succumbed and died (prior to that my elf cleric had been beaten down to 0 wounds twice so I had used up both "surge" tokens).

The game suggests that you can increase and decrease the difficulty level of the game by adding/removing surge tokens. I think we will run the game with 3 surge tokens in the future. It's just insane how hard the game gets if certain combos of traps-events-monster coincide.

Another good idea, suggested by Steven over at the What Would Patton Do blog is to allow your heroes to fully heal when they level up. This can make things a tad easier, we didn't do that in this game.

I'm really really curious about  the "Legends of Drizzt" game in this series, being a huge fan of "Icewind Dale" trilogy I'm very tempted to buy the game even so for the villains alone (Jarlaxle!), and I prefer the "Underdark" locations and monster over the one's currently featured in Ravenloft and Wrath of Ashardalon. I have ordered Descent 2nd edition and look forward to trying it out this weekend, hopefully I will get my fix of a more in depth adventure game (completely missed out on the whole D&D thing when I was younger).