Lords of Waterdeep review

So I got to play Lords of Waterdeep with my regular boardgame group yesterday where we managed to play 2 games. Lords of Waterdeep is a resource handling worker placement game - with a Forgotten Realms theme that doesn't impact the game play. In fact the fantasy theme is just there to give the game a setting and some cool fantasy artwork more than provide any fantasy specific rules or twists. This theme does so little impact on the game that it doesn't even have any special rules or differences between the factions - which while taken from the Forgotten Realms and probably known to gamers and readers of that universe - don't do much else than provide an alternative name for the different colors that players use for their gaming pieces.

Now this may sound quite awful but the game itself is really good. Players each take up the role of a "Lord of Waterdeep", who are competing for power and glory. You get power and glory by completing quests, quests are not completed by the lords themselves but rather by adventure groups put together by the lords personal agents. This is where the resource handling comes in, as each quests has a list of required resources that needs to be gathered before it can be completed (adventurer types and money) the role of each Lord is to send out his agents to fine comb the streets and locations of the city of Waterdeep and gather warriors, wizards, clerics, rouges and gold necessary to form expeditions for the quests.

As soon as you have enough resources to complete a quest an agent of yours can pay the required resources from your stash, complete the quest and cash in the victory points and other rewards the various quests yield. It's a very simple game and it plays fast. It is however pretty cool and a bit more complex than you may think.

Depending on the number of players, each lord will get a limited number of agents. Agents are placed in locations, and there is often a single slot in each location which makes it very competitive so that player order and turn initiative becomes important. New buildings can be added to the city if you decide to build some in the "Builders hall", these new buildings are better than the original locations as they provide more resources per visit - but also provide the owner with a "owner bonus" whenever other players are using your buildings. Thus owning a lot of buildings automatically has the opponents contribute to your cause.

The game really starts getting interesting about midgame when some new buildings have been built and an additional agent has been added to each players supply. This makes competition for resources even tougher and people really begin using the added buildings - but also keep thinking how to gather resources without helping out their opponents by doing so. Long term planning is crucial but fragile. Players can string together several events to cash in a larger victory points bonus - but it also means your plans can be ruined by another player picking a resource or scrapping all existing face up quests in the Tavern.  You need to keep a cool head and a bit of a poker face not to reveal too much about your lords identity (which remains hidden until the game ends), if people start to notice that you take a lot of Arcane quests they may come to the conclusion that your lord provides a bonus for each such quest that gets completed. They can then screw you over by blocking necessary resources or scrapping quests in the tavern.

In our last game I had built a building that allowed me to - when visited by an agent - to pick up a quest in the tavern and immediately complete it. If I completed a quest that way I would get additional victory points. However I needed to first gather resources in order to be able to finish that quest, and I could not rush my actions or be too eager doing stuff unless I wanted to reveal my plan. It was a very tense turn as I watched the other player putting down their agents on various spots and hoping they would avoid picking the spots where I needed to go!

Much of the excitement comes from players taking turns in placing one of their agents at a time, there are possibilities to play intrigue cards and the whole intrigue part of the game can be very tactical in that your agents that perform intrigue actions can be used twice but their second action is always at the very end of each game turn when many locations are already taken by other players. The intrigue cards are a mix of cards that give you a bonus, cards with a shared bonus between several players, cards that penalize opponents and a real knife in the back card called "Mandatory quest" which is great for draining opponent resources. The mandatory quests are as the name suggest required to be finished before an opponent can complete his other quests. The reward is very poor for the number of adventurers needed, and it can be a setback for players that have a fragile balance of resources and a great way of stopping opponents either early in the game when resources are scarce or in the endgame when everyone is spending their last resources on the final quests in the last turn.

Lords of Waterdeep is a very fast game, the box says 2-5 players takes 90 minutes. Since you get more agents if you play 2 players, and less agents when you play more than that I think it may be fairly accurate. I would recommend playing it twice in a row if you are learning to play the game or bringing new players into it.

Our first game was quite OK but not really spectacular. However the second game when everyone knew all the tricks and tactics was really damn good and a lot more exciting. By that time we all made bold moves, planned ahead and made better use of the first player and intrigue mechanics.

As I said at the beginning of the review, the theme is paper thin. But it doesn't really matter since the game mechanics are really good. This is a game that I think can be played with people that aren't normally board gamers or don't play that much. It's easy to teach, plays fast and has some really good depth once you learn it.

My only critique I would have is perhaps towards the rulebook, only 4 out of 22 pages are rules (the rest are descriptions of buildings and setup diagrams). While the rules are mostly clear I feel that a few things could have been explained a bit more in depth, most of the flaws are picked up in the FAQ document for this game (and there aren't that many so don't worry). Still they could have added slightly longer explanations of actions and what you can and can't do in the more specialized areas such as Waterdeep harbor where intrigue cards are played or a more clear description on how the "Ambassador" agent works (the text for this entry is quite poorly worded and cut short imo).

But overall this is a very good game, and it's another fairly "cheap" title . I got mine for 285SEK which is a bargain and about the same price as Spartacus. It feels nice to be able to to take a risk buying a boardgame when the price tag isn't overwhelming. Boardgames these days are a huge investment and far from all are really worth the money.

Lords of Waterdeep is a great game and if  you like games like Puerto Rico this will surely appeal to you as well. I give it a 8.5/10 and happily play this more often.

Lords of Waterdeep unboxing and content overview

Lords of Waterdeep is a "Euro" type game with a Forgotten Realms fantasy theme - a weird combination if you ask me but it's a game that has been highly praised by many people and reviewers. I first heard about this when the WWPD.net guys talked about it on their podcast and it sounded interesting, having watched a video of the game online I managed to hunt down a copy very cheap here in Sweden from an online bookstore of all places.

I will post a review once I've had the chance to play a game or two, until then I thought it might be interesting to talk about the box contents. A Euro type game means that you have cubes, meeples and more focus on the game mechanics than the theme. There are some really good Euro games out there, but it feels like it's generally a genre that is slightly looked down upon because it does not have the same production value and component overload of games from  manufacturers such as Fantasy Flight Games.

Euro games are more about players competing against each other over resources, and this game is no different and it's also a worker placement game at heart. This means that players assign their agents on various spaces on the board to gather resources which are then traded in for victory points - the player with most victory points at the end wins.

However, while the game does feature square cubes and meeples instead of miniatures the rest of the game does not spare much expense and the production value of the other components is really top notch. From the high quality cards, to the great looking board and awesome cardboard tokens and other details this game is not cheap but rather practical. (You can also buy meeples specifically made for Lords of Waterdeep here if you don't want to use the cubes http://www.meeplesource.com/products.php?cat=14 )

And speaking of practical, someone with boardgame experience has clearly put some thought into the design of things here. There are for instance buildings cards with small slots for player tokens to be attached - so that you know who owns what building, the box itself is worth mentioning. It has perfect amount of slots and space to allow you to store all components in an orderly fashion. The areas for cards and some larger tokens have a small bump that allows you to easily pick up the token or cards by pressing down one end and thus raising the other eliminating some classic frustrating moments.

The deck of cards features around a dozen "Lords" which are assigned to players at the start of the game, the rest of the deck is divided between quests and intrigue. Quest cards are what the game basically revolves around, and the most common way to gather victory points as you complete them. Intrigue cards are additional effects that can be played on oneself or the opponents and can boost or penalize a player - thus creating a bit of backstabbing opportunities (though not as to make it a core element as in games such as Spartacus or Game of Thrones).

The board is covered with areas where players may place agents and gather resources, but there are also building cards which can be placed on the board by players during the game to create more locations that are more profitable to visit - but which also award the owner of the building with resources when they are used by other players. I like the art direction and it is both tidy and easy on the eyes.

Finally the rulebook, it's just 24 pages long - of which only 4 pages are actual rules -the rest is an overview of components, setup diagrams and detailed information about the buildings you can build in the game. So it doesn't look like it's hard to get into.

I really look forward to play a game, and will post a proper review where I talk about the game mechanics as soon as possible.

Mansions of Madness first impression and thoughts

Anders at our club invited me and a couple of other guys to try out Mansions of Madness, it's a game that could best be described as a zoomed in version of Arkham Horror. I've been looking at this game since it was released a while ago but just had a weird gut feeling that something was off, or at least didn't directly appeal to me enough to buy it myself.

First of all I love Arkham Horror, however as I got more expansions for it the game became a lot better and more interesting - but also a damn chore to setup and clean up. As such perhaps Mansions of Madness should appeal to me since it is a (slightly) less component heavy game. But what made me hesitate was the limited amount of scripted scenarios, five to be exact.

Talking with Anders about this he said that there are indeed five scenarios (meaning 5 different floor plans) but that each scenario had 3 different stories which the game master could pick from, and that there were further variations within those 3 stories that could slightly alter them even further.

You could argue that once you have played 15 games you got your money's worth, but since boardgames (and especially Fantasy Flight Games titles) are so expensive I have this built in preference of being able to play a game without running into this dead end of already played through content.

You could argue that games like Descent 2 or Battles of Westeros have the exact same problem, but I would disagree, since Descent 2 at least offer character development making the amount of variants vastly increased, and Battles of Westeros is about tactics first and the "story" second. Mansions of Madness on the other hand is a very story driven and thematic game that is exciting to play when you don't know what's going to happen and it relies heavily on the "investigators" not knowing all the story elements, the tricks that the GM can pull and being able to foresee events.

My worry is thus that once you have played through the stories and variants of the core game it may be difficult to find it as exciting as it was during the first "fresh" play through, because as soon as you realize what story is being played much of the game and possible plans of the GM are spoiled.

Having played only once so far, I have to say that my worries have not been put to rest and I still think that the game suffers from the scripted content. I could argue that FFG should have included more scenarios in the scenario book, but on the other hand it is possible (but players very rarely have time, imagination or energy for it) to come up with your own scenarios and floorplans - thus prolonging the enjoyment and replayability of the game.

Now a bit about the game itself.

I't quite good, I have only played it once but I don't think it is super awesome. My perception may be clouded by everything I have already written.

It did however feature a couple of really interesting aspects that I really liked. In game puzzles that created a bit of a "adventure game" atmosphere where you have to solve puzzles. In this case there were mosaic, lock en fuse box puzzles. These would all have been dead simple to solve had not the game enforced a limitation directly tied to the character you are playing. The more intelligent the character the mode work you can spend on figuring out the puzzle during one attempt. The game allows players to pick up where they left with the puzzle, or let another investigator finish it for them in a subsequent turn - but you always tried to solve it in one go to save "in game time".

Another thing I liked was the way the game master had planned out his whole  take on the story game and certain effects only occurred if the circumstances in the game were fulfilled. The game master also seemed to have a bunch of options at hand which he could play during various circumstances such as when the health or sanity of an investigator reached a low level.

The thing I liked the most however was some kind of "weapon/damage" deck which was played each time an investigator intended to fight something. The investigator declared what weapon was going to be used, and before any die was rolled the GM drew a card that related to that weapon and provided a random effect - such as suddenly running out of ammo, going nuts and firing at everything in the room, accidently dropping your weapon, doing critical damage etc. This created a much more tense and unpredictable combat situation than simply min/maxing weapon vs monster the way you do in Arkham Horror.

Anders said that the game had fulfilled its purpose when I at one point declared "we are all fucked no matter what we do..." when things were going really bad, and yeah it was interesting to see how you began thinking about how to survive rather than how to best kill the monsters.

On the other hand the game we played was slightly absurd in that we died with IIRC 4 investigators and new investigators were constantly arriving at the house. I poked fun of this, especially since the entrance of the building was burning since the early beginning of our game and how that, gunshots and wild screams kept attracting curious neighbors. The possibility to get new investigators when you die is also featured in Arkham Horror. However where it is relatively rare to lose an investigator completely in Arkham Horror the setting and gameplay of Mansions of Madness is a LOT more deadly and it kinda broke the immersion a bit throwing new characters into the story. It also made the game more action oriented than I would have liked. I actually liked the very beginning of the game where it was more of a mystery and exploration with the sense of danger  more than the later stages of the game when monsters kept spawning at a rate which was impossible to handle.

I won't write this game off, or recommend it, at this point. I feel I would need to play it a couple more times to see if there is a pattern of how games develop. These were just my first impressions and thoughts about the game which I have been curious but very hesitant to get into myself.


One last thing that though, the miniatures you get in the game look a LOT better unpainted than the "pre-painted" versions you can buy through FFG. The painted versions looked horrible, so don't waste you money on that and keep with the nice and much crisper looking raw plastic look.