For Christmas I got a copy of Betrayal at House on the Hill. It’s a great little game. I don’t really have much to say about it at the moment, but I bring it up because the game ships with eight 6-sided dice which are marked as 1d3-1 (generating results of 0, 1, or 2 pips). At one point during the holidays we had the game half set-up when everyone got distracted by some other bit of family business, which left a couple of people mucking about with the dice.

In the process, I was struck with the idea for a silly little dice game that proved amusing enough that I present it here:

1. The first player rolls all 8 dice from Betrayal at House on the Hill.
2. The target number is 6. If you fail to roll 6 pips on your dice, you have lost and the other player scores a point.
3. If you have rolled more than 6 pips, you are allowed to remove a number of dice from the pool equal to the number of extra pips you rolled. (Example: If you roll an 8, you can remove 2 dice from the pool.)
4. Hand the remaining dice to the other player to roll. The target number remains 6.
5. When a player scores a point, the other player rolls all 8 dice and play continues.

We either played to 6 points or swapped in new players in a tag-team style.

Not exactly a high-strategy game, but a strangely satisfying combination of Horse with the random rote of War. Plus dice. (Dice are cool.)

I wasn’t planning on doing this, but almost immediately after writing about my first set of rulebook woes with Castle Ravenloft I ended up playing the solo scenario “Adventure: Impossible” and running headlong into two particularly egregious problems.

First, a quick description of the “Adventure: Impossible” scenario: In the scenario you play each of the five Heroes in the game sequentially as they enter Castle Ravenloft’s dungeons in order to defeat 3 of Strahd’s powerful lieutenants. (Which three is randomly determined before the game begins and revealed as you play.) When one hero dies, the next hero arrives.

(Minor problem: The scenario doesn’t specify what happens to the dead Hero’s treasure. It also doesn’t specify what happens to the monsters which were controlled by the dead Hero. I arbitrarily ruled that the dead Hero’s treasure disappeared, but that their monster control cards and traps transferred to the new character.)

The scenario wasn’t going too badly for me until I got an Alarm trap. These traps generate a new monster every single turn until they’re disabled… and I could never get the damn thing disabled. My fighter failed to disable it twice and was then killed. He was replaced by the rogue, who has a +5 bonus to disabling traps (and thus has an 80% chance of success). The rogue failed three times, but was then fortunate enough to get teleported to the far side of the dungeon by an Encounter card. A few turns later, this was my predicament:

The Alarm trap was still spitting out monsters, all of which were pouring across the dungeon towards me. At this point I had killed one of Strahd’s lieutenants and was now engaging Klak. Klak’s appearance was actually quite lucky in some respects because he would cause unexplored tiles to flip over, which gave me room to continue moving away from the monsters pursuing me and, thus, enough time to kill Klak before they reached me.

PLACING MONSTERS

Here, however, we run into our first rulebook woe. The rule for placing Monsters reads:

When you have to “place a Monster” this is shorthand for draw a Monster Card and place the corresponding Monster figure on the bone pile that’s on the Dungeon Tile you just placed. If you already have the same Monster Card in play in front of you, discard that Monster Card and draw again. Note, however, that it’s okay to draw a Monster Card if another player has the same Monster in play.

(Minor problem: You will often be told to “place a Monster” in situations where you haven’t just placed a Dungeon Tile, so the first sentence is actually misleading in addition to being ungrammatical. But that’s just a quibble, really.)

The question becomes: What happens when you already have one copy of every single Monster Card in the game? Should multiple Monsters now be allowed? Or is it now impossible for new Monsters to appear? And if it’s impossible for new Monsters to appear, should I cycle through the entire deck?

I ask that last question, because the game is also unclear on what you should do when you get to the bottom of a deck of cards. Should you reshuffle the discards? Or have you simply depleted the dungeon of Monsters? (I think the answer here is pretty obviously “reshuffle”, but once again we’re seeing the sloppiness of the rulebook.)

In terms of whether or not Monsters should be drawn when you already have one copy of each Monster Control card, I see three possibillities:

(1) You don’t draw any additional monsters. (This is the most literal interpretation of the rules; it is also the most favorable to the players.)

(2) Draw an additional control card to determine what type of monster to place, place it, but then place the extra control card under the existing control card. The new monster will still be activated by the control card already in your hand. If one of these monsters is killed, remove one control card to your XP pile normally while leaving the other in play. (This allows new monsters to continue entering play, but doesn’t result in a single player activating the same monster multiple times on their turn.)

(3) Draw an additional control card, place the monster, and resolve the additional control card normally. (This is the most punitive possibility, since it means that the active player will be activating those monsters twice.)

I decided to go with the first possibility in thie scenario, largely because the alternative was pretty much certain death. In the future, however, I might actually use a house rule in which scenario #2 is always used when a duplicate control card is drawn. It might make the game slightly more difficult, but in a way that I feel would be more enjoyable and universally consistent.

TACTICAL FAIL

In any case, I’d managed to kill Klak, but the monsters were still coming.

oh shit…

I had them strung out pretty well so that I could take them one at a time, but the problem was that as soon as I killed one of them the Alarm trap would immediately respawn them. And I couldn’t keep that up indefinitely because the encounters would slowly whittle me away.

But then I got lucky and pulled a treasure that would let me teleport all the way back to the other side of the board where I could deactivate the Alarm trap.

… instead I missed the die roll three more times.

(If you’re keeping track at home, I have now missed the die roll seven times. One of these had a 55% chance of success and the others all had an 80% chance of success, meaning that there’s only a 0.002% chance that something like this could happen.)

I’m now down to 1 hp and the monsters are closing in, but I have a clever scheme which will allow me to circle around a corridor loop in the randomly generated dungeon, pull the monsters away from the Alarm trap, and give me one more shot at disabling the thing.

… except for the encounter card which teleported a spider right next to me for a guaranteed kill.

At this point, the cleric — my last Hero in the scenario — teleports in and makes a beeline for the Alarm trap. Once there, he proceeds to blow his disarm roll three more times. (I am officially done calculating the probability on this one.)

With more monsters closing in, the cleric fled down the hall, where he promptly discovered the Zombie Dragon (Strahd’s third lieutenant) lurking in a the Rotting Nook:

This does not look good.

And here, as the Zombie Dragon pins me in the corner, we reach our second rulebook woe. When a monster activates, you are supposed to check the Monster Tactics listed on their control card. The rules for this are:

• The Monster’s tactics are presented as a list. Each possible maneuver for the Monster starts with a statement. If that statement is true, the Monster follows the resulting tactics.
• If the statement is not true, go on to the next statement. If that statement is true, the Monster follows the resulting tactics.
• Once a Monster has selected and followed one set of tactics, the Monster’s turn ends. Do not continue to check its remaining tactics that turn.

What these rules fail to address is a situation in which a tactics statement is true, but the resulting tactics cannot be executed. For example, in the picture above my cleric is boxed into the corner by a skeleton and the Zombie Dragon. As a result, there are no adjacent spaces open next to the cleric. You can see just beyond the Zombie Dragon that there is a wolf and a spider waiting to pounce me. The wolf’s tactics read:

• If the Wolf is adjacent to a Hero, it attacks that Hero with a bite.
• If the Wolf is within 2 tiles of a Hero, it moves adjacent to the closest Hero and attacks that Hero with a pounce.
• Otherwise, the Wolf moves 2 tiles toward the closest Hero.

The first line doesn’t apply since the Wolf isn’t adjacent. The second line does apply (the Wolf is within 2 tiles of the cleric), but it can’t move adjacent. Does that mean it doesn’t attack at all? And, if so, should I instead execute the third line of the Wolf’s tactics? What if this wasn’t a solo scenario and the closest Hero was boxed in but there was another Hero within range who wasn’t? Should the Wolf attack the available target or freeze-up on the unavailable target?

Then consider that the spider’s tactics unambiguously trigger a web attack. (“If the Spider is within 1 tile of a Hero, it attacks the closest Hero with an acidic web.”) But the spider’s web attack is a +11 attack with the effect, “1 [damage] and Slowed. Place the Spider adjacent to the Hero.” Should the spider deal damage and then not move? Or is the entire effect canceled since part of it can’t apply?

What would probably be useful is a general rule for handling occupied spaces. Maybe something like, “If a Monster must move to or appear in a particular space and all possible spaces are occupied, the monster instead moves to an adjacent space.” This doesn’t necessarily clear up the question of whether or not the Wolf would be allowed to attack even though they didn’t get adjacent to their target, but it would help.

It would also clear up another issue with the “place a Monster” rules: What happens if the bone pile is already occupied by another monster? (Since many monsters won’t move when they appear and several encounters spawn multiple monsters, this situation actually crops up quite frequently.) We’ve been playing with the “place them in an adjacent space” rule since it obviously makes the most sense.

A couple days ago I posted my first thoughts on the Castle Ravenloft boardgame. One of the things I mentioned was the horrific quality of the rulebook. Today I want to expound upon that a little bit.

But first, let me mention how the session we played last night went: We had a couple of newbies at the table, so we started with Adventure 2: Find the Icon of Ravenloft. This is essentially the plain, vanilla version of the game. It’s a good way to get introduced to the basic gameplay, and then wraps up with a climactic fight in the Chapel. We were able to conserve our big AoE attacks until reaching the Chapel, but then two bad Encounter draws ended up teleporting two of our Heroes to opposite ends of the dungeon while spawning even more monsters. With a good deal of scrambling, however, we were able to strand a gargoyle, reconcentrate the enemies, and then blast our way out of the castle.

Good times.

We then moved to Adventure 9: Gauntlet of Terror. In this scenario the layout of the dungeon is largely predetermined at the beginning of play and groups of monsters are moving towards the dungeon’s entrance, seeking to escape and ransack the village. This adventure completely inverts the strategy of the game in almost every way.

The first time we played it, we screwed up the respawning rules for the monsters. Then a couple of players left and a new player showed up and we played through it a second time using all of the rules correctly. Both plays were great fun, with quite a few really tense moments. (Including one memorable turn where we ended up semi-intentionally spawning 7 monsters at the same time.)

I’ve now played the game a total of 18 times. It continues to deliver a consistently fun experience.

THE RULEBOOK

With that being said, I now want to discuss the inadequacies of the rulebook in a bit more detail. To quickly sum up the problem: Castle Ravenloft pretty much can’t be played without house-ruling nearly every facet of the game.

EXAMPLE 1: IMMOBILIZATION

The complete rules for the Immobilized condition read: “If your Hero is Immobilized, your Speed is reduced to 0 — you can’t move!”

Okay, that means that you can’t use a Move action to move (since your Speed has been reduced to 0). But can you still use At-Will, Utility, or Daily powers that allow you to move? What if another character uses a power that would move you… is that allowed? What if an encounter card is triggered with a trap-like effect that would ordinarily force you to move — does the Immobilized condition prevent that movement, too? What if the effect in question doesn’t use the word “move” to describe the positional change, should that be allowed?

For example, here’s the text from the Overwhelming Terror encounter card: “Place each Hero 2 tiles closer to the Start tile. If a Hero is on the same tile as a Monster after being placed, that Hero is slowed.”

Should Overwhelming Terror move an Immobilized Hero to a new tile? Does the flavor text (“A cacophony of shrieks and howls rises up around you, and you flee in terror.“) change your opinion?

If they aren’t moved, do you still check to see if they are slowed? And if you do, do you use the tile they’re currently on or the tile they would have been placed on if they were moved?

Okay, let’s consider Strahd’s Minions: “Place the active Hero and the two Monsters that are closest to that Hero on the tile farthest from the active Hero. If there are less than two Monsters in play, place a new Monster adjacent to the active Hero after he or she is placed.”

If an Immobilized Hero isn’t placed on a new tile, should you still move the monsters? And if not, should you draw a new monster if there are less than two in play? (After all, there is no “after he or she is placed” if the Hero was never placed.)

Should an immobilized rogue be allowed to move as part of their Deft Strike ability? (“Before the attack, you can move 2 squares. Attack one adjacent Monster.”) If not, should the immobilized rogue be allowed to move when the cleric uses Hallowed Advance? (“Hit or miss, each other Hero can move one tile.”) If not, can the fighter use Bodyguard when the immobilized rogue is attacked? (“The attack misses instead, and you swap positions with the Hero that was attacked.”) Can the fighter use Bodyguard if the fighter is the one who’s been immobilized?

In order to have a nice, consistent ruling for being immobilized, our table has been playing “Immobilized” to mean:

(1) The immobilized Hero cannot change their own location through the use of any action or power. Any other power, ability, or effect which would change the immobilized Hero’s location takes effect normally — including other Heroes using their powers, attacks from Villains and Monsters, and Encounter cards.

But other reasonable interpretations could include:

(2) “Immobilized” simply reduces the Hero’s speed to 0. Any effect (including their own powers) which allows a Hero to move without taking a Move action can be performed normally.

(3) An immobilized Hero “cannot move”. Nothing will cause them to leave they’re currently standing in.

(4) 4th Edition’s definition of Immobilized: “You can’t move from your space, although you can teleport and can be forced to move by a pull, a push, or a slide.”

Since forced movement isn’t defined as part of the Castle Ravenloft rules (and “pull, “push”, and “slide” are terms of art which are not used), this would still leave gray areas. But you could try to formalize something close to it by saying:

(5) An immobilized Hero has a speed of 0 and cannot move using a Move action. A Hero cannot use any of their own abilities to move. (Exception: The eladrin’s Fey Step ability can be used normally.) Any ability or effect which says that a Hero “may” or “can” change their position cannot be used by the Hero. Abilities or effects which do not give the Hero a choice in whether or not to move affect an immobilized Hero normally.

Of course, each of these variant interpretations result in significantly different gameplay. And many of them don’t provide clear guidance in resolving the tack-on issues of effects like Strahd’s Minions. (One of the reasons we use the interpretation we do is because it doesn’t have any gray areas in resolving abilities or powers found in the game. It may occasionally give “illogical” results based on the flavor text, but it can be applied with absolute consistency.)

EXAMPLE 2: GAUNTLET OF TERROR

Adventure 9: Gauntlet of Terror, like most of the adventures in the game, introduces several scenario-specific rules. For example:

When an active Hero moves within 1 tile of a tile with a face-down Monster token on it, or onto a tile with a face-down Monster token on it, flip that token over.

Seems simple enough. But does that mean that a Hero can avoid flipping Monster tokens by simply not moving on their turn? And if that’s the case, then we’ve also re-opened the whole “what counts as a move?” can of worms. Are we only talking about Move actions? What if you take a Move action (which may or may not be mandated by the game) but move 0 spaces? Or use your Move action to do something other than move? What if you’re immobilized?

And so forth.

(We interpreted this rule as, “If the active Hero is within 1 tile of a face-down Monster token or on the same tile as a Monster token at any point during their Hero phase, flip that token over.”

This seems to match the intention of the rule as written, but may be a distortion if “move” should be interpreted to include movement from Encounter cards (which are drawn after the active player’s Hero phase is completed). On the other hand, if we changed the rule to read “if the active Hero is within 1 tile of a face-down Monster token (…) at any point during their turn” we end up with a different kind of distortion because the Monster tokens can also be moved within range during their turn but after the Hero has moved. The rules as written clearly don’t suggest those tokens should be flipped over… but maybe they should? I don’t know.)

Complicating this, here’s another example from the same scenario:

Discard the token [you flipped over]. Then place a new Monster token from the box top face down on any tile (except for the Start tile) that doesn’t have a Monster token on it.

Does that mean we can place a Monster token on the same tile as the Monster token we just flipped over? And, if so, should we immediately flip it over again?

Another point of confusion: The rule as written reads, “When an active Hero moves within 1 tile (…) or onto a tile.” That’s a strange way of writing it because “within 1 tile” is interpreted consistently elsewhere in the game to include the tile you’re on. It’s probably just needless redundancy, but should it be interpreted to mean that “within 1 tile” doesn’t include “the tile the Monster token is on” in this particular case? If so, does that mean if you start your turn on a tile with a Monster token on it that you can actually move around on that tile without flipping the token over (since you wouldn’t be moving onto the tile)? Or even move diagonally off the tile (which would result in you being two tiles away and never “within 1 tile” due to the tile-counting rules)?

Final example:

Shuffle the Dungeon Tile stack and take out 15 tiles. One at a time, each player takes a turn placing one of those tiles adjacent to the unexplored edge that it closest to the Start tile until all 15 tiles have been placed.

This rule is problematic because it doesn’t tell you how to orient the tiles you’re placing. Since the monsters and monster tokens in the scenario follow the arrows on the tiles, the vagueness of the rule technically allows the players to construct a board in which all of the monsters move away from the Start tile (making the scenario ridicuously easy).

THE NEED FOR A REVISED RULEBOOK

Needless to say, these radically different interpretations and/or patchings of the rulebook are not trivial matters in terms of gameplay.

For example, if Monster tokens can be placed on the same tile you just removed a Monster token from and they can be triggered as you place them, you can actually end up in scenarios where all the remaining monsters in the game spontaneously generate.

On the other hand, consider the difference between (1) “characters moving as a result of encounter cards flip a monster token” and (2) “characters only flip monster tokens while using a Move action” when dealing with an encounter card like Strahd’s Minions (“Place the active Hero and the two Monsters that are closest to that Hero on the tile farthest from the active Hero. If there are less than two Monsters in play, place a new Monster adjacent to the active Hero after he or she is placed.”).

In the first scenario, you end up with a situation where a Hero can be teleported to the far side of the board and immediately spawn multiple monster tokens which will (probably) all attack them simultaneously on the same turn.

In the second scenario, however, the Hero is stranded in a far corner of the dungeon surrounded by prowling monsters, allowing the other players to move the monster tokens away from their location and prevent the mass-spawning which would otherwise occur on their next turn.

Off-hand, I can’t tell you which one makes for the more interesting game; nor can I tell you which one makes for a more balanced game; nor can I tell you which one the designers (Mike Mearls and Peter Lee) intended me to play.

And these are not isolated problems. Both the Rulebook and the Adventure Book are filled to the brim with this kind of vagueness and inaccuracy. I can’t really classify this as bad game design (I’m pretty certain the underlying design is actually quite robust and thoroughly playtested). It’s atrocious rules-writing, not bad rules-design.

But given this woeful shortcoming in the game, it’s surprising that Wizard’s response to the problem has been an overwhelming and deafening silence: No errata. No FAQ. No official clarification or support of any kind.

So, to conclude: Fun game. Very much worth grabbing a copy of. But be prepared to put in a little sweat equity to make the game function properly.

Go to Castle Ravenloft: More Rulebook Woes

As a roleplaying game, 4th Edition sure makes a great boardgame.

… Zing!

But in all seriousness, I’ve been looking forward to getting my grubby paws on a copy of the new Castle Ravenloft game for awhile now. For the better part of two decades now, I’ve been looking for a boardgame that could be played when you were in the mood for a little dungeon-crawling but didn’t have anyone to DM.

(Over the years I’ve dabbled with dungeon-crawling boardgames that require DMs, but I’ve pretty much sworn off them at this point. Descent is a decent game, for example, but I can’t imagine a scenario when I would ever play it: Since it requires a DM, I might as well just grab my copy of Dungeons & Dragons off the shelf. The full-fledged RPG is a richer and more rewarding experience in almost every way, and with the speed of OD&D character creation you can actually get the game set-up and start playing much quicker, too.)

Most recently, Munchkin Quest looked like it might fill that slot for me. It had some pacing issues, but after fixing those problems the game saw a couple months of intense use. But after that, the game started collecitng dust: The competitive aspect meant it still wasn’t quite scratching that dungeon-crawling itch. And it was too long (3-5 hours) given the relative shallowness of its gameplay. Way too many sessions ended with all of us wishing that the game would just end already.

Castle Ravenloft is pretty much at the opposite end of that spectrum: The prepackaged adventure scenarios all feel lightning fast and can easily be completed in 60 minutes or less. I’ve played it more than a dozen times already (having gotten it only a week ago). The real test, of course, will be whether or not the game endures after the first flush of excitement. But for the moment I wanted to talk about some of my first impressions.

RANDOM DUNGEON, BUT SHALLOW EXPLORATION

TACTICS, BUT NOT AS WE KNOW THEM

Although Castle Ravenloft offers a setup superficially similar to 4th Edition, this can actually be quite deceptive. As a result, I’ve seen quite a few reviews complain that Castle Ravenloft doesn’t have any tactical depth.

This is not, strictly speaking, true: Castle Ravenloft does have tactical depth; it’s just a tactical depth that looks absolutely nothing like 4th Edition’s tactics.

The primary tactical crux of Castle Ravenloft lies in the fact that heroes move by spaces but monsters by tile. (For example, a typical hero might move 5 spaces on their turn. A typical monster, on the other hand, will move 1 or 2 tiles.) Thus, the core tactics of the game revolve around managing the placement of monsters and heroes around the tile borders.

These basic tactics are complicated by the necessity to manage the monster’s control sequences; the panoply of variable hero abilities; and the random crises generated by a fair-sized chunk of the game’s encounter cards.

(The game may also suffer in the opinion of some because it’s very easy to brute-force your way through the early, introductory scenarios. It’s thus possible to completely ignore the tactics and strategy of the game and still pull out early victories, leading one to the false conclusion that the game has no strategy. In that respect it’s kind of the inverse of Settlers of Catan — a game which you think has a strategy when you first start playing it and then eventually realize is dominated completely by dumb luck.)

HORRIFIC RULEBOOK

The Castle Ravenloft rulebook is quite possibly the worst I’ve ever read. It’s poorly organized, fails to explain basic terminology, establishes other terminology which it then proceeds to use inconsistently, and then compounds all of these problems with an atrocious (lack of) organization. And given the relative simplicity of the rules, the experience of the designers, and the fact that the game is built on the back of a fairly well-established ruleset… well, it’s completely inexcusable.

It’s also disappointing that WotC failed to leverage their existing stock of high quality fantasy art to spice up the cards. The lack is particularly felt, in my opinion, when it comes to the treasure cards.

MONSTERS & SCENARIOS

The argument could certainly be made that it’s worth buying the game just for the 42 miniatures that come with it. I don’t think I’d disagree: Amazon is selling the game for $50 right now, so the price per mini comes out to about $1.20. Since that includes a Huge Dracolich, I’m pretty happy with it. (And that’s ignoring the general utility of the interlocking dungeon tiles.)

Laying that aside, I do wish the game had a bit more variety when it came to monsters. There are basically ten varieties of “grunt” in the game (zombie, skeleton, blazing skeleton, wraith, ghoul, wolf, kobold, spider, rat swarm, gargoyle) and you’ll see a lot of them all. While the varied scenarios are keeping much of the game fresh for me right now, the monsters have all become rather hum-drum.

Fortunately, this is an aspect of the game which is surprisingly easy to customize. Although game balance probably requires that you keep 10 different types of creature for each adventure, swapping them out for equally challenging monsters isn’t a problem. There’s a ton of fan-created monsters already available, and there are cheap D&D mini singles available all over the place.

Speaking of scenarios, the game comes with 12 (including two solo scenarios) and 2 more have been released through Wizard’s website. The scenarios are varied (often completely changing your strategic approach to the game) and have been easily supporting multiple play-thrus for me. For example, in this scenario:

The heroes start play having been randomly teleported to different corners of the dungeon. You have to reunite with each other and shut down a demonic summoning while the villain of the piece continues to assault the heroes with teleportetic assaults.

(In the image above you can see where we’ve set off an Alarm trap — which summons additional monsters each round — in a section of the dungeon we were subsequently teleported out of. One of the (blue) heroes has been abandoned in a dead end corridor. And both of the heroes are dreading the possibility that the villain is going to teleport them back up to where all those monsters are waiting to devour them.)

But I do wish there were more of them. When I compare the relatively anemic number of scenarios offered by Castle Ravenloft to the dozens of scenarios offered by Betrayal at House on the Hill (another game I received this Christmas which features variable scenarios of roughly equivalent complexity), I do feel this was an opportunity missed by the designers.

FINAL WORD (FOR NOW)

Castle Ravenloft is fun.

I’m enjoying it a lot, and I keep roping in more and more people who all seem to agree.

It’s not perfect, but its only egregious flaw (the atrocious rulebook) is relatively easy to overcome.

Having just reviewed my early thoughts on Munchkin Quest, I realize that initial success may not translate into a permanent or even long-term success. But as I write this I’ve already gotten more than a dozen plays out of the game, and I’ve only touched half the scenarios it shipped with. A couple scenarios have already seen 4+ plays. Even if that’s where the game tops out, I’ll still get 40+ plays out of it. That’s pretty good compared to most of the games I own.

Go to Castle Ravenloft: Rulebook Woes

A lot of my contemporaries have fond memories of the boardgames Dungeon! and HeroQuest. I was never that enamored of them. I think this is largely because I came to the games via Dungeons & Dragons rather than vice versa — so it always seemed like the poor man’s version of a fuller and richer game. There are myriad limitations to the game, of course, but the largest lack I felt was that — although the contents of a room could change — the board was largely immutable. There was no true sense of exploration.

HeroQuest, in particular, was never a game I really warmed up to. The inclusion of a gamemaster allowed for dungeons with more flavor, but also emphasized the fact that — with the same play dynamic — I could be playing an actual RPG. (Perhaps Advanced HeroQuest or Warhammer Quest would have left a different impression on me, but I’ve never even seen a copy of those games.)

The completely randomized Dungeon!, on the other hand, at least served the niche of “I want to play D&D, but I don’t have a DM”. It just didn’t scratch it very well (at least for me).

Over the years I’ve occasionally dipped back into this particular sub-genre, usually to be met with disappointment. Most recently the Order of the Stick boardgame failed to be anything more than an unbalanced, colossal bore.

Which brings me to Munchkin Quest — which finally scratches the itch I first developed twenty years ago: DM-less dungeoncrawling. It has a variable board which you discover as you explore it,

Over the past few weeks, my little circle of friends have played Munchkin Quest almost a dozen times, more than any other game. That’s probably not a pattern of usage that will last forever, but it does speak to a dynamic and interesting game.

SLOW PACE

The only real complaint we had with the game was its slow pace. Allow me to explain…

Munchkin Quest is based on the popular Munchkin card game, which I played a lot 3-4 years ago before losing my regular playing group. In Munchkin, every turn stats by opening a Door — which generally means fighting a monster. And once that monster has been defeated, play proceeds to the next player.

In Munchkin Quest, in order to facilitate the exploration of the dungeon complex, players are instead given 3 movement points (which can be increased or decreased with various pieces of equipment or other abilities in the game). When players explore into a new room (generally by spending a single movement point), they encounter a monster and fight it.

Begin to see the problem?

In Munchkin a player’s turn usually consisted of a single combat. In Munchkin Quest, on the other hand, we were usually seeing 3 or 4 combats on every player’s turn.

The first time we played the game, it took 90 minutes before the fourth (and final) player finally got to take their first turn. Even with all the out-of-turn actions that can be taken in the game, this was still hugely problematic. The long breaks between turns not only tended to result in players disengaging from the game, it also had several knock-on effects that also degraded gameplay.

For example, because of the multiple combats per turn the players tend to level up faster in Munchkin Quest than they do in Munchkin (at least in terms of the number of turns — in actual playing time, Munchkin Quest is a little slower). In our experience, a game of Munchkin Quest was over in just 3-4 turns (which would take 3-5 hours). This had a direct impact on the flow of the game (unlike Munchkin it didn’t feel like you were in a race with other players — the pace was just too slow for that).

One of the more interesting elements of the game are the wandering monster mechanics — which allow undefeated monsters to move from one room to another. But the longer, slower turns significantly lessened this dynamic of the game. Monsters rarely moved and didn’t move very far.

The longer, slower turns also created poor gameplay in other ways. During our third game, for example, it took nearly two hours for the fourth player to get their first turn. At their beginning of that turn, the first three players were already levels 6th, 8th, and 7th. (The game is won at 10th level.) The fourth player was already 2nd level, but had ended up out of position as the others had all moved away from the entrance of the dungeon. She hadn’t been able to join in the combats or treasure hauls and was seriously disadvantaged.

HOUSE RULES

In order to fix this problem, we introduced a simple set of house rules:

(1) At the beginning of the game, all players roll a single d6. The player with the highest result becomes the Quest Master. (Re-roll ties.)

(2) At the beginning of a round of play, all players draw one (1) Deus ex Munchkin card.

(3) At the beginning of a round of play or at the end of any monster movement phase, the player with the most green feet (movement points) takes a turn. In the case of ties, start at the Quest Master and go clockwise.

(4) On their turn, in addition to all the other actions allow by the rules (playing cards, combat, etc.) a play can take any ONE action which requires the use of movement points.

(5) At the end of each player’s turn, there is a monster movement.

(6) If all of the movement points at the table have been spent at the end of a monster movement, then a new round begins. Flip all of the red feet back to green and continue play.

EFFECTS

These house rules have several effects:

(1) Play looks a little more like traditional Munchkin in that, on any given turn, a player will probably only fight a single combat (at most).

(2) Players don’t have such long lapses between their turns, which also means that there will be a more active churn of resources (which helps to keep the game fresh).

(3) Monsters become more active in their movement around the board, making the dungeon feel more dynamic.

(4) As far as we can tell, no meaningful strategies from the original game are eliminated. But we have discovered that all kinds of new strategies have been created. One major area of strategy became the manipulation of remaining movement tokens (allowing you to take more turns or affect the sequence of play). Another area of strategy rose up around how players traveled together. (In the original rules we all felt like we were basically soloing the game. But the house rules allowed people to either move off by themselves; move with small partnerships; or huddle up as one big group and stick together.)

Game balance appears to be completely unaffected by the modification.

I suspect that once we get the 6-player expansion for the game, the dynamics made possible with these house rules will become even more interesting. And, in my opinion, necessary: When it takes 45-75 minutes to get to the fourth player’s first turn in a four-player game, I can only imagine that it would take 90-120 minutes toget to the sixth player’s turn in a six-player game. And that would be outrageous.