Playing Games at PAX, Part Three: Dungeon Crawl

We found the chapel, but it's FULL OF MONSTERS!

At the D&D encounter on Friday, we’d gotten a glimpse of the new D&D board game: Castle Ravenloft. Ken got a copy to take home and is planning to review it with his sons (despite our best efforts to convince him that the box was just too big to fit in his luggage). However, thanks to Andrew at Giant Fire Breathing Robot we got to try it out before PAX ended. Ravenloft uses some of the D&D battle rules, provides pre-made characters and a bunch of scenarios, and turns D&D into a board game that doesn’t require a dungeon master to play. It takes a little bit to get set up and learn the rules, but it’s not too complex once you get going. Hardcore RPG players might find it a little too simple compared to the full Dungeons & Dragons experience, but for a newbie (and board gamer) like me it was just right.

The board is a modular tile system, and you flip a new tile if you’re on an edge at the end of your turn. Each tile comes with a monster, and some have additionally an Encounter—usually something nasty, but very occasionally something that can help. Instead of initiative, each player takes a turn in order, and then activates the monster and trap cards they drew. So it does work out that every hero and monster gets an action each round, in a particular order, without having to keep track of initiative.

We played the basic starting scenario, looking for the sun icon in a chapel, and emerged triumphant although not without nearly losing our wizard once. It’s a lot of fun, and I’m considering getting a set for myself—though it wouldn’t have fit in my carry-on bag so I opted not to buy one right away. (Thanks for letting us play it through, Andrew!)

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