The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Because really, anything with the word “Raven” in it is reason enough to cue Raphael the Raven’s music.

We continued our tradition of playing the board games I got on Christmas on New Year’s Eve, and busted open my copy of Castle Ravenloft. This game has the most giant box I have ever seen, and is supposedly filled with Dungeon-crawl-y goodness.

BUT WAS IT?
Hell yes it was.

The game is basically 4th Edition DnD Lite. Many parts are streamlined. For instance, everyone just has an AC, instead of many different defenses, and HP values for enemies are more in the 1 to 2 HP range. The basic combat, however, is DnD. You have a level 1 hero that you get to pick powers for, which are very close to the basic power choices in the Player’s Handbook. For example, my Fighter that I played still had Cleave as an at-will, which was very similar to how Cleave works in actual DnD, just without damage rolls. Enemies and traps and things were basically defeated quickly with a good strategy, or utterly destroyed the party. It was quick, tactical, and fun, and I felt like everyone enjoyed it a lot.
When we play DnD, one of the problems everyone has is how slow the combat moves. It’s hard to design encounters which are dynamic, interesting, difficult, and fair. Either everyone is a pushover, or you end up in a long, drawn-out slog fest where you’re beating against an enemy’s high HP, even though he doesn’t pose a lot of threat. This game basically didn’t have that: every fight was perfectly tuned because the designers knew what the possible party combinations were. It was difficult, but intense and fast-paced. It was just what my group wanted.

Other than the combat, you have a book of scenarios with different quests to do in the randomly generated dungeon. This is also something my friends like, so that’s a plus. Whenever you move to the edge of a tile, you “explore” and draw a new tile, putting a monster on it. Otherwise, you draw an “encounter” card, which could be a trap, a global effect, a sneak attack against your hero, or even something sort of positive sometimes. Some of those encounter cards are kind of a bitch, but they end up working really well.

Our initial outing was pretty screwed. Cara drew a “Spear Gauntlet” trap very early on, and we failed to disarm it several times. That thing is a total bitch, and it left us all hurting on HP. Spaeth was the Cleric, but he only had one use of Healing Word, and could otherwise only heal in 1 HP increments, which was useful, but since we had lost so much life, he couldn’t get us stabilized. We eventually went down to some fire-flinging skeletons.

Still, I cannot wait to play the game again. It really didn’t take that long to play, which is nice, and the gameplay was super-fun. I look forward to really figuring it out and seeing if we don’t do better next time!