Anyone have a sense if this would be too complicated for a fairly bright 10-year old (playing alongside her dad)? She has played Ticket to Ride and Carcasonne and done quite well.
I’m looking to gateway her into RPGs before the wife finds out.
I haven’t played it, but I did play regular D&D with our son when he was 10, and that worked fine. I mean, his tactics were not necessarily sound (he’d do things based on how cool they were, as opposed to how mathematically advantageous they were), but it’s not that complicated, rules-wise.
Co-op games in general are great for kids, because the “coaching” issues that are a problem when you play with adults aren’t a problem at all.
I can see it working with a lot of properly motivated kids. Like Arabian Nights, it’s title I own that would probably best serve in that capacity. You might want to check out the faq that’s linked on the BGG page (plus the bonus scenarios) and the pocket rules, since the “explain what things do only when specifically needed by that scenario” thing the game does might be frustrating.
I think it would be perfect for her. The rules are easily understood, and kids possess more of a flexibility of imagination than many adults, so the scenario weirdness that LK finds frustrating would only add to the fiction of the story space.
When I reveal a crypt belonging to a villain that doesn’t have a role in the scenario I’m currently playing it just adds colour to the mood; I look around and quietly thank whoever is responsible for the cryot being currently unoccupied. Have fun :)
If people don’t mind, can I ask a Ravenloft rules question here?
I’m reading through things and looking at the monsters as I read. Do the monsters really just jump from tile to tile depending on their rules?
As an intro to D&D, CR fails miserably. I’ve a D&D veteran and I gave up after an hour trying to explain the rules to my girlfriend, who now has zero desire to play another tabletop game that has even the faintest whiff of swords.
The rules may be solid, but the way the rulebook breaks out the initial playthrough is just terrible.
Yeah, monsters move by tile (but never diagonally) and players move by square (in all directions). You are able to flee from some monsters; Gargoyles, for example, will just go to sleep if you’re more than a tile away from them.
Got to play two more games of CR today and we got our asses whupped both times. My god can this game be brutal and unforgiving. The first one was the fountain scenario where you escort Kevan around and we got trounced on by monsters before even finding the stupid fountain. The second game involved the treasure scenario and we only got to 6 treasures before caving to all the encounters being thrown at us each turn. You really have to be monster killing machines to win that one and even then I’m not sure how winnable it is.
We picked our powers carefully – anything intended for boss fights is obviously a waste, e.g. – discussed tactics extensively in tough spots, gamed monster placement where the rules give you leeway, and stopped exploration to stave off sunrise, milking an alarm trap for monsters. It was still really close. I don’t think anybody escaped with more than 3 hit points. (I’m not actually sure that stopping exploration was profitable; the game went on a long time, and we may have ended up drawing more encounters than we would’ve if we’d just gone on exploring.)
The tactical planning yielded fruit more often than not. There were several nightmare situations where the discussion went on for upwards of a minute before we hit on the “perfect” sequence of moves that got us a reasonable outcome. The mechanics are not nearly as trivial as the “contrarian review” makes them out to be.
Update: Castle Ravenloft arrived for Christmas, as Santa and I conspired to introduce my 10-year old daughter to dungeon delving. But rather than break open the box right away, and then struggle through the rules together, I spent the past week learning the game on my own.
Only this afternoon did I ask if she wanted to try it. We played the first solo adventure together, both making decisions for the single hero. She chose the dwarf cleric, and rather than advise her that a healer wasn’t ideal for soloing, I bit my tongue and went with the flow. Over the next hour I taught her about hit points and armor class, about the undead and crypts, about healing and treasure.
I had prepared myself for the possibility she would think it all very strange, or perhaps boring, that she would have no interest and I would end up only ever playing solo. But about two thirds of the way through that first excursion, it all apparently clicked for her. She looked up with wide eyes and proclaimed, “This is FUN!” We plan a two-hero excursion tomorrow.
Later she took a Ghoul miniature and showed my wife how it is gnawing on a dismembered limb. At that point I made myself scarce.
I think your standards for tactical depth are significantly different from his, and since I share his opinion, I’ll assume he’s basing it on other quasi-rpgs, wargames, or tactical battle games as I do. The kinds of titles where there are layers to the strategy, multiple less-terrible-but far from optimal choices at a variety of meaningful junctures, and an interaction with chance that still places the emphasis on player skill and choices while preserving novelty of outcome and luck. For some of us, the streamlining in Ravenloft simply cuts too many corners, and its superficial resemblance to the big daddies of simple but deep combat like Space Hulk is incredibly unfortunate in how it will be judged.
I’m glad others are enjoying it and I could see it being employed as a gateway game in the future if I took the effort to sort through the rules preemptively (but this should be a game you can play and learn much more than it is).
I’ve been playing this with some friends for about two months now, and after being a little underwhelmed by the boxed rules, we started playing with custom rules that I read on boardgamegeek, called Barkham’s System. That’s made enough of a difference in the gameplay that we’ve gotten quite addicted to playing this every couple of weeks. If you’re disappointed by the game’s rule set as-is, I’d suggest taking a look at this variant.
lol. thats pretty funny.
So I played this a few weeks back and it was kind of fun, but it must’ve taken an hour to explain the rules and get through the first round of turns or so.
In the end it reminded me of a slightly more complicated Hero Quest from my youth.
As someone who doesn’t play lots of board games I had a good time, but the guys I was playing with were all veterans of complex board games so they had the patience to learn the rules. I don’t think I could get too many other types of people involved with something like this.
So Reldan suggested we try the modified ruleset from BGG, and we did so with the “loot 12 treasures and run, nobody dies or you lose” scenario. For a while we were holding firm at about 6 treasures with both of the healing surges intact, but then everything went to hell especially after a catastrophic series of rolls by the fighter. I chose the thief in order to exploit the increased importance of traps in these rules, but never had a chance to thanks to the only trapped area being the entrance we never returned to. Other than that, we had a ranger, so in the end we would have benefited greatly from either of those (or both) being replaced by a mage or cleric. That’s probably true for many RL quests, but there you go.
It was a moderately interesting dice roller for most of the first half, then eventually petered out until we conceded a loss. The new rules definitely make it more difficult (particularly the penalty for not exploring), but I’m not sure they balance well with the scenario we played. It certainly beats the kill a small number of monsters and move on we had going before, but in the end I just don’t find the abilities of the characters relative to the decisions in combat all that interesting. Anyway, perhaps the alternate rules will be useful to someone here.