Waterdeep: The Dungeon of the Mad Mage

Where stupid design decisions begin creeping in.

The next game after Tomb of Annihilation, this sees your cooperative party of up to five intrepid adventurers tackle the infamous Undermountain, which is home to the mad mage Halaster Blackcloak and his monstrous apprentices. This time the game adds more spell wielding foes as well as elder rune cards that can either have a bane or boon, depending on the situation. Some of these are rather minor, offering one free reroll or simply stunning you. Others are noticeably stronger - like being unable to heal yourself for the rest of the adventure!

Also, it's as if the designers looked at the previous game and thought "this one needs to be harder" - a trap many stupid designers seem to always fall into. Monsters are more dangerous in many ways. Some don't just hurt you, they "weaken" you meaning you can't get that HP back. Others, like the intellect devourers only stun you if they can hit, but if they hit a stunned person they do 5 points of damage. For comparison your tanks will have 12 HP at most. Oh, and there are thugs later who upon death spawn into those intellect devourers. There's a small chance three of them spawn simultaneously as well.

Bring Cormac!

Unable to think of clever boss mechanics, they also just decided to make them hit point sponges - the most stupid and boring way to upgrade a boss. In exchange, you can actually reach level 4 in this game, two levels higher than any before! Of course, my party finished all 13 adventures on level 2 as per usual.

The worst sin however, is misprints, one especially significant one on the sorcerer's card. While we still finished and enjoyed this outing, we all agreed it is the weakest of the existing set, as such I rate it 3 death knights out of 5. Only recommended if you've played and enjoyed all the others. If not, Tomb of Annihilation currently holds my highest score. For those who prefer competitive board games, check out Lords of Waterdeep instead.

Insight: It is almost mandatory to have a cleric with the "Path to the Grave" daily power ready, and get someone that anti-stun ring or you will have a bad time.

The Witching Hour (Witcher Adventure Game / Coop)

It's a vast improvement.

The Witcher: Adventure Game has long been at or near the bottom of my favorite games list, mainly because of the dull game play mechanics combined with the dumb idea of making the game PvP.

That doesn't really fit the group of characters provided, since they are almost always allies, and more importantly - a good PvP game makes you care when your opponent is taking action. See El Grande or Lords of Waterdeep.

Great components deserved another picture!

In the base game you can and will often zone out while other players take their turn because its rare that anything they do will really affect you.

Not willing to let the investment, or the nice components go to waste, I decided to try out The Witching Hour fan mod variant, which adds a page of rules for a coop variant to the game and it is a significant improvement.

Chasing the fast moving enemy token on the victory track adds tension, and suddenly you are trying to coordinate with others to chase it down. As far as I'm concerned, this is a must have add-on and actually gives this game a chance of making it back to the regular gaming table.

Lords of Waterdeep VS El Grande

Who is the Grandest Lord?

In the battle between these two board games the similarities are plenty: both are competitive, both require tactics, both play the same number of players, both take a similar amount of time to play, and both have some really nice components and mechanics. Their methods vary though as El Grande is pure territory control while Waterdeep uses worker placement in a bid to finish more quests than your opponents.

En garde!

For me, the deciding factor is the "long game". El Grande's action cards (base game and Grand Inquisitor and Colonies anyway) are cool, but are quite limiting as you can't really plan too far ahead - meaning at best you only need to worry about this round and maybe the next.

In Waterdeep the long game is alive and well, where you can pull of Batman Gambits and must constantly be revising your strategy as people block your plans intentionally or not. It's because of this that Lords of Waterdeep is the winner in this match up, which is sad because I tend to always lose Lords of Waterdeep (my wife is too good), while I tend to always win El Grande. ;p

Today I Smiled: Too Much of a Good Thing?

My little cousin stayed over for a night of boardgames and did we go through a whole bunch! Won two rounds of Pandemic (easiest level then easiest with mutation), lost two rounds of veteran level Flash Point: Fire Rescue, lost one and won one novice round of Forbidden Desert, and surprisingly won two games of Eldritch Horror, without any detective casualties, against Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth!

We then moved onto more competitive rounds of regular playing cards and a game my cousin calls "Chinese". She won 4 out of 5 of those, followed by me winning two rounds of Bluff and finishing off with two games of Lords of Waterdeep where once again my wife proved she was the ultimate Lady of Waterdeep winning both games by a huge margin. As you can imagine a little bit of board game fatigue has since followed. :P

I've also finally gone through all the "vigilance quests" (just shy of 200, counting repetitions) introduced in Neverwinter Online's Elemental Evil and am now level 70 on my rogue. At least you get a lot of good gear for going through all of that - an artifact main hand and off hand weapon to boot! I normally put video links at this point, so for those who don't play or haven't reached any of the dragons, here's a clip taken by my brother. That's me with the knives and the weird helmet! Or, if that doesn't interest you - have a trailer to Batman vs Superman instead. :D

Hope you all have a great day!

Crysis Management

I somehow managed to get Crysis: Warhead running on my PC (after years of it sitting on my to-play list) and was quite impressed with the fluid, albeit railroaded, gameplay. To be honest though, I found it on the easy side, despite playing on the hardest mode. I guess all that practice with the L4D2 zombies improved me as I don't recall the original game being so easy. That said the final boss still took me a few tries to beat! The rest of my games have been taking a backburn though as they are venturing into the realms of "my compy can't handle them" anymore. It's ok, hopefully sometime this week I'll it will be getting an upgrade.

Lords of Waterdeep
 
Hasn't stopped me from playing my other games though - board games! Primarily been playing "Lords of Waterdeep", a really clever and competitive game in a D&D with a focus of management and manipulation. So far I've fared better (won) in bigger groups but when it's one on one I'm usually on the losing end. The premise of trying to gain the most influence on the city through completing quests is pretty simple and very elegantly done. The lack of dice rolling and an 8 turn limit also makes it go pretty quick (in comparison to Arkham Horror at least) but it's the strategy that may take time (as that's where all the fun is). Lastly it's very fast to get into and quite quick to setup which are two more positives, I just wish there was a cooperative mode where you had to fight the board but that would be kinda hard to do I think.

The other one I got to play recently was "Settlers of Catan" which I totally got thrashed in. Still fun, but I feel that you are often at the mercy of the dice. Comparatively speaking I like Waterdeep more because there's less luck involved and you never have turns where you do nothing (which was a common occurence in Catan if the dice gods didn't favour your villages). Note that you still need -some- luck in Waterdeep to be able to get the quests you need but other than that it's all on you.