Lords of Waterdeep Review

  Lords of Waterdeep

Wizards of the Coast

Designed by Peter Lee and Rodney Thompson

Is this the best Ameritrash/Eurogame hybrid to date?

 I'm fortunate to have two very distinct gaming groups—one which prefers old-school American-style hobby games (hereafter: Ameritrash) and another that mostly seems interested in the latest Eurogame hotness. For a gamer who likes all types of games, this is a huge luxury, but it also means that when I buy a game, it usually is only going to see play in one group or the other. For that reason, I've had my eye out for so-called hybrid games—games that appeal to both the Ameritrasher and the Eurogamer. The latest game to get pinned with that appellation is Wizard of the Coast's Lords of Waterdeep. After getting multiple plays in with both of my game groups, I'm ready to declare it the best crossover game I've yet come across and a very good game overall.

In Lords of Waterdeep, players take on the role of masterminds attempting to gain control of one of the flagship cities in the Forgotten Realms (one of Dungeons and Dragons two main universes). The players accomplish this by recruiting heroes of four different types (cleric, fighter, wizard, and rogue) and sending them on quests that earn the player influence (victory points) as well as other benefits. The game is played over eight rounds with the player who finishes with the most influence winning.

Mechanically, Waterdeep is a worker-placement game. Players have a certain number of agents that they can place onto locations on the board each turn. Placing agents allows the player to recruit heroes, that will be used to complete quests, or gain other benefits. After each placement, a player can complete a quest if he has the heroes in the correct number and colors. Like Caylus, there is a building mechanic that allows players to build and own locations that they get rewarded for each time an agent is placed there. To me, the game feels like a mix of Agricola and Caylus, but the mechanisms should be familiar to players of any worker-placement game.

The question when a game is so familiar mechanically is “what does it do better than other games in the genre?” Why play this instead of Stone Age, Caylus, Agricola, Ora and Labora, Dungeon Lords, Troyes, Dominant Species, Age of Empires III, Antiquity, Alien Frontiers, and In the Year of the Dragon (the worker-placement games currently in the Boardgamegeek top 100 games)? Well, I haven't played all of those, but three are among my all-time favorite games (Age of Empires, Agricola, Caylus) and Waterdeep offers a few things that recommend it over (or as an alternative to) those great titles. First, it plays very quickly. The limit to eight turns makes for a quick game and the diminishing options available each placement means adding new players doesn't add much time per player. In my experience, four-player games run about an hour, three-player about forty-five minutes. With three players, I can get two games of Waterdeep in the amount of time I could play one game of Caylus (or set up one game of Dungeon Lords, but that is another issue, entirely). The other difference is what makes it a great game for my collection—the Ameritrash mechanisms included as chrome.

The two elements that separate Waterdeep from the euro worker-placement games it will be compared to are the lords and the intrigue cards. Each player is randomly dealt a lord at the start of the game. These lords have special end-game bonuses and are kept secret from the other players. This keeps the victor in doubt right up until the final count. The intrigue cards introduce a level of take-that game play that is missing from the Eurogames. My favorite intrique cards are the mandatory quests, which can be played on an opponent forcing him or her to deal with them before completing quests of their own. Other cards allow players to break certain game rules for a one-time advantage. The cards are a very Ameritrash addition that add an element of surprise but don't add enough randomness to spoil the strategy.

It is those two elements that make the game more appealing to my Ameritrash group (along with the theme, since we are also a long-time D&D group). So far, the cards haven't provided enough of a swing that my Eurogame group were put off by them. The game has been requested multiple times by both groups, making it money well spent already and potentially one of my best bang-for-the-buck purchases in years.  

Dragoncon Cosplay Gallery

 My wrap up of DragonCon is coming soon, but I thought I'd go ahead and post some of the cosplay photos as I got them uploaded.  You can find the gallery here.  My favorites were the Rollerball players, the awesome 4th Doctor (featured to the left), a Hiro Protagonist that I was unable to get a good picture of, and a Arrested Development character to be uploaded later.  Enjoy, and let us know what you think in the comments.

From the Vault: Realms

Hello everyone, its been a long time.  Its my fault, not yours.  You see, a funny thing happened after we started the website.  My wife and I started a family, and well this is the result...

 

I know, adorable.  Since he was born, I haven't put much effort into anything other than raising him, working and playing Magic.  That's literally it.  Well to fill a void here at NERDBLOGGERS I will now be trying to do a regular MAGIC update.  We will see how it goes.  My first topic is a Wizards release coming to you this FRIDAY, August 31st. 

 

Realms is the latest release in the From the Vault series that Wizards releases annually around Labor Day.  Some of the previous reprints from this series include popular staples like Mox Diamond, Sensei's Diving Top, Berserk,  Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker and Strip Mine.  Overall the sets have been well received particularly by the Commander community, for giving them "pimped" versions of cards that previously didn't have foil versions (Berserk) or have became scarce to the community (Mox Diamond).  Anticipation for Realms was at a all time high just before Gencon, with possible reprints like Karakas (a Legacy power card), Maze of Ith (popular in Commander and Legacy), and Wasteland (Legacy staple).  There was an "unboxing" video release during Gencon, here is what we got.

Cephalid Coliseum

Shivan Gorge

Maze of Ith

Dryad Arbor

Vesuva

Desert

High Market

Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth

Grove of the Burnwillows

Glaciel Chasm

Murmering Bosk

Forbidden Orchard

Boseiju, Who Shelters All

Ancient Tomb

Windbrisk Heights

 

Well, one out of three is not bad, I guess.  The set as a whole is quite underwhelming.  The only "stars" of the release are Urborg and Maze of Ith, with a couple of OK reprints thrown in like Grove of the Burnwillows and Vesuva.  Some of it is pretty much crap, I'm pretty sure Shivan Gorge didn't even see block play let alone getting play now.  Overall I give this set a C+.  It does have a few cards I want to pick up for Commander, so I will likely get it if it is available at my local game store.

 

This brings me to my final observation, availability.  Wizards releases FTV in a limited print run to stores certified to sell their product; the individual store's sales reflect the number of copies of the FTV sets they get.  My local game store, will receive 8 copies, sell them for 15 dollars over retail on a first come first serve basis.  Online retailers like Coolstuff and StarcityGames will inflate the price even more, making it pretty hard for the average player to pick up at a reasonable cost.  I personally do not like the way they do this and think WIZARDS needs to change its policy on how this set is delivered to the players.   I feel like their Commander release coming in the fall at the MSRP of $75.00 may be a test for the future of these From the Vault expansions.  Only time will tell.

Gaming with the Kids

 I haven't done a what-I've-been-playing post in a while, and, since I've been playing a lot of games with the kids, I thought I'd start there. We've mostly been playing older games from the stuffed-in-the-garage portion of my collection because I felt like the dusty old games needed a little love. Here's my take on what we've been playing.

 Sleeping Queens, Gamewright

 This light card game designed by a young girl and her family has been one of my daughter's favorite games for years, and now my three-year-old son has glommed on to it.  In the game, players use cards to "wake up" sleeping queens, each of which has a different point value and some different effects.  The game has cute art and has players form a mathematical equation in order to discard cards.  For example, a player could say, I'm discarding a four, a three, and a seven because four plus three equals seven, and draw three new cards into his or her hand.  The object is to draw a king card in order to wake up a queen.  Very cute stuff.  I'd say that Sleeping Queens is about a must-have game for families with young kids. It is a great math learning tool, has a fun theme, and has enough take-that elements to work with the kids on not taking a game too seriously. It also has enough take-that elements to cause fights, so beware if you have extremely sensitive kids. If you want a friendlier game, the negative cards like dragons and sleeping potions (and their counters—knights and magic wands) can be taken out, leaving a math-heavy game that is still a good time.

Looping Louie

  I've got the original, larger version of this infamous action game from the 90's. In it players compete to protect their chickens from a mad crop-dusting pilot who is trying to knock them from their perch (do chicken's have perches?). It is really the only battery-powered kids game that I still like playing, and it even gets some table time on adult game nights. If you can pick up the original or the new, smaller version, I recommend doing so. The differently themed Bobbin' Bumblebees is also good, if not quite as responsive. For the record, I logged 20 games of this on my play count, but I've probably played more like 100 games this month. My little boy adores “woopin wooey.”

See Loopin' Louie in action in this tv commercial from 1993:

 Snail's Pace Race, Ravensberger

 This kid's “racing” game could be on the “what German games could be converted for gambling?” that someone used to keep in the early days of BGG. In the game, players predict the order of finish of a group of six different-colored snails. Each player writes down which snail they think will come in first and which last. Players roll dice to determine which color snail moves forward until all have crossed the finish line. The players who picked the first place and/or the last place snails win. Since no player actually owns or controls a snail, the game, theoretically, won't cause your kids to break down in tears when their prediction is wrong. In my experience, however, predicting a snail to win is much like adopting it, and my youngest kid has gotten upset a few times when his snails didn't win. I have devised some rules to turn this into a grown-up gambling game, but I haven't had the chance to bring it to game night yet to see how it works.

Lionheart, Milton Bradley

 I remember being disappointed with Lionheart as a game for adults when it was released. I bought it hoping for a medieval Battle Cry and got something much lighter. I would have tossed it, but decided to hold on to it for my kids to play. It's a good thing I did. My three-year-old really enjoys it, and I don't even have to simplify the rules. It is basically a move-forward-and-attack kind of game, with the opposing armies lined up on opposite sides of a grid. The combination of the archers' range and the infantry's slow movement make ranged combat completely broken, but my son and I play it unmodified, and I balance the game by taking all infantry and giving him archers. He enjoys always winning by darkening the sky with arrows, and I get to enjoy easing my son toward being my eventual Warhammer opponent.

 How do I get these?

 All of the games mentioned here can be purchased cheaply online. Some are out of print, but all are available on Ebay. Loopin' Louie goes for pretty random prices—up to 80 bucks—but hang around and you can get the classic edition or the smaller box edition for around 20. Lionheart is also out of print, but can be found for less than 10 dollars. Sleeping Queens and Snail's Pace Race are still in print and available from multiple retail outlets.  Clicking the links in the three in-print titles will take you to Amazon where you can by the game and help support Nerdbloggers at the same time.

Nightfall: The Coldest War - Staking New Territory

I've been playing Nightfall since it first came out, and have been impressed with the low-downtime cutthroat fun delivered through it's unique chaning mechanic. In my review of the last expansion in the series, Blood Country, I had expressed some concern that the Tru-blood style settings and themes in the various Nightfall entries were becoming somewhat similar. Almost as if AEG has read my mind, I find the newest expansion The Coldest War half a world away from the humid nights of the American South, revealing instead how Nightfall has affected the cradle of vampire myth: the fridgid tundra of mother Russia.

Nightfall: The Coldest War not only opens up a refreshingly new thematic setting, it also introduces the widest variety of changes to core gameplay so far in the series. With new starting minions, moon phase cards that change the overall playfield, a couple of new mechanics that turn the game on it's head, and a set of fully illustrated wound cards, there is a ton of new content packed in the box.

Like Nightfall: Martial Law, The Coldest War can be played as a standalone game. However, where Martial Law duplicated some cards from the base set, The Coldest War presents an entirely new cast of starting characters, as well as gives all of the wound cards a graphical facelift. If one word can describe The Coldest War, it is "change".

Has this new Nightfall toppled a Berlin Wall-like barrier holding back it's thematic potential, or has it dropped like an Iron Curtain separating the new play experience from it's core audience? Let's take a look at the new changes in a bit more detail, and I'll give you my impressions.

Setting:

The biggest change to the game is the new setting. In what seems like a complete reversal of the Tru-Blood style Americana slasher, Nightfall: The Coldest War opens up an entirely new continent with plenty of supernatural lore to explore. As children, practically every one I have known has played make-believe as the stereotypical movie vampire while laying on a thick slavic accent. The minions in The Coldest War may be foreign, but their horror heritage will allow any players to comfortably assimilate the thematic flavor that theiy bring to the game. That's not to say that Nightfall has done a 180, and is delivering 1800's dracula; Not at all, it's still the same mix of urban decay Nightfall does so well - but the minions and artwork in this expansion have a bit more foreign charm than the previous settings.

I really like this detour in setting. I was getting a bit bored with the sameness of the theme in the previous expansions, and I was pleasantly surprised at how refreshing a simple change of locale made to he gameplay experience. I hope that AEG continues along this line and explores all of the shadowy nooks and crannies of the newly decaying world.

Mechanics:

Moon Phase - One of the biggest changes introduced by The Coldest War is the inclusion of Moon Phase cards. An optional addition, moon phases are represented by a small deck of cards, each card depicting a certain phase of the moon. Each moon phase adds a global effect to the game, usually helping or hindering a particular type of minion (Lycanthrope, Vampire, Ghoul, etc..). Players can choose to manipulate these cards on their turn by blindly drawing the next one from the deck or shuffling the deck. 

This gives an interesting flavor to the game, and although there is a bit of allowance for strategy when deciding when to draw vs. shuffle, it is still pretty random. It definitely spices up the game, though, and actually gives some purpose to the different minion types. Players may be divided about whether or not they like this particular mechanism, but it's optional status means that it can easily be left out if it is not your cup of tea.

Combat Effects - While the moon phase cards may seem like a big change to the game, the biggest change is actually much more subtle. Many cards in The Coldest War contain combat effects: actions that can be taken during combat by playing the card directly from the player's hand without chaining. This will probably be the most controversial aspect of this expansion. The chaining mechanic is really the core of Nightfall, but these new combat effects essentially bypass it. These effects may be likened most to "instants" in Magic the Gathering, allowing players a chance to save themselves or damage others out of turn. We have seen this mechanic before in some of the wound cards introduced in previous sets, but The Coldest War really brings the concept into the spotlight.

Personally, I like the addition. One of the apparent shortcomings of Nightfall after many plays is that it can be prone to "Kingmaking", where all of the players beat up on another - virtually forcing him out of the game. The ability to more nimbly counter these attacks takes some strides to level the playing field. Players may feel that these cards are a bit more powerful than the standard cards due to the fact that they have potent effects without having to consider their colors, but I felt that they brought an interesting, refreshing twist to the formula.

New Wound Cards - The Coldest War not only introduces new wound cards with a flexible effect that acts as a wildcard to chain any two colors together, it also includes cards from the previous games with slick new art that is much nicer than the simple bullethole graphic found in the original. Since each of the older expansions have unique wound effects, this is actually like getting bonus cards in the coldest war expansion. (Even if you are like me and snag each new expansion as it comes out, the new art is worthwhile in and of itself.)

New Starting Decks - While every full expansion up until The Coldest War has included a set of starting characters, they have been the same familiar faces in each set. With the setting change in The Coldest War comes a new cast of starting characters as well, which is a breath of fresh air. I'm not sure that these new characters were built with beginners in mind though, as their effects and powers are a bit more nuanced than the basic set, with one or two that may seem downright weaker at first glance. As a set though, these new starting characters are balanced and play differently enough to be worth exploration. I am already starting to notice changes in my strategies while utilizing these new starting cards.

Conclusion:

The Coldest War definitely has a new feel to it, and plays much differently than the previous games. The combat effects really change things up and create a faster, more aggressive, and immediate game. I can't help but feel that Coldest War brings a bit more "Magic the Gathering" flavor to Nightfall, by adding more complicated interactions that require a new type of thinking about how, and where cards can be utilized.

While this new mechanism seems to address kingmaking a bit, it also makes the game much more cutthroat, and changes its nature significantly. If you want more of a CCG feel in your Nightfall, then this will be an excellent addition, but those who feel that Nightfall is already too chaotic may want to steer clear. I enjoy the new mechanics, and feel that they help revive a game that was starting to falter with expansions that were beginning to feel too similar.

Some players may feel that the optional Moon Phase cards add a bit too much randomness to the game as well, but I really enjoy that the moon phases give more purpose to the different creature types found in the decks, delivering an added dimension of strategy to the card draft process. I may not use Moon Phases in every game I play, but the ability to add them on a whim is a welcome inclusion.

I think that Nightfall was really due for a refreshing change, and The Coldest War really delivers. There is enough newness here to last for quite a while. That being said, The Coldest War may not work very well as an introduction to Nighfall - the new mechanics all bend the basic core of the gameplay, and while exciting for the veteran player, this may seem aimless and without focus to the beginner. If you are looking to dip your toes into the Nightfall universe for the first time, the base game is still the best entrypoint.

All in all, Nightfall: The Coldest War is a solid entry for the veteran Nightfall player and should scratch the itch for those who are looking for something to spice up their gameplay - just be aware that this changes the nature of Nightfall quite a bit, and may require a paradigm shift in strategies that are used to succeed.