Dungeons & Dragons Board Game - Another HeroQuest?

By jbuergel
Most of the truly difficult decisions in the game will be equipment related, and inventory management is significant. I like it, but some might feel confined by the fairly low carrying capacities. Traps also bear mentioning. ...

When I heard that there was a new dungeon crawler that had been put out in Europe but not here in the States, I made sure to put it on my list of things to pick up when I was there a couple years back. I managed to track down a copy in Oxford along with the first expansion, and later picked up the second expansion from Paizo. I wasn't sure exactly what to expect, really, other than it was likely to be fairly simple as a Parker Brothers game. But I'll buy essentially any dungeon crawling game, and it's a decent entry, although it's certainly not groundbreaking.

The Presentation

The D&D Adventure Board Game (D&D through the rest of these rules) comes in a largish box featuring a custom molded plastic tray featuring fake stone texture. Swanky! It's a pretty nice production, including 40 miniatures of OK quality - not as nice as those with Descent or the Games Workshop games, about on par with HeroQuest - 5 double-sided 11x11 game boards, several decks of cards (the usual item and monster cards along with some initiative cards), an assortment of card stock tokens featuring some stand-up terrain (pillars and trees), doors that lay flat and various status markers and 10 special dice. The special dice are quite nice, with painted grooves and clear icons. The game also includes the usual rule book and adventure book, the latter feature 11 adventures across three player levels. It's a nice production, and for the money I paid for it, quite a good value. In the States, where you have to pay to import it (if you can find it at all), the cost starts climbing up pretty high. There aren't really any areas of the production I can point to as being poor, the only thing I'd point out is that the miniatures are not extremely detailed. This doesn't really bother me much, but skilled miniature painters might get frustrated.

The Basics

As with its closest relative, HeroQuest, the players always play the same four heroes, so if you play with fewer than four hero players, somebody will have to double up. Someone must also play the GM, here called the Dungeon Master in grand D&D tradition. The game tries its best to stick to D&D terminology, which is nice, I suppose, even if the game has nothing to do with D20 mechanics. The four characters are familiar to anyone who has read the examples in the RPG books: Regdar the human fighter, Lidda the halfling rogue, Jozan the human cleric and Mialee the elven wizard. Each character is represented by a large player card, which has all their stats and a little piece of background printed on it. Around the edge of the card, it also lists your limits on equipment, which is handy, and they also differ amongst the characters, which is interesting. Each character has movement allowance, armor class, carrying capacity and hit points. The spell casters also have spell points.

The players are placed onto the game board, which is dictated by the particular adventure, and someone is nominated to open the door. Whenever a door is opened, the GM deals out the initiative cards, one to each hero and one to themselves. The GM also lays out the revealed room. The players and GM now take their turns in order of the initiative cards, which will change each time a door is opened. By having the GM go possibly in the middle of the heroes, it lends a little bit of uncertainty to how things will go, since the initiative cards are not revealed until it is your turn to take an action (of course, the surprise only lasts for one round). A player turn permits the player to take two actions with their hero, in any order: movement, opening a door, combat, opening a chest, changing an item or taking a special action (casting spells, disarming traps, turning undead, etc). Allowing the players to take any two actions gives them a fair bit of flexibility. Combat is simple, with the player just rolling the dice listed on their character card, totalling up the swords and subtracting the target's armor. The human fighter gets a bonus to his combat, but that's about it.

Spell casting is pretty simple as well. The characters start with certain spells, and they can acquire new spells during their adventure. However, they can only have a limited number equipped and available for use at any time. Each spell cast costs a certain number of spell points, and the spell points only come back when using particular weapons (and rolling particular results). It can be a slow process, regaining spell points, so you do find yourself being careful about when it's right to cast them. You also find yourself really considering whether to equip a more powerful (but more expensive) spell. It's a simple system, but it works well, and the spell points do keep the powerful spells in check.

Monsters, during the GM turn, get one move and one attack. They cannot take a double attack, so they're more limited than the players. Their attacks work the same basic way, and they can make decent headway against the heroes, even the weaker monsters. The game does a nice job of making sure the heroes never feel invulnerable. The other well done part of the basics is that carrying capacities are very limited. When you find new gear, you have to decide if anybody wants it, and frequently it's not an obvious choice. That weapon might have a good power attack, but it's risky, or you could go with this one which will be more consistent but less powerful on average. That spell is more powerful, but it's expensive, so maybe you're better off sticking with the cheap spell. And so on. Most of the truly difficult decisions in the game will be equipment related, and inventory management is significant. I like it, but some might feel confined by the fairly low carrying capacities.

Traps also bear mentioning. Traps can pop up all over the place, and the rogue can find and disarm them. When combat is going on, players might blunder into traps, but once combat is over, there's no time pressure to get them moving. A careful party will therefore be very cautious and investigate for traps carefully. They can get a result that stops them from searching further, forcing another character to have to swap in. It's all kind of tedious, really. I would sometimes just tell the players where the traps were after combat is over, rather than watch them shuffle characters around and search really carefully. Of course, sometimes I'd let them go through the process, because every now and again they'd screw it up and fall in a pit, which is always fun.

The Campaign

Unlike HeroQuest, characters do improve in this game. There are three player levels available, which give the characters more hit points, spell points and access to better loot and spells. You can also start out a character at levels two or three if you need a replacement for a dead character or want to start the campaign in the middle. You also carry over your treasures from adventure to adventure. It's a very simple system, but it is nice that you'll see different stuff as things move along, and it does give some continuity to things. I like this campaign system better than the one in HeroQuest, where you only carry over treasure.

The Good

It's a decent production, and the rules are simple and straightforward. The initiative card mechanic is interesting, the spell system gives good results with a surprising amount of balance, and the encumbrance rules are very effective for forcing some difficult decisions. The players are usually in actual danger even from the weak monsters, and it's nice that they threw in a campaign system, even in a simple way. The geomorphic board provides a decent number of layouts for the dungeon. The action system has reasonable flexibility, and the special actions for each character give good differentiation.

The Bad

The combat system is very basic, and is probably the weakest part of the system. Beyond the decision of what to carry and what spells to cast, the decision on how to fight monsters is pretty obvious. Dealing with traps is tedious, and the campaign runs out of steam fairly quickly and doesn't have a lot of replay value. It's hard to find here in the States, although that's more of a local problem.

A Word about Expansions

There have been two boxed expansions published for this game, one a winter adventures and one an outdoors one. Each comes with a new character (the barbarian and druid, respectively), some new board sections, monster, cards and a new campaign. Both are pretty well done, and good expansions to get if you like the base game, and they'll extend your enjoyment of the game.

Conclusion

In terms of complexity, this is very much like HeroQuest. The mechanics are similarly simple, and they work well at creating a good hack-and-slash type of environment. There are some nice touches in the system, and overall I'd say there are probably a few more interesting decisions going on here than there are in HeroQuest. It's also probably more challenging for the players, meaning it's probably a better choice for slightly older gamers than HeroQuest (although it's still going to appeal more to younger folks than to older folks). Like that game, though, you have to approach D&D on its own terms. It's not a sophisticated game with a lot of agonizing decisions. It's not really a competitive game, like Descent, where the GM is really out to get you. If you're looking for a simple, cooperative dungeon crawler, and desire atmosphere and hacking more than a really advanced game system, this is a good choice. I'd say that purely on the contents of the basic boxes, I like D&D slightly more as a game than HeroQuest, nostalgia for the latter (and awesome furniture!) notwithstanding. But, that leaves out the very strong HeroQuest community online. If you had to pick only one, HeroQuest is probably a better choice, given the wealth of supporting material you can find online. If you're in the mood for something similar but different, it's a nice change of pace, and if for some reason you run across D&D and not HeroQuest, you won't regret D&D as an alternative. A good, solid, simple dungeon crawler.