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Beyond this, the main doors of Castle Ravenloft stand open, a rich warm light spilling into the courtyard. A rotting wooden portcullis, green with growth, hangs in the entry tunnel. From atop the high strong walls, stone gargoyles stare at you from hollow sockets and grin hideously. The chains of the drawbridge creak in the wind, their rust-eaten iron straining with the weight. A lowered drawbridge spans the chasm, leading to an arched entrance to the castle courtyard. Beyond these, a wide chasm gapes, disappearing into the deep fog below. Crumbling towers of stone keep a silent watch over the approach. It’s about picturing the towering castle beneath the stormy night sky and imagining how a fantasy adventurer might react to the challenges that scene presents.ĭungeon Master (DM): After passing through the craggy peaks, the road takes a sudden turn to the east and Castle Ravenloft towers before you. Like those games, D&D is driven by imagination. It shares elements with childhood games of make-believe. My recommendation to you is find a copy of it that you can try out and play it through - you'll probably like it, but then never play it again.The Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game is about storytelling in worlds of swords and sorcery. If I had played it once, it probably would have gotten in the 8.5-9.0 range, but when a game is only fun to play through once and has an MSRP of $60, it is hard for me to give it a great score. With that all said, I have to give Ravenloft an overall score of 6.0/10. This is not the case in Ravenloft, and it feels more like deja vu than anything else. In most cooperative games when the players are going up against the board there is an element of change each time through and so you feel like you are playing a different game (though similar). It plays essentially the exact same way the 2nd time through because all of the monsters are the same until you get to whatever the final monster or challenge is (this part does vary based on scenario). Once you have played the game, you should be happy and put the game back down and move on. Ravenloft really only needs to be played once. This leads to the biggest drawback for Castle Ravenloft. The game was so much fun that we immediately decided that we needed to play again using a different scenario. There were traps that we encountered, monsters that we had to kill, and the game was very engaging and challenging.
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I thought that the dungeon crawling experience went well, and I enjoyed the cooperative nature of the game. When playing Ravenloft, I was very impressed. You lose by getting your character killed off (you have a few revives but once you're out, you're out). Specifically, you have to do all of these things before your character dies off and, true to form, this is the case with Castle Ravenloft. I don't know what all the scenarios are in Ravenloft as I only played a couple, but I know that there are several that can be played through. The main difference is that the scenario is setup for you so that you don't need a Dungeon Master, and you also don't have to worry about keeping up with stat sheets, etc, as the game takes care of a lot of the paper & pencil part of D&D.Īs with any role playing game, in Ravenloft you represent a hero that is trying to save the world, kill the evil bad guy, rescue a princess, get piles of treasure, etc. I thought this game looked pretty neat and I was excited when I got to play it a couple of times.Ĭastle Ravenloft is a dungeon crawler that uses the Dungeons & Dragons 4.0 rules and can be played with 1-5 players. This review will be of Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft Board Game (I ran out of catchy intro's).