Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft Board Game
- For 1-5 players
- Challenging quests
- Tons of replay value
- Multiple scenarios
- Cooperative game-play
An exciting D&D™ boardgame for 1–5 players.
The master of Ravenloft® is having guests for dinner—and you are invited!
Evil lurks in the towers and dungeons of Castle Ravenloft™, and only heroes of exceptional bravery can survive the horrors within. Designed for 1–5 players, this boardgame features multiple scenarios, challenging quests, and cooperative game play.
Castle Ravenloft includes the following components:
• 40 plastic heroes and monsters
Rating: 
(out of 11 reviews)
List Price: $ 64.99
Price: $ 49.49
Dungeons & dragons Castle Ravenloft Board Game Akron Comic Books
 | US $79.99 End Date: Saturday May-26-2012 13:02:44 PDT Buy It Now for only: US $79.99 Buy it now | Add to watch list |
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Castle Ravenloft Board Game. Bill Slavicsek and Mike Mearls. The master of Ravenloft is having guests for dinner—and you are invited! …
www.wizards.com/dnd/Product.aspx?x=dnd/products/
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Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft Board Game | Board Game …
Castle Ravenloft Boardgame by Bill Slavicsek, Mike Mearls and Peter Lee The master of Ravenloft is having guests for dinner – and you are invited!
boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/
POKEMON MUSTERY DUNGEON EXPLOERES OF TIME & DARKNESS GU
 | US $9.95 End Date: Thursday May-24-2012 20:45:58 PDT Buy It Now for only: US $9.95 Buy it now | Add to watch list |
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Review by Dhampire for Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft Board Game
Rating:
Caveat: I played this game at GenCon (Indianapolis; August 4 – 8, 2010) however, as of this writing, the game is not yet available. At the time it was a complete shrink-wrapped game box and package as one would purchase and I am inclined to believe that it is the finished product, pending any severe issues that may have come up during the course of people playing it at the convention.
Now, on with the review:
The components of this game are many. There are several sheets of punch tiles that comprise the game boards, character cards, status modifiers, health pips, coffins, etc. The box, itself, makes for a poor means to store all of these bits and pieces and you may consider baggies, counter trays, or other means of keeping certain tokens from intermingling between sessions to make set-up go a little more smoothly. The parts themselves are very sturdy wood-stock bits (similar to those used by Fantasy Flight Games – for those familiar with their board game offerings) and are therefore quite robust and will last you many-many years without damage or loss from being blown aside by a mild cough. There are several plastic miniatures, of excellent quality (unpainted), that are conveniently color coded by type. Undead (skeletons, zombies, etc) are white, animals are brown, spectral undead (ghosts, specters, etc) are a translucent blue, notorious villains (Strahd, werewolf, etc) are a dark grey, and the heroes are alight grey. I found this distinction to be very helpful in taking quick glances of the board and seeing how monsters were grouped versus the distribution of the PCs as well as seeing where any allies were located and obstacles between without having to examine every mini on the grid. This also makes monster placement simpler in that you are now examining a smaller pool of minis to locate rats, versus having to search though all of them at once.
The game `board’ is crafted through the course of play. Several tiles represent rooms and corridors of the castle and as you and your fellow heroes move, more of the castle is revealed. This is similar to the Avalon Hill game “The Betrayal at the House on the Hill”. Unlike that game, heroes do not need to enter the tile/room to place it but simply be near the edge of a tile. With each tile enters a new monster, and possibly an encounter based on the mark on the tile, who goes under the control of the player that drew it and it will perform certain specific actions on the monster turn of the game. Defeating monsters gains the heroes equipment and experience points. The experience points go into a community pool and can be used to level up your hero or negate certain encounters.
Aside from the rule booklet, there is also a scenario booklet. The scenario you choose will determine the victory conditions for the game. The game itself is cooperative and either the entire group wins or all of the heroes lose. Some of the scenarios seemed capable of being linked together (the scenario we played was “Hunt for Strahd, part one”) and can become part of a larger and longer game played over several weekends. I should also think that one could also invent new scenarios not included with the original book.
While the hero cards are definitely crafted with the current Dungeons and Dragons rules set in mind (4th edition) they only seem to have a 1st level and 2nd level power set. This makes the bookkeeping minor and even someone (like myself) who has not played the fourth edition of the game is capable of comprehending and understanding their hero.
I found this game quite enjoyable and useful. It serves perfectly well as a board game by itself. For those Table-Top RPG gamers, its beautifully printed tiles, tokens, and the included minis, can very easily serve as dungeon mapping for your home campaigns. This game would also do well for those parents out there looking for a way to let their children experience RPG style play without delving into the morass of character sheets, race selection, statistic generation, and all of the bulk of the RPG system. Definately worth the price of admission.
Review by M. Sayre for Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft Board Game
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I got the opportunity to play through Castle Ravenloft with a couple different groups of people at the PAX convention during the first weekend of September and was thoroughly impressed. The game is a great one-nighter for anyone who’s played Dungeons and Dragons before, and a quick and easy introduction to the role-playing game for anyone who’s never played before. Themes and some basic mechanics from the D&D game are kept in place, though greatly simplified allowing players of almost any age to jump in and have a great time. I probably wouldn’t recommend trying to play with kids under ten though, the game is a bit harder than the average board game.
The game includes a large number of unpainted miniatures that are to-scale and pulled from various past D&D minis products, so even if you’re unsure how long you and your friends will stay interested in the game, it still has great value for fleshing out any other D&D genre games you might play.
Review by Starr S Luteri-Hicks for Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft Board Game
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As an owner of the game, I discovered that Castle Ravenloft is the perfect game for when my regular pen and paper d20 group is missing a player. No Gm, no prep time, no bringing a dozen books, no pencil or note keeping, just a simple night of d20 without all the paper, dice and books spread out on the table. (Yes, the pizza and beer still takes up just as much room as it does any other night. If your group loves D20, this is a great alternative. You will learn the rules quickly, because you already know most of them, and all the prep takes is getting the stuff out of the box.
The only criticism I have with the game is that the figs are not painted and it doesn’t come with a plano storage box or card boxes (I use a card tin from Magic. I doubt that I will buy the second game that is being released in December because one is enough, and while story line is different, the point of this board game is not story as much as it is a random unknown dungeon crawl.
Review by jpdavis for Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft Board Game
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I got this game as a present for my husband since we had been talking about trying to play D & D together but just didn’t have the time or the crew to start a real, full-length adventure. He was already familiar with the series, but we were both beginners at the rules and nitty-gritty logistics.
We have really enjoyed the game thus far. We have both been surprised by how engaging the play is. Waiting to see where the next tile will lead us and what the next card will bring is a lot of fun, and I think that this introduction has whetted our appetites for dungeon crawling; we already have plans to expand our collection and have found additional adventures to use when we’ve successfully completed the enclosed adventure pack.
My one major complaint about the game is that, in condensing the rules to fit into a one-hour game, the creators may have over-simplified the rule book itself, leading to a lot of confusion for us. Since we are not learning D & D from an experienced player, we are completely reliant on the rule book to explain even simple things like which hero is attacked if a monster is equidistant from them or whether experience is shared by the group or only held by specific players. Our first game in particular was very frustrating because we had to constantly check the rules to explain a certain action or situation, and we were usually left with an incomplete picture of the right way to play. Most of the online help that we found said that, in the case of ambiguity, set your own house rules and always abide by them, but since we were new to the game, we didn’t really want to have to do that often (since we don’t know what makes a good house rule or a fair one).
All in all, we are well pleased and are getting a lot of good use out of the game already (the replay value really is incredible – I can’t imagine getting bored with this game quickly). But I recommend having an on-line guide ready if you are a beginner to the series.
Review by ROBERT J STJACQUES for Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft Board Game
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After reading many positive comments about this game and watching the “unboxing” video on the WotC web site [...] I decided that this would be the perfect introduction to DnD for my daughters (ages 11 and 12). The general consensus that I got from reading up on the game was that it plays very much like DnD 4th Edition with the role of the GM played by the careful, but brief rule system. The box contains a rule booklet (available as a PDF download from the game site), and an adventure booklet that contains several 1-page adventures, each of which customizes the rules of the game towards a specific scenario. Additionally, WotC provides a couple of supplemental adventures as downloads from the Castle Ravenloft site.
the only drawback to the game is that it requires a LOT of table space. Depending on the adventure you choose, and the direction that your players choose to explore throughout the randomly generated dungeon, you can quickly create a large, unwieldy dungeon that stretches to the very edges of your table surface (and beyond). This leads to making decisions about which directions to move based not on where you want to go, but where there is room on your table to expand.
In addition to the ever growing dungeon, each player also has to deal with the many cards required to play. Every player gets a “hero card” which is a heavy stock cardboard card that measures about 6×6 and features the essential stats for their chosen hero (cleric, rogue, ranger, fighter, or mage). Each player also gets 5-6 power cards that describe their at-will, utility, and daily powers. As players defeat monsters they acquire treasure cards, and as the game progresses they may acquire any number of monster or encounter cards. There are also 40 plastic figurines for monsters and players, and decks for treasure, encounters, and monsters that must be accessible to all players. With a game featuring 3 or more players, things can quickly devolve into a chaotic mess if you’re not careful. In our second game, which featured a villain that could cause the dungeon to randomly expand) we were forced to move the dungeon and our cards several times to make room for the expansions and keep track of the monsters that were spawning on every turn.
Despite the apparent complexity with so many game items to keep track of, both of my daughters were able to quickly pick up the basics of the d20 system and, by the mid point of our second game, were quickly and easily calculating the necessary rolls with specific attack bonuses to hit the armor class of the monsters that they had targeted. It made this father very proud to hear my 11-year-old say: “OK, so my tide of iron has a +8 to attack, and that skeleton has an armor class of 16. But I’m on the same tile as the level 2 mage, so I get a +1 bonus to my attack roll. I need to roll a 7 or higher to hit him.” As an educational tool it definitely teaches kids to quickly do simple mental arithmetic, and keep track of lots of variables (treasure, traps, encounters, hit points, and bonuses).
Overall, it’s a fantastic game that’s fun for everyone, and is a great on-ramp to more open ended DnD sets in the future. I’m very satisfied!