Haven’t added to my board game collection for a while, so I treated myself to a copy of Dungeons & Dragons board game Lords of Waterdeep and its expansion Scoundrels of Skullport.
For those unfamiliar, Lords of Waterdeep eschews the dungeon-crawling of the other Dungeons & Dragons games available at present in favour of a competitive strategy game where players challenge one another to score as many points as possible through completing quests.
At heart, Lords of Waterdeep is a worker-placement game somewhat akin to Uwe Rosenberg’s well-respected Agricola. Each round, each player has a number of actions to take (here represented by “agents” that you place in buildings around a map of the city of Waterdeep) that allow you to do various things: collect resources (here in the form of money and adventurers of various classes), pick up quests for later completion, build new buildings to add new action spaces to the board, or play “Intrigue” cards to either benefit yourself or directly screw over your opponents.
It’s this latter aspect in particular that means I like Lords of Waterdeep quite a bit more than Agricola — there’s a lot more direct player interaction thanks to the “attack” cards that usually allow you to directly impact another player’s collection of money and/or adventurers, but even without direct conflict I find the game tends to put people on a much more even playing field than Agricola’s enormous decks of cards tend to.
For those less familiar with Agricola, the full version of the game gives you a hand of “Occupation” and “Minor Improvement” cards at the start of the game; our gaming group likes to distribute these through draft, a process which gives an immediate advantage to those who have played the game more and learned the decks more thoroughly. Lords of Waterdeep eschews this system in favour of a combination of things: the constructible buildings, which provide a benefit to their “owner” any time another player takes them, and the quest cards you’re completing throughout the course of the game. Most of the time, these simply award victory points to help determine a winner, but a number of them are dubbed “Plot Quests” and provide ongoing benefits over the course of the game. In other words, you very much “earn” these benefits through play rather than being dealt or drafted them at the start of the game and then simply having to find the perfect moment to play them, and when they become available — all available quests are public knowledge — everyone has a fair crack at them.
Lords of Waterdeep also isn’t as stressful as Agricola in that there’s no race to feed your family (or equivalent) every few turns; in other words, the game is more about earning victory points rather than attempting to avoid losing them. That is, until you add the Skullport module from the Scoundrels of Skullport expansion, which provides various new action spaces and quests that net you “corruption”, which is worth a variable amount of negative points at the end of the game according to how much corruption is in circulation around the table.
There’s still an element of scarcity and a scramble for resources, however, particularly if you indulge in the Undermountain module of the Scoundrels of Skullport expansion, which, besides adding a few new action spaces, focuses on high-value quests that require a huge amount of resources to complete successfully. You need to quickly prioritise which quests are worth working on and which are not — taking into account the fact that your secret character card provides you with a bonus at the end of the game according to the types of quest you completed — and hope, pray that your opponents don’t hit you with a Mandatory Quest card: a quest that you have to complete before any others, which is typically very low-value and low-requirement, designed simply to get in your way and waste a turn or two.
I haven’t yet had the chance to try the Scoundrels of Skullport expansion, but I’m looking forward to breaking it out in the near future. We had a game of the base game a short while ago and enjoyed it, and it inspired me to pick up my own copy. I’m looking forward to playing again.
Oh, and if you’re curious, there’s a good version available for iOS.
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