Tried out Warhammer Quest: The Adventure Card Game with three of my regular board gaming buddies for the first time this evening. We challenged the first quest, which challenges the party to make it through three random locations and a quest location before getting splattered across the nearest wall, and came pretty close to completing it, but were ultimately unsuccessful. Fortunately, the penalties for losing this first quest are relatively minor, though we do miss out on the potential to grab a Legendary item in the next quest as a result.

So how does the game play? Very well, as it happens; each of the four characters gradually start to show how distinctive they are as the game progresses, with each having a clear specialism which can be further developed through the campaign progression system after each quest. The Bright Wizard is particularly good at dealing area-of-effect damage, for example, though many of her abilities require her to take damage in order to have increased effects. The Waywatcher, meanwhile, is very good at exploring, while the Dwarf Ironbreaker is good at tanking enemies and attacking two (or, later, three) at once. The Warrior Priest, meanwhile, is the aid-bot of the group, with his Aid and Rest actions both being particularly strong and benefiting both him and the party: Aid, aside from its usual effect of potentially granting a party member bonus “free” successes on a subsequent action, also heals both the Warrior Priest and the target of his Aid, while his Rest action allows him to endow a party member with the Empowered condition, which is very useful indeed — it prevents an action from being exhausted on use, as well as providing a bonus automatic success and defence on top of any results rolled.

The quest starts relatively straightforward, but gradually escalates as you progress. We cleared the last random location in a somewhat bloodied fashion, which meant we weren’t in a particularly good position to deal with the Nemesis Odious Grump in the final location, particularly as the Peril track had advanced to its final stage, granting him two bonus activations per turn on top of his usual attack. Somehow we reached a position where in the last couple of turns, two party members were dead, leaving the Waywatcher (my friend Tom) and the Warrior Priest (me) to soak up the incoming damage from a good seven or eight enemies, which, of course, wasn’t going to happen at all.

I get the impression the different quests each reward a somewhat different approach. This first quest rewards a quick, efficient exploration process, for example; the quicker you can get through the locations, the fewer enfeebling effects you’ll suffer and the less you’ll have to deal with Odious Grump being a nuisance. It’s all very well knowing that, mind, but it’s not always easy to put into practice: the game’s elegant mechanics of exhausting your actions as you use them but allowing you to refresh them through the use of your character’s otherwise weakest ability makes for some interesting strategies, particularly when you contemplate how the different party members can interact with one another by, say, Aiding one another to refresh actions ahead of time, or using other actions to exhaust enemies or cause them to retreat, taking some of the pressure off comrades.

It’s a really interesting game. The basic mechanics are very simple to understand, but the execution of a quest gives the game a surprising amount of depth that might not be immediately apparent. I’m very keen to see how the game progresses over the course of the complete five-quest campaign, and everyone in our group seemed to enjoy the experience, too. So I call that a win — particularly as it was eminently possible to get through a whole quest on a weeknight evening, which is more than can be said for more conventional board-based dungeon crawlers such as Descent: Journeys in the Dark or indeed the original Warhammer Quest.