Into the Deep

I recently got to play the board game Lords of Waterdeep. It's themed in the Forgotten Realms universe (one of the established worlds of Dungeons & Dragons). I feel like I've seen other D&D board games come and go over the years, and my casual assessment of them is that they've been aimed generally at the Talisman crowd. The games come with loads of bits, take hours and hours to play, and are fine if you don't mind that luck overwhelms any element of strategy present. Lord of Waterdeep seemed to be trying for a different audience, the strategic "Euro game" crowd. But in my opinion, the game missed the mark.

Lords of Waterdeep is a worker placement, resource gathering game. Players have a series of Quest cards (and can acquire more during play). Each quest requires certain resources in certain quantities. When completed, the quests provide a variety of rewards, and a certain number of victory points (scaled to the difficulty in completing the quest). Players compete to get the resources needed for their quests by placing workers onto the spaces of a large game board. As in some other games (Caylus comes to mind, in particular), new spaces with new options are added throughout the game, and can be "owned" by individual players -- who reap rewards when their opponents use them.

Despite being dressed up in the trappings of a Euro game, Lords of Waterdeep still felt to me like it bore the hallmark of those other D&D games: luck overwhelmed the strategy. This wasn't in a readily obvious way, as the game did dispense with overtly random elements like dice to establish its strategy game credentials.

The problem for me was those quest cards. Set aside the question of whether or not the designers properly balanced each quest's difficulty with its payoff. (Though I'm rather doubtful they did.) Quests had a rather wide range of difficulties, from almost trivially easy to supremely difficult. Most quests provided some sort of ongoing benefit to the player completing them. This effectively put a ladder-like structure in place. A player really needed to finish an easy quest (or quests) early to enable the rewards that would allow an intermediate quest. That in turn would grease the skids for the difficult quests.

But all these quests were shuffled together in a single deck, with each player randomly being dealt two to start the game. Some players would randomly receive great building blocks to begin their game, while others would be hamstrung with impossible tasks that stymied early progress. Players in the latter camp could use game mechanics to draw new quests, of course, but this would put them actions behind the players with luckier draws -- and put them into direct competition with other stymied opponents, thus providing even more advantage to the fortunate.

There are lots of other Euro games with similar kinds of "objective" cards -- Louis XIV and Yedo are two that come to mind. The key difference is that in those games, the cards are divided into separate decks of different difficulties. In my opinion, Lords of Waterdeep is critically flawed for not doing the same thing. I suppose players could easily implement a house rule to do this (if they could agree on which cards belong in which decks), but I personally feel like I'd rather just play one of those other games that got it right, rather than try to modify this game.

It's possible I'm judging the game too harshly from a single playthrough. But it was a rather unpleasant playthrough where I felt behind the curve from square one. (And from what I could tell, I wasn't the only player in that position.) The components are good, and the overall concept decent enough, but I don't really see myself trying Lords of Waterdeep again. I give it a C-.