Welcome to Castle Ravenloft

Wizards of the Coast were kind enough to supply me with a review copy of Castle Ravenloft. Got to unbox it on Monday, much to the delight of my 4-year old daughter who absolutely loved the figures and is itching to help me play when we go away on holiday. But could I wait that long? Could I hell! So at lunchtime today I played two impromptu session of the introductory solo scenario in the back of my car. This has your adventurer racing to try and find the stairs out of the crypt before Strahd wakes up and starts pursuing them through the dungeon.

My first choice was a human ranger - not a great choice for solo play as it turns out. The first monster she found was a kobold Skirmisher which she dispatched with ease since one of her abilities to to inflict a single point of damage without a dice roll. And a welcome ability it was too since she couldn't roll a decent dice for toffee. The second tile she ran into a rather more scary blazing skeleton which she missed, and then she ran into a succession of traps that she failed to disarm and which kept slowing her down and eating away at her hit points and since disarm attempts happen in lieu of attacks, the result was that each turn a new creature was added to a veritable horde of monsters following her round the board that she couldn't make a dent in due to trying - and failing - to deal with all those traps. Good thing she's fast else she wouldn't have lasted as long as she did, which wasn't very long at all. When she was on her last legs she drew a "burst of speed" card which allowed her to leg it all the way to the opposite side of the dungeon and get away from her pursuers and gain some breathing space, only to draw a new tile with ... another blazing skeleton which promptly killed her.

My second attempt was with the dragonborn fighter, who is a rather tougher proposition entirely and spent his first few tiles merrily ploughing through monster after monster with little ill-effect. That was until he ran into something as puny as a giant spider which started flinging webs at him, slowing him down, with the result he couldn't explore as fast and had to draw yet more of the nasty encounter cards that have terrible events and traps on them. After a hairy couple of tiles he took care of the arachnid and carried on, somewhat the worse for wear but at least having managed to gain 2nd level.  I was 2 tiles from the bottom of the stack and victory when Strahd woke up but he was miles behind me and I thought I'd have an easy win on my hand. But then I woke a Wraith, one the nastiest base monster in the game, who did me some serious damage after I'd failed to kill him. Still, I drew the next tile confidently, only to get a terrible event which teleported the character and the wraith to the tile furthest from his current location - which was right next to the newly awakened Strahd! The two monsters proceeded to give me a horrific mauling, although I managed to take down the Wraith in exchange. That just left me with 1 tile to explore and the hardest vampire in the history of D&D to deal with so I did the obvious thing and just ran for it. Strahd tossed a fireball at my rapidly disappearing arse which, if I could avoid it, would leave me clear to get up the stairs and out into the daylight. Sadly I took it right on the back of the head leading to a second loss in a row.

The sessions were really fun and back-to-back they took less than an hour to play including a couple of rules checks. There seem to be a couple of rules ambiguities for a relatively simple game but I just worked round them in what seemed to be the most obvious manner. The game did present me with a couple of real tactical conundrums during my session but there's plenty left to chance too: overall the game seems to strike a good balance between strategy and luck for a short, rules-light game and it's certainly an exciting, atmospheric and entertaining experience.

This is just an initial overview though - you'll get a few review in a couple of weeks.