Fantasy Flight Games is on its third strike.
Although I stand firm by my assertion that FFG is the premiere publisher of high quality, professionally designed and produced games in the marketplace today, I have almost completely hated everything they have done in connection to the WARCRAFT license.
One of FFG’s first major licenses was WARCRAFT and the board game that came out of that was one of the most boring and completely uninteresting games I’ve ever had the displeasure of playing. Blobby wooden bits representing generic units didn’t help the game’s cause much. Apparently the game was produced before FFG had the capital to explode into plastic-mania. It was an eBay casualty after a handful of plays; I didn’t bother with the expansion. 2005 saw the release of their WORLD OF WARCRAFT board game, a smash hit in terms of sales but a dull thud in terms of gameplay. I thought the development system and the dice pool-based combat was as cumbersome, bulky, and sluggish as running WARCRAFT III would be on a 486SX sometime in 1992. Supposedly the expansions helped it too, but I was so put off by the base game that I never bothered to investigate further.
STARCRAFT (2007’s Cracked LCD Game of the Year) was a marked improvement for the prospects of the Blizzard/FFG partnership but rather than the DIABLO board game I’ve been hoping for, the most recent fruit of this alliance is the WORLD OF WARCRAFT ADVENTURE GAME. It’s probably no surprise that I wasn’t very excited about the game but I held out a little hope for it since Corey Koniecska is billed as the designer and his work on STARCRAFT and TIDE OF IRON has firmly cemented him as one of the more interesting designers working in the Ameritrash field today. If nothing else, I hoped that WOW:AG would at least be better than those previous WARCRAFT debacles.
The good news upfront is that the game is actually quite good, even if it is a little rough and somewhat sloppy in spots, a little unpolished and incongruous in a few ways. Early reports had the game tagged as a TALISMAN-style adventure game or as a modification of FFG’s naptime-in-a-box RUNEBOUND in WoW drag. Thank Crom the latter comparison doesn’t pan out at all, but it also isn’t really comparable to TALISMAN either. Unlike that game’s freewheeling, punch-drunk style, WOW:AG features a lot more decisions and options as well as a fairly interesting and compelling quest-based narrative structure that accurately mimics the style of gameplay the popular MMO is known for.
The base game supports two to four players (with more possible with the inevitable expansions) and plays in two to three hours. That makes it feel a little long for such a light RPG-style game, but it’s not quite as long as a larger and more complex one such as DESCENT. The rules are very simple overall and would appear to be extremely accessible, but there is so much text in the game, so many options, so many items, and so many different icons, chits, cards, encounters, and combinations of effects that it winds up seating the game in this strange limbo between a lightweight beer-and-pretzels style adventure and a heavier offering.
The process of playing the game is simple enough; it’s just that everything else makes it more complicated than it appears at first glance. Each player takes on a unique character that starts out at the lowest level (“grey”) with a small deck full of ability cards and two starter quests. Quests run the gamut from simple pick-up-and-deliver affairs to defeating a certain number of a certain type of encounters to killing another player. Completing quests earns Glory Points and eight Glory Points wins the game. Throughout the game, players can receive new quests or complete on-board objectives and “boss” encounters to further this goal. Of course, more challenging quests and objectives are harder and generally result in a lot more pain and suffering.
On a turn, a player rolls a die to determine how many spaces he or she can move along with the available energy for the turn. Energy is a resource spent on playing ability cards, generally in combat although some provide lasting buffs and special abilities. A character can only move on to spaces that match the color of their level or that of a previous level, so opening up new areas for travel is a matter of increasing experience. After moving, the player can interact with one of several icons that may be on a space (draw ability cards, use a healing potion, get a new quest, etc.) or a discovery token that may have been placed there as a trap by another player and then an encounter card is drawn from the corresponding color deck. There are some event cards, but the vast majority of encounter cards are CGI-rendered bad guys that are in dire need of stabbing or shooting.
Combat is a snap, and in a complete 180 degree turn from the previous WoW board game, it’s all done in one die roll. A player rolls two six-sided dice and comes up with a result by adding the numbers to combat ratings and comparing them to armor values. If a character or encounter has a weapon with ranged ability, then it is possible to shoot something dead before it enters the simultaneous combat resolution of melee. Ability cards, encounter effects, and special weapons can be deployed to tweak results and if the encounter is defeated then the card is flipped over to reveal the spoils of war- generally an item which may or may not be usable by the character. If it doesn’t match up with a character’s permissible item types, it can be used as one of three different types of potions- nothing you get is ever really worthless.
