Lording it over the City of Splendor: Reviewing WotC’s Lords of Waterdeep
Yesterday, two friends and I cracked open Wizard’s of the Coast’s newest D&D inspired board game, Lords of Waterdeep. I have fond memories of kicking around Waterdeep in my 2nd edition days, so I was eager to see what WotC had made of the “City of Splendors.”
The production value of the game is first rate: brightly colored wooden pieces, large board with an old-fashioned map of the city, 4th edition-style illustrations on the cards and throughout the rule book, and a cleverly-designed compartmentalized box with a place for everything and everything in its place (hint: do not store this game vertically). All the pieces are sturdy and will hold up well to repeated play. In fact, during our first game I spilt lemonade over the board but – with immediate action – all the pieces were saved and seem no worse for the dousing.
Lords of Waterdeep is a European-style game of resource management with simple and fast mechanics. The rules are easy to learn and various strategies immediately suggest themselves. At the beginning of the game each player chooses a faction (Harpers, City Watch, etc.) and is randomly dealt a lord of Waterdeep. These rulers, through a limited number of agents, compete for control of the city by scoring Victory Points. Whichever lord has the most Victory Points after 8 rounds wins the game. Each round players take turns placing agents throughout the city to acquire quests, gather resources, or plot intrigue against the other lords. Quests come in several different flavors (warfare, commerce, etc.) and each lord has an affinity for two flavors. Quests are the primary way of gaining Victory Points and require various resources in the form of adventurers and gold. Intrigue is mostly in the form of Intrigue cards, which allow players to steal resources from each other, slow their opponents down, or bend the rules in their favor. A track around the outside of the board tracks each player’s VPs and adds a tension-filled race aspect to the game as players leap-frog each other, gaining and losing the lead.
The setting of the game was fun and we all enjoyed seeing familiar places and NPCs popping up again. I was particularly amused that adventurers, like the ones so earnestly played by me and my friends so many years ago, were now lowly resources, represented by faceless colored blocks, to be collected, counted, and discarded. It shed a new light on all those old adventures and was a bit like playing Paranoia: High Programmers after years of playing Paranoia: Troubleshooters.
While we enjoyed the game and liked the setting, we all felt Lords of Waterdeep does not quite live up to its potential. More could have been done to evoke a feeling of D&D intrigue. The rules were a little too simple and missed some opportunities. For example, the Lords, while having different flavor-text, are almost identical in play, differing only in which Quest types garner them the most Victory Points. Worse yet, the factions, which represent diverse magical and political groups within the city, have absolutely no effect on the game. The best board games use their rules to reinforce their themes (like Last Night on Earth’s harrowing move-or-search rule), but the mechanics of Lords of Waterdeep could just as easily describe a game about clowns competing to build the craziest circus.
That’s not to say it isn’t a good game, it is. But it could be a great game. Clearly it’s time for the gamer’s secret weapon – house rules! It would be easy to give special abilities to each Lord and each faction. These then could be mixed-and-matched, like Small World’s race + description combos. This would not only drastically increase the game’s re-playability value, but also tie the game’s rules closer to its theme. The adventurers, too, could be further delineated – perhaps rogues could steal gold while priests could convert other adventurers into priests. The game offers a lot of possibilities and with a little tweaking I think Lords of Waterdeep will become a regular part of our game night.
