Seth Brown
United States
North Adams
Massachusetts
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BIG
The first thing you should know about WOW:TBG is that it's big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. The box doesn't fit on my game shelves, and currently lives on the couch. The game barely fits on my game table if I remove EVERYTHING else. It takes a while to set up, a while to put away, and 3-6 hours to play (unless you are playing co-op or solo). If this is a dealbreaker for you, you need read no further.
WHATSIT
A pair of opposed parties of 2-3 adventurers each travel the land completing quests to gain power until one can finally topple the big evil boss, hopefully within 15 turns. Each character has skills, talents, and equipment, all of which can get better as you rise in level, that you use to travel the board and roll dice at monsters to kill them and gain exp and loot.
COMPONENTS
Are pretty great. This is Fantasy Flight at their best, with a variety of awesome-looking plastic figs (my favorite is the Ogre with giant mallet) for the mobs and characters, thick chits for health, mana, and all sorts of other random nonsense, and a veritable plethora of cards for items and powers of all sorts. There is a lot in this box.
GAMEPLAY IN BRIEF
Your quests spawn some mobs on the board. On your team's turn, each character gets two actions. As an action you can shop/train, rest, move two spaces, or fight. If two characters are on the same space, they can fight as a team, which is handy for taking on tough enemies. You roll a few dice for ranged damage, melee damage, and defense. You score hits on the mob and it scores hits on you. Your various skills and equipment help you roll more dice, manipulate them, etc. Combat continues until one side is dead. If it's your quest mob, you complete the quest and get rewards yay. If it's you, tough luck, and you'll respawn next turn at low health.
That's the basics. Want to know more? Read another review.
LOVE THIS GAME
The characters are awesomely differentiated. Everyone gets a character with one of nine unique classes. Each class has a different character sheet (with different starting stuff in the 7 slots), and their own set of 12 unique talents and 12 unique skills. Over a game, you can only learn a max of 4 of those talents, and skills each take up one of your valuable 7 slots, which you also need for equipment. So there are different ways to play each character, all of which are totally different from playing another character, giving the game some solid replayability.
Decking out your character makes for interesting decisions. You don't just collect all the items and get all the bonuses. As mentioned above, you've only got 7 slots. Some can be used for either of two types of skills, or a ranged weapon, or an item. Others are specifically just for armor. Different classes have restrictions on what types of armor/weapons they can use. You know 7 skills? Great. You can only have 4 equipped at once, 5 if you drop your bow. Do you need two ranged damage spells? Howabout that passive armor bonus? You probably won't miss healing, right?
Levelling up is fun. It's not just a rise in max HP and MP. When you level up you immediately get that, true, but then you pick a new talent at your current level, from 3 possibilities (or anything lower). You also then gain access to your next level of skills, and can wear the next level of equipment. Unlike some adventure games where you just gain a point of strength, levelling up here feels like a big deal, and it's a lot of fun.
Somewhat involved combat. It's not just roll 1d6 and add your strength. You roll your dice -- ranged, melee, and armor -- and then use your powers to re-roll and manipulate them in interesting ways. Enemies each have a special ability, some of which punish you for your 1s. Your ranged dice damage the enemy. Then your melee and armor dice defend you from damage. Then if you weren't killed, your melee dice damage the enemy. Choosing between ranged dice (Kill fast with no fighting back!) and melee dice (they're also armor!) can be tricky.
Did I mention components? The figs here are just awesome, and every time I pick them up I can't help but be impressed.
HATE THIS GAME
Enough downtime to knit socks. Is it the other team's turn? Are they going to be in combat? Go make yourself a sandwich. It's not going to be your turn for a while. Although to not be a jerk, you should use the first few minutes of their turn to plan exactly what you want to do on your turn, so you don't waste even more time. But you'll still have time to make that sandwich. My girlfriend got a lot of knitting done during the last time we played this game.
It gets worse. You know what's worse than waiting 15 minutes for your turn? Waiting 15 minutes for your turn, which consists of "I move four spaces to my quest. Your turn again." Or dying on your turn, which pretty much guarantees your next turn is going to be resting and then moving.
It's almost like interaction... You're not generally interacting overmuch with the other team. Sure, there are occasional PvP options, but it's a dicey proposition unless you can gang up on one opposing team member. Pretty much, you're in a race to topple the big boss, and your only interaction may well come from bidding on the occasional auction house item. To be fair, if you're playing on a team, there's plenty of interaction, both in planning and combat, among your own faction. But that may make it feel more like two co-op games, rather than one fighting game.
Somewhat involved combat. Yes, it was on the love list too. Some people will love that combat is interesting. Other people will wish it would just move faster, and would rather just roll 2d6 and see if they win, rather than dealing with 21 dice, hit tokens in three zones, and a combat process that makes the game take literally twice as long as it would otherwise.
Did I mention big? Seriously, the game is a beast. It's a little annoying owning a game that won't fit on my shelves, demands ten minutes of setup/teardown, and takes up all available table space +5.
BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
If you are convinced by both the love and hate sections above, you may want to consider playing this game with a variant for co-op, or solo. It keeps all of the good stuff, and eliminates most of the bad stuff. You can finish a game in 2 hours and downtime is minimal. Of course, you may still feel a lack of opponent, but you can't have everything.
OVERALL
I like this game a lot. Of all the adventure games I've played -- Prophecy, Talisman, Heroquest, Battlemasters, Heroscape, Order of the Stick, (or even tangentially related games like Arkham Horror or Munchkin), etc. -- WoW:TBG is heads and shoulders above the rest when it comes to the character development. Your equipment and skill slots make sense, you get interesting choices, every character is tangibly different, and each one can be played a few different ways. The skills and talents are alluring, and it's just plain fun to grow in power as you roll fistfuls of dice to mow down various pretty enemy figs.
I'm in no rush to play this with the full compliment of 6 people. Two characters each on two teams is about as much downtime as I can handle. It's slightly faster with 2 players than with 4, since you control both characters for your team and needn't negotiate to plan. It's a PITA to set up, so this is definitely a "weekend only" sort of game, and not something to break out every week. But it's big, pretty, and a lot of fun -- if you enjoy that sort of thing.
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Mikko Karvonen
Finland
Tampere
Tampere
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Excellent review that pretty much sums up my feelings about the game too. Although I really like the combat system.
The downtimemissue is so big for me, though, that I'll probably stick to solo and co-operative on this one.
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X Topher
United States
Plainfield
Illinois
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Nice brief review with some good points!
Also, nice timing with the deal for WoW + expansions for $62.99 at tanga.  (Great deal btw!) Coincidence?
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Markus
Germany
Kaiserslautern
So this is my new overtext ? Hmmm...
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It's also a very nice game when played with only one team. Removes a lot of the downtime and makes a nice coop experience.
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stephen
United Kingdom
Burton on trent
Staffordshire
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I would second the play a co-op version with no opposing team, it works pretty well, however this fact alone makes you realise how little interaction there is in the standard game.
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Dark Overlord
United States
Raleigh
North Carolina
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Thumbed on the Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy reference!
Oh and a good review too.
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M.D.W
United States
San Angelo
Texas
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Excellent review! The game really does shine with character building and I'm glad you touched on co-op, which is the only way I play this anymore.
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Joe Wasserman
United States
Portland
Oregon
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Excellent timing of your review! I really like that you went into what's to love and what's to hate so clearly.
So if you play this purely co-op, does it give you any sort of challenge? Does the game bite (like in Arkham Horror), or are you just kind of easily leveling up, collecting loot, and then tackling the big baddie at the end?
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Seth Brown
United States
North Adams
Massachusetts
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I have to admit that I've only played it co-op once. But I imagine I will be playing it co-op again, because that really brings it down to a more reasonable time-frame. You still only get the 15 turns to do stuff because the time track goes twice as fast, so when we played we managed to kill the Big Baddie on turn 30. It didn't feel nearly as challenging as a normal game (naturally), but it wasn't too boringly easy.
I also play with a house rule where all blue monsters are worth 1xp a piece, because I think it just sucks to kill stuff for no reward. I didn't put that in the review proper, but it might be worth mentioning.
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kronlin
United States
Arlington Heights
Illinois
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I bought it from Tanga today. It was just too good of a deal to pass it up. This review put me over the top. Thanks.
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Mikko Karvonen
Finland
Tampere
Tampere
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Mymil wrote: So if you play this purely co-op, does it give you any sort of challenge? Does the game bite (like in Arkham Horror), or are you just kind of easily leveling up, collecting loot, and then tackling the big baddie at the end?
The challenge is of somewhat different nature than the one you get in Arkham Horror. In co-op version of World of Warcraft: the Boardgame, you need to take the right risks to be able to develop your character far enough before the time runs out and you need to face the Big Bad. If you go for stuff that's too hard for you, you are slowed down, but if you are too careful, you are likely not to develop tough enough to face the final boss (especially if you decide to take on one of the more difficult ones). So there are reasonable challenges and decisions to tackle.
But I'd be dishonest if I didn't admit that part of the charm is just developing your character and getting new abilities, bigger loot and more dice to roll. One of my favorite things about the combat system is how concrete it makes the development of your character by giving you a huge handful of dice to roll in the end, compared to maybe 3-4 for the starting characters.
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Posted Wed Oct 27, 2010 8:26 am
