I bought this back in december. I'd seen it around my FLGS for a while, but I wasn't sure what to make of it. After seeing it on tabletop, I decided to give it a go. And I'm glad I did, because it turned out to be a quite decent little timewaster. I've had around 20 games of this - 10 of which were the expansion.
In the box:
The contents are standard fare. The box contains a bunch of wooden markers (agents, score markers, cubes in 4 colours), some cardboard markers (points, coins), a sizable amount of playing cards (quests, intrigue, lords) and a playing board. The artwork on the components is quite nice, and the components feel good. (Cards are laminated, cardboard tokens are decently thick).
The box also comes with a hilariously over-designed plastic insert. While everything fits perfectly into the insert, it only does so if you align every component in exactly the way the designers intended. If you toss away the insert and pour everythign into ziploc bags instead, you can unpack/clean up the game in half the time AND fit the expansion into the base set box with room to spare.
The game is for 2-5 players (6 with the expansion), although we've found it works best with 3-4 people. Playtime is somewhere between 45min and 1h30min, depending on the number of players and how new they are to board games.
Game overview:
The game is a worker placement game. Initial comparisons to Agricola are hard to avoid but - both to its credit and detriment - LoWD is a much simpler game. The game lasts for 8 rounds. During a round, players place one of their agents - the exact number of agents available to a player depends on the number of players in the game - on one of the marked locations on the board. Only one agent can occupy a locations at any given time. A locations will then give the player some sort of benefit - typically in the form of resources. For instance, the Blackstaff Tower will give the player who place an agent on it a wizard; the Fields of Triumph will yield a pair of Fighters; Castle Waterdeep will give you the first player marker (meaning you go first every round until someone else takes it) and an Intrigue card and so forth.
After placing your agent, you may complete one of your active quests, if you meet its prerequisites. There are 5 base resources in the game: Fighters, Thieves, Wizards, Priests and Coins. These match up with the 5 quest categories: Warfare, Skullduggery, Arcana, Piety and Commerce. Warfare quests always require fighters to solve, arcana always requires wizards and so forth. Quests allow you to exchange a specific combination of resources for a benefit. Most quests yield victory points, but many also yield resources in return. For instance, the "Patrol the Docks" quest requires a number of fighters and priests, but yields a number of thieves in addition to victory points. (If you want to LARP it, you apprehended some thieves who now work off their debt to society for you). Early in the game, quests that yield adventurers are usually more valuable than quests that only yield points, as this allows you to quickly chain multiple quests together. Other quests are marked as "Plot Quests" and give a persistent bonus once they're completed. For instance, "Produce a miracle for the masses" requires a bunch of priests, a wizard and some gold. It gives you a small amount of victory points but - much more importantly - allows you to convert a non-priest adventurer to a priest whenever you place an agent on a location that gives you one or more priests. Since wizards/priests are typically more valuable than fighters/thieves, the quest can yield you a substantial amount of free resources if you manage to complete it early in the game.
Player interaction happens in 3 ways. First, you can block other players by placing agents in locations they desire. For instance, if player A has a bunch of quests requiring wizards, it may be worth placing your agent in Blackstaff Tower first to deny them the ability to finish an early plot quest. More interesting are the aforementioned Intrigue cards. You typically acquire these in Castle waterdeep when taking the first player marker or in addition to picking up a quest in the White Cliff Inn. You play these intrigue cards by placing an agent in the Waterdeep Harbor to give yourself an advantage or to mess with the plans of other players by stealing their resources or giving them "mandatory" (aka "bullshit") quests that they must finish before they can score the quests they actually want to solve. Agents placed in the harbour are reassigned at the end of the round into non-harbour spaces, so they are often desirable - but not as desirable as locations that yield resources critical to your quests. This keeps the amount of intrigue cards played in a game fairly high. The last and most interesting way that player interaction occurs is through buildings. By placing your agent in Builders Hall and paying a sum of coins, you are allowed to take one of the 3 random face-up buildings and put it into play along with a token that shows you built it. Builders hall buildings usually yield more resources than the regular locations on the playing board. But whenever a player other than the one who built the building places an agent on it, the person who built it also earns bonus resources. Like plot quests, an early building can yield the player that made it a substantial amount of free resources over the course of a game if other players keep entering it. At the start of every round, a point token is added to every face-up building int he builders hall. Since they add up over time, "undesirable" buildings become more interesting to buy as the game progresses and bonus points build up on them.
At the end of the 8th round, players tally up their final score. In addition to points gained throughout the game from quests and buildings, players also score points for left over adventurers and coins in their tavern. Although less than they would have scored by using the adventurers and coins to complete a quests. Every player is also dealt a "Lord" card at the start of the game, which is revealed during the final step. The lord card details a bonus condition (usually specific types of quests) that grant them bonus points. Correctly guessing which lord an opponent has early on allows you to block their access to quests that would give them bonus points at the end of the game, so it pays to pay attention to what kinds of quests other players are collecting.
(Re)playability:
Like most worker placement games, LoWD is all about deciphering which locations are most valuable to work. Since every player has the same number of agents, the player who places his agents on the most valuable locations scores the most points and thus wins the game. However, the value of locations is not fixed. As a rule of thumb is 1 Wizard = 1 Priest = 2 Thieves = 2 Fighters = 4 Coins = 4 VP, assuming the resources are used to fulfill a quest. But many factors modify the "value" of resources: some locations give other players resources, the value of plot quests and building buildings is directly related to how many turns have passed, multiple players having lords that give bonus points for the same specific type of quests, buildings coming into play that make certain resources easier to acquire, intrigue cards and so forth. The buildings in particular change what resources are highly contested and 20 games in the game is still fairly fresh and compelling for my group.
We do have some grievances with the game of course. Mandatory Quests in particular suffer from the fact that they don't give the player who plays them any advantages; they just hinder someone else. This means that if you're in last place, all they're good for is being kingmaker, letting someone else win the game at the expense of another. We've messed around with house rules to try and fix this, but we've yet to find a satisfactory solution. The game is also a bit too random in regards to the lords you're dealt. A player who starts with a warfare/x lord and the plot quest that generates fighters to complete more warfare quests will be at a huge advantage over a player who drew an arcana/commerce lord and 2 piety quests. We fixed this to some degree by introducing card drafting to the start of the game. In the normal rules, every player is dealt a lord, 2 quests and 2 intrigue cards. In drafting, the 4 quests in the inn are revealed along with the 3 buildings in builders hall. Then every player is dealt 2 lords, 3 quests and 3 intrigue cards. Every player keeps his lords, a quest and an intrigue card and passes the other cards clockwise. He then keeps a quest and intrigue card from the new cards he recieves from the player to his right and discards the other. He then discards one of his lords. This allows everyone to build some sort of strategy for the first couple of turns instead of relying on the luck of the draw. In our experience, this has led to closer and more interesting games.
Scoundrels of Skullport expansion:
With the base game receiving a warm reception among my cardboard mutilation companions, I figured I'd go and get the expansion pack as well. The expansion pack contains multiple components that can be added to the game either in parts or all together.
First, it contains a new player colour with the associated tokens to play with 6 players instead of 5. It also includes an additional agent of every colour, allowing players to play a "long" game by giving everyone an additional agent at the start. The long game is also more or less mandatory if you play with all of the expansions, as they introduce a bunch of new locations to place agents. Without the additional agents, there will be precious few "bad" locations to force other players agents into.
The meat of the expansion is the Undermountain and Skullport expansions though. Both add new locations quests, intrigue cards, lords and buildings. You remove a number of cards and buildings from the base game and shuffle the expansion cards in. The rules say you should pick the cards and buildings to remove at random, but I would advice against this. It is all too easy to end up completely screwing over certain types of lords by removing only buildings/cards that they would benefit from. I would recommend going to boardgamegeek instead and grabbing the quite excellent list of cards to remove that one of their users made. It removes a combination of the "best" and "worst" cards and buildings from the game, eliminating the no-brainer choices and leading to more interesting decisionmaking overall.
Undermountain adds a new board with several new locations. These are basically more of the same, with nothing new. If the base game wasn't compelling for you, undermountain won't change that. The sole new mechanic it introduces is quests, intrigue cards and building where part of the action involves taking a resource from the bank and placing it on a location on the board. This can be used to make locations more enticing for the next player to place an agent on -- typically to lure other players into your buildings so you can reap the owners benefits.
The real gem of the expansion is skullport. It introduces new quests, intrigue cards, locations, buildings and lords just like undermountain. But they all contain a new machanic as well: Corruption.
Corruption is a resource just like adventurers and coins. But unlike other resources, corruption is a "bad" resource. At the end of the game, every point of corruption gives you negative victory points. How many negative victory points it gives you depends on how much corruption has been taken from the corruption track and put into play. Early in the game, the -1 or -2 VP a point of corruption is worth makes it seem well worth the cost. Why go to the Fields of Triumph for 2 fighters when you can go tot the Slave Market for 2 fighters AND 2 thieves (and a teeny little bit of corruption)? Ad the game progresses however, corruption builds up and suddenly you're sitting with 5 corruption tokens, worth -6VP each and wondering how the fuck you got there. There are ways to get rid of your corruption - typically through quests of intrigue cards But they are highly sought after, fought over and consume your actions to play. There are also ways to force corrupt players into even deeper pits of corruption, or performing powerful actions at the expense of gaining more corruption. The most interesting actions are the ones that allow you to take corruption from your tavern and place it somewhere on the board. Do you have the First Player token? Would you like to keep it? How about placing some corruption on Castle Waterdeep to discourage other players from going there. LoWDs strength is the way the value of locations is in constant flux. Skullport adds a lot to this. It is for thisreason we're always playing with skullport in my group after trying it once.
Final thoughts:
Lords of Waterdeep is not a complex game. Some people - especially Agricola players - find it too simplistic. There are other games on my shelf I turn to if I'm in the mood for deep, complex strategy games. But there is a time and a place for LoWDs simplicity as well. It is easy to teach new players, and even younger gamers can join in. The dungeons and dragons fluff is pleasant enough for people who are into Forgotten Reals, but stays enough in the background that people who don't care about dungeons and dragons won't feel alienated. There is a large degree of randomness in the luck of the draw. It is easily for a player to be at a distinct disadvantage to another simply because a building that's really good for one player was finished early in the game. While the player interaction is fairly high thanks to intrigue cards, it is quite possible to find yourself in a position where one player is clearly surging ahead, but you have nothing on hand that can slow him down.
If you're not too competitive I found LoWD makes for a nice, casual worker placement game in a pleasant wrapping. As an added bonus, my family seems to adore it almost as much as Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, Smallworld and Dominion. While there are several other strategy games I like better than LoWD, it is a decent enough game that doesn't take forever to finish and I'm almost guaranteed to have someone who's willing to play against me.
If you'd like to give LoWD a spin but don't fancy paying the full price of cardboard, there is an app of the game for phones and tablets that will leave less of a dent on your beer budget.
In the box:
The contents are standard fare. The box contains a bunch of wooden markers (agents, score markers, cubes in 4 colours), some cardboard markers (points, coins), a sizable amount of playing cards (quests, intrigue, lords) and a playing board. The artwork on the components is quite nice, and the components feel good. (Cards are laminated, cardboard tokens are decently thick).
The box also comes with a hilariously over-designed plastic insert. While everything fits perfectly into the insert, it only does so if you align every component in exactly the way the designers intended. If you toss away the insert and pour everythign into ziploc bags instead, you can unpack/clean up the game in half the time AND fit the expansion into the base set box with room to spare.
The game is for 2-5 players (6 with the expansion), although we've found it works best with 3-4 people. Playtime is somewhere between 45min and 1h30min, depending on the number of players and how new they are to board games.
Game overview:
The game is a worker placement game. Initial comparisons to Agricola are hard to avoid but - both to its credit and detriment - LoWD is a much simpler game. The game lasts for 8 rounds. During a round, players place one of their agents - the exact number of agents available to a player depends on the number of players in the game - on one of the marked locations on the board. Only one agent can occupy a locations at any given time. A locations will then give the player some sort of benefit - typically in the form of resources. For instance, the Blackstaff Tower will give the player who place an agent on it a wizard; the Fields of Triumph will yield a pair of Fighters; Castle Waterdeep will give you the first player marker (meaning you go first every round until someone else takes it) and an Intrigue card and so forth.
After placing your agent, you may complete one of your active quests, if you meet its prerequisites. There are 5 base resources in the game: Fighters, Thieves, Wizards, Priests and Coins. These match up with the 5 quest categories: Warfare, Skullduggery, Arcana, Piety and Commerce. Warfare quests always require fighters to solve, arcana always requires wizards and so forth. Quests allow you to exchange a specific combination of resources for a benefit. Most quests yield victory points, but many also yield resources in return. For instance, the "Patrol the Docks" quest requires a number of fighters and priests, but yields a number of thieves in addition to victory points. (If you want to LARP it, you apprehended some thieves who now work off their debt to society for you). Early in the game, quests that yield adventurers are usually more valuable than quests that only yield points, as this allows you to quickly chain multiple quests together. Other quests are marked as "Plot Quests" and give a persistent bonus once they're completed. For instance, "Produce a miracle for the masses" requires a bunch of priests, a wizard and some gold. It gives you a small amount of victory points but - much more importantly - allows you to convert a non-priest adventurer to a priest whenever you place an agent on a location that gives you one or more priests. Since wizards/priests are typically more valuable than fighters/thieves, the quest can yield you a substantial amount of free resources if you manage to complete it early in the game.
Player interaction happens in 3 ways. First, you can block other players by placing agents in locations they desire. For instance, if player A has a bunch of quests requiring wizards, it may be worth placing your agent in Blackstaff Tower first to deny them the ability to finish an early plot quest. More interesting are the aforementioned Intrigue cards. You typically acquire these in Castle waterdeep when taking the first player marker or in addition to picking up a quest in the White Cliff Inn. You play these intrigue cards by placing an agent in the Waterdeep Harbor to give yourself an advantage or to mess with the plans of other players by stealing their resources or giving them "mandatory" (aka "bullshit") quests that they must finish before they can score the quests they actually want to solve. Agents placed in the harbour are reassigned at the end of the round into non-harbour spaces, so they are often desirable - but not as desirable as locations that yield resources critical to your quests. This keeps the amount of intrigue cards played in a game fairly high. The last and most interesting way that player interaction occurs is through buildings. By placing your agent in Builders Hall and paying a sum of coins, you are allowed to take one of the 3 random face-up buildings and put it into play along with a token that shows you built it. Builders hall buildings usually yield more resources than the regular locations on the playing board. But whenever a player other than the one who built the building places an agent on it, the person who built it also earns bonus resources. Like plot quests, an early building can yield the player that made it a substantial amount of free resources over the course of a game if other players keep entering it. At the start of every round, a point token is added to every face-up building int he builders hall. Since they add up over time, "undesirable" buildings become more interesting to buy as the game progresses and bonus points build up on them.
At the end of the 8th round, players tally up their final score. In addition to points gained throughout the game from quests and buildings, players also score points for left over adventurers and coins in their tavern. Although less than they would have scored by using the adventurers and coins to complete a quests. Every player is also dealt a "Lord" card at the start of the game, which is revealed during the final step. The lord card details a bonus condition (usually specific types of quests) that grant them bonus points. Correctly guessing which lord an opponent has early on allows you to block their access to quests that would give them bonus points at the end of the game, so it pays to pay attention to what kinds of quests other players are collecting.
(Re)playability:
Like most worker placement games, LoWD is all about deciphering which locations are most valuable to work. Since every player has the same number of agents, the player who places his agents on the most valuable locations scores the most points and thus wins the game. However, the value of locations is not fixed. As a rule of thumb is 1 Wizard = 1 Priest = 2 Thieves = 2 Fighters = 4 Coins = 4 VP, assuming the resources are used to fulfill a quest. But many factors modify the "value" of resources: some locations give other players resources, the value of plot quests and building buildings is directly related to how many turns have passed, multiple players having lords that give bonus points for the same specific type of quests, buildings coming into play that make certain resources easier to acquire, intrigue cards and so forth. The buildings in particular change what resources are highly contested and 20 games in the game is still fairly fresh and compelling for my group.
We do have some grievances with the game of course. Mandatory Quests in particular suffer from the fact that they don't give the player who plays them any advantages; they just hinder someone else. This means that if you're in last place, all they're good for is being kingmaker, letting someone else win the game at the expense of another. We've messed around with house rules to try and fix this, but we've yet to find a satisfactory solution. The game is also a bit too random in regards to the lords you're dealt. A player who starts with a warfare/x lord and the plot quest that generates fighters to complete more warfare quests will be at a huge advantage over a player who drew an arcana/commerce lord and 2 piety quests. We fixed this to some degree by introducing card drafting to the start of the game. In the normal rules, every player is dealt a lord, 2 quests and 2 intrigue cards. In drafting, the 4 quests in the inn are revealed along with the 3 buildings in builders hall. Then every player is dealt 2 lords, 3 quests and 3 intrigue cards. Every player keeps his lords, a quest and an intrigue card and passes the other cards clockwise. He then keeps a quest and intrigue card from the new cards he recieves from the player to his right and discards the other. He then discards one of his lords. This allows everyone to build some sort of strategy for the first couple of turns instead of relying on the luck of the draw. In our experience, this has led to closer and more interesting games.
Scoundrels of Skullport expansion:
With the base game receiving a warm reception among my cardboard mutilation companions, I figured I'd go and get the expansion pack as well. The expansion pack contains multiple components that can be added to the game either in parts or all together.
First, it contains a new player colour with the associated tokens to play with 6 players instead of 5. It also includes an additional agent of every colour, allowing players to play a "long" game by giving everyone an additional agent at the start. The long game is also more or less mandatory if you play with all of the expansions, as they introduce a bunch of new locations to place agents. Without the additional agents, there will be precious few "bad" locations to force other players agents into.
The meat of the expansion is the Undermountain and Skullport expansions though. Both add new locations quests, intrigue cards, lords and buildings. You remove a number of cards and buildings from the base game and shuffle the expansion cards in. The rules say you should pick the cards and buildings to remove at random, but I would advice against this. It is all too easy to end up completely screwing over certain types of lords by removing only buildings/cards that they would benefit from. I would recommend going to boardgamegeek instead and grabbing the quite excellent list of cards to remove that one of their users made. It removes a combination of the "best" and "worst" cards and buildings from the game, eliminating the no-brainer choices and leading to more interesting decisionmaking overall.
Undermountain adds a new board with several new locations. These are basically more of the same, with nothing new. If the base game wasn't compelling for you, undermountain won't change that. The sole new mechanic it introduces is quests, intrigue cards and building where part of the action involves taking a resource from the bank and placing it on a location on the board. This can be used to make locations more enticing for the next player to place an agent on -- typically to lure other players into your buildings so you can reap the owners benefits.
The real gem of the expansion is skullport. It introduces new quests, intrigue cards, locations, buildings and lords just like undermountain. But they all contain a new machanic as well: Corruption.
Corruption is a resource just like adventurers and coins. But unlike other resources, corruption is a "bad" resource. At the end of the game, every point of corruption gives you negative victory points. How many negative victory points it gives you depends on how much corruption has been taken from the corruption track and put into play. Early in the game, the -1 or -2 VP a point of corruption is worth makes it seem well worth the cost. Why go to the Fields of Triumph for 2 fighters when you can go tot the Slave Market for 2 fighters AND 2 thieves (and a teeny little bit of corruption)? Ad the game progresses however, corruption builds up and suddenly you're sitting with 5 corruption tokens, worth -6VP each and wondering how the fuck you got there. There are ways to get rid of your corruption - typically through quests of intrigue cards But they are highly sought after, fought over and consume your actions to play. There are also ways to force corrupt players into even deeper pits of corruption, or performing powerful actions at the expense of gaining more corruption. The most interesting actions are the ones that allow you to take corruption from your tavern and place it somewhere on the board. Do you have the First Player token? Would you like to keep it? How about placing some corruption on Castle Waterdeep to discourage other players from going there. LoWDs strength is the way the value of locations is in constant flux. Skullport adds a lot to this. It is for thisreason we're always playing with skullport in my group after trying it once.
Final thoughts:
Lords of Waterdeep is not a complex game. Some people - especially Agricola players - find it too simplistic. There are other games on my shelf I turn to if I'm in the mood for deep, complex strategy games. But there is a time and a place for LoWDs simplicity as well. It is easy to teach new players, and even younger gamers can join in. The dungeons and dragons fluff is pleasant enough for people who are into Forgotten Reals, but stays enough in the background that people who don't care about dungeons and dragons won't feel alienated. There is a large degree of randomness in the luck of the draw. It is easily for a player to be at a distinct disadvantage to another simply because a building that's really good for one player was finished early in the game. While the player interaction is fairly high thanks to intrigue cards, it is quite possible to find yourself in a position where one player is clearly surging ahead, but you have nothing on hand that can slow him down.
If you're not too competitive I found LoWD makes for a nice, casual worker placement game in a pleasant wrapping. As an added bonus, my family seems to adore it almost as much as Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, Smallworld and Dominion. While there are several other strategy games I like better than LoWD, it is a decent enough game that doesn't take forever to finish and I'm almost guaranteed to have someone who's willing to play against me.
If you'd like to give LoWD a spin but don't fancy paying the full price of cardboard, there is an app of the game for phones and tablets that will leave less of a dent on your beer budget.
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