I am a huge, HUGE fan of build as you go type of board games. My first experience with one of these was Hero Quest. Man I still love that game, I even had Advanced Hero Quest, I had fully painted pieces for each game, and I figured a way to combine the 2. I also love me some ZOMBIES!!!. I honestly had never even thought of Wizards Of The Coasts D&D Adventure System board game line. But that all changed today as we got Legend Of Drizzt in the mail!

Now at first, I couldn’t figure out how they were going to pull off a game based on a single character. Shows how much I know. True, I had no idea what he was, or anything from Neverwinter, so I went into this game blind. (It did come with the new novel though so I guess now is as good a time as any to get into him) Once I knew it was a build as you go dungeon crawler game with hack and slash elements, I was sold.

You Shall Not Pass!

So first thing you are going to notice when you open the box is the giant figure of Errtu, or as I instantly dubbed him – Not Balrog. (the similarities are strikingly…similar) This piece is HUGE and weighs a ton! And then you get to all the other pieces, all of which are fantastic, and the major amount of tiles and counters. The box seems rather small for all the things you will be popping out to store properly, but it can be done. We all know how I like clean game boxes. Here is my tips – Place all HP counters in the space under the first deck of room tiles. Place all the big squares under on deck of cards, all the big circles and cave in pieces under the other deck of cards, place the dead end pieces stacked in the corner of the massive figurine compartment, and place the rest neatly, usually on end, under the second stack of room tiles. It will make sense once you get the game, trust me. There are just a lot of pieces to this game and it can get a little jammed in the box. (you will thank me for this placement advice later. You are welcome. I know, I am awesome like that. )

So onto the game itself. We started at the beginning of course. For us, it was a little easy, but luckily there are two decks of cards – beginners and advanced. I think we are going to jump straight into advanced from here out. We are a little seasoned here, so the first game was way too easy for us. However, it was good to get used to the rules and such. Get a good flow for the game, and it is a great gateway into this awesome game. the game comes with an adventure book, with predefined scenarios that use certain aspects. I can see this getting way too much fun as we figure out how to make our own adventures. I was killer at that in Hero Quest and I also made bad ass boards in HeroScape. The tile placement is random, you never know what is going to come up next. When you place a tile, you have a 50/50 shot of encountering an encounter ( a randomly drawn card effect) and you also must place a monster. We had the giant troll in our first game and I was near death so I booked it. Outside of that, the game is pretty simple to understand. It was far more streamlined than Conquest of Nerath, but it is really meant to play with a group of people.

We did find a few things confusing though as they are not really explained too well. Like stances. A non D&D player won’t know to not move to activate a stance. The rule book says nothing about that. I am sure as we go into adventure later they may be here somewhere, but we used common sense for it since you start with some cards that give a stance option for a few characters. Also, the villains that you can later play as would have been better served as separate cards as the villain in the first mission is the assassin and we didn’t know what to do with his cards powers as outside of his main attack, the other cards were kinda useless. Do we use them, are we considered monsters? Stuff like that. We also used common sense with the big friggin beasts, the ones that move by tiles, not by individual spaces. The troll for instance was too big to cross the single bridge, but we argues he could jump that small space anyways. And lastly, why level up? I think it is a nice addition to level in the middle of a play-through, but it would have been nice to have an out of the box system to go past 2. I know we can always do it ourselves, but I must admit rolling a 20 to do it during an attack is already pretty hard. So it balances itself out in the end. It would have been nice to have to not know too much about D&D to play the game, as that would make it more open to just about everyone. As it is, I think the fans are getting a treat on this and they will share it with the non-fans and get them hooked. At least that is what I hope.

Basic play will not use all the extra counters and such, so don’t freak out. Ease into them with the adventure set up. And you don’t even have to worry about that! Every game will be different. Every board will be unique, each adventure a challenge. It’s just flippin awesome which is why I love games lie this so much.

I can say I was honestly surprised by how much fun this was. Outside of the fact we breezed through the first round, it is an excellent game. Like Nerath, the pieces are amazing and detailed and the entire game is well thought out. Now I am into getting the other two Adventure Series games. The tiles in Drizzt are all Cavern tiles, so they don’t really mix with the others, but that only means there are more Cavern tiles to come!

Legend Of Drizzt is an awesome team based game. Now I just gotta figure out who Drizzt really is. Guess I will read the book Wizards sent with the game! Can’t wait to play this game again.

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