Daniel Marshall's page

I too played this game at Gen Con Indy this year. When I first looked at the game it had a lot of potential. I've been a big fan of castle Ravenloft since the original AD&D adventure came out, so suffice to say I was looking forward to testing the game out.

My expectations were apparently too high however. We played a beginner scenario in which the players have to retrieve the icon of ravenloft from the chapel. Everything was alright until the final chamber. The only issue I had was that the monsters could attack everyone on a tile (which was a square with a grid, I honestly can't remember how many squares are on a tile), while the PCs could only attack a single creature that they (for the most part) had to be adjacent to. The characters also have 2 healing tokens total to use for the entire group, and if a single player dies, the game is over. Keep this in mind when I talk about the chapel later on.

At first we figured that we could remedy this issue with a few house rules. But at the end it just simply became to impossible to overcome with such rules. In the final room each time a player took a turn the spawned a monster or triggered a trap. Bear in mind that the monsters can attack the entire party (since the room was about 1 tile in size) while the party can only attack a single creature. You win the game when all of the creatures are dead. Since it was very unlikely that a creature would be killed in a single hit, the monsters and traps just kept piling up until they overwhelmed the party. There simply was nothing you could do to conquer the scenario.

As the previous reviewer mentioned, I am making the assumption that what we played was the final version of the game. And keep in mind that this is only a single scenario out of the booklet, but we were told by the guy running it (who didn't have much more of a clue about the rules and game play as we did) recommended it as a good starting scenario. It is possible that the other scenarios are set up a bit better, and would thus be more fun to play. However, with the frustration the one I played left me with, I honestly have no intention of spending the money to find out.