A long time ago (holy shit it was nearly a year ago that I started this as a weekly blog) I talked about board games as a gateway to geekier things. At the time I really intended on talking about more board games in this blog but life has a way of sidetracking you and you end up writing about Mad Max all the time.

Well, it’s time to take a look at another board game. One that you would think would be an excellent gateway into the world of Dungeons & Dragons (but you’d be wrong): Lords of Waterdeep. Before we played this game I jokingly referred to it as “Lords of Watership Down”. That’s the game that I really want to play, but I’d imagine that it would basically just end with the entire table crying over the plight of rabbits.

I guess the first thing to address is the D&D branding. I’ve never played Forgotten Realms but apparently within the setting there’s this city called Waterdeep that is ruled over by the “Masked Lords” or something that keep the town running smoothly but also have their own little competitive squabbles of one-upping and undercutting each other. I could be super wrong here, but I feel like Jono said something like that when he described the setting.

There’s D&D flavour all over the game. The “core” resources are clerics, wizards, rogues and fighters. Missions involve fighting Beholders and Orcs and whatever but at the end of the day, it’s all just window dressing. Is this background information important to the game? Not at all. Does having or not having an understanding of D&D help you or hinder you in any way? Not at all. They just as easily could have branded this as Game of Thrones, Vampire: The Masquerade or basically any fictional, historical or modern setting known for some level of political intrigue.

So, if you’re thinking of picking this game up to try and get people into Dungeons & Dragons you’re probably picking up the wrong game. But on the flip side, if you’ve been avoiding this game because you know nothing about D&D then you can rest assured that other than cosmetically, this game has nothing to do with its tabletop RPG cousin. If you are a fan of Forgotten Realms you’ll probably enjoy some of the references to the setting, but again, they don’t give you any sort of edge in the game.

If it’s not like D&D, then what is it like? Well, I’ve heard it frequently described as a “German style” board game. I am not entirely sure what that term means but I think it means “competitive resource management”. I looked it up and I’m not entirely wrong (from Wikipedia):

“A German-style board game is any of a class of tabletop games that generally have simple rules, short to medium playing times, indirect player interaction and abstract physical components. Such games emphasize strategy, downplay luck and conflict, lean towards economic rather than military themes, and usually keep all the players in the game until it ends.”

Basically, you control a mysterious “Lord of Waterdeep” and you send little lieutenants out into the city to complete a number of actions that will yield you either a certain type of resource (money, clerics, fighters, rogues or wizards),a new building (which will help you and your opponents yield resources) or an “Intrigue” card (to mess with other players). There’s a few other options but this isn’t the rulebook. You use those resources to complete missions to score victory points and at the end of a fixed number of rounds you add up the victory points and declare a winner.

The game isn’t directly competitive in the way that you are not actively attacking or destroying other player’s resources but the competition stems mostly out of trying to further your own ends while strategically blocking another player’s ability to further their own.

A major selling point for this game is the play time. We played as four players and only Jono had ever played before so that meant 75% of the table had no idea what we were doing. Even with that learning curve and some general tomfoolery the play time from set-up to winner and packing the game up again was probably an hour and a half. I’m sure with everyone familiar with the rules you’d have games running around an hour each. A far cry from our old friend Arkham Horror where set up and packing up can be a nearly 30 minute undertaking on its own. There’s just a lot of game nights where you don’t have an open 4 or 5 hour block of time to play something like Arkham Horror or Game of Thrones, for those nights, a game like Lords of Waterdeep will do nicely.

It’s good fun. Off the type of my head it has much more in common with a game like Puerto Rico than it does with Tomb of Horrors. Sort of a tricky spot for the developers I’m sure. Releasing a game without some sort of existing intellectual property tie-in is risky business, since these days the board game stores are being flooded with high quality games of all kinds competing for your attention. On the other hand, some people might be put off by the D&D branding thinking that you need to know about the RPG in order to have fun.

Quick learning curve, minimal text and easy mechanics make this game pretty sweet for any level of player. The system presents interesting enough mechanics for strategy with as much of the game being about subtly thwarting your opponent as it is about advancing yourself. I dig it.

How does it rank as a gateway to geekier things? I would say somewhere in the middle. You might be able to take someone’s enjoyment of the game and steer them towards more “German-style” games like Agricola or Puerto Rico but you won’t likely have them clambering to make a character sheet for your next D&D campaign. I mean, unless a player is like “shit yeah I’ve never seen a floating purple monster with a bunch of eye-stalks before I want more of that”.

Keith does all sorts of things here on 9to5.cc, he works with the other founders on 9to5 (illustrated), co-hosts our two podcasts: The 9to5 Entertainment System and Go Plug Yourself and blogs here as The Perspicacious Geek.