Castle Ravenloft--Adventure # 1, "Escape the Tomb"

Since the Call of Cthulhu campaign has unfortunately lapsed into a temporary period of abeyance, The Wife and I went out and picked up some new board games: Mansions of Madness, Save Doctor Lucky, and Castle Ravenloft.

We started with Castle Ravenloft and it's proven to be a lot of fun. It's a cooperative game of tactical combat, with the goal changing with each scenario (the book comes with 13, and there are more online). The funny thing is, the first introductory adventure proved surprisingly hard! Working together, it took The Wife and I six tries before we finally succeeded. The adventure, "Escape the Tomb", is a relatively simple one: a single hero awakens in Strahd's tomb and has to find the stairways out (always the eleventh tile laid down) before Strahd returns and he (or other monsters) kill that hero. We came really close the first time (playing the Fighter), and didn't even realize we had forgotten to award ourselves treasure for each monster killed. Subsequent games with the Ranger, Rogue, Wizard, and Cleric proved unsuccessful even though we now knew what we were doing. Finally, we gave the Fighter a second try and won pretty easily.

The key, as best we can tell, is do two things: (1) don't let an overwhelming number of monsters build up because they will quickly overpower you; and (2) explore the dungeon consecutively outward so you're putting as much room as possible between yourself and where Strahd first appears.

Although it sounds backwards, I really like games like this where I lose all the time! It makes winning that much more exciting, and prompts me to keep trying (I find Arkham Horror, another cooperative game, a lot less fun because the big final battle against the bad guy usually seems too easy).