By:
Eldorian (J. R. Cook)

Introduction
I was lucky enough recently to be able to try out the board game for World of Warcraft, a game that is being published by Fantasy Flight Games. At first the $80 price tag to me was a serious turn off, mostly because I wouldn’t say I’m a board game advocate by any means, and also because I wasn’t really sure if a board game could really pull off the Warcraft universe that well.

However, I believe I was quickly proven wrong. After playing a couple games now, the board game itself is actually quite a bit of fun – if you have about 8 hours of time to waste as well as 5 other friends who do as well. That’s really the tricky part of the whole game is being able to find 5 other people who are willing to invest time into learning the ropes and also spending the time to play a fairly long drawn out game in one day or evening.

The Contents
The box the game comes in is pretty massive, there’s a lot of content in there, Several hero figures that the players can choose to be, several monster figurines that portray anything from Murlocs to Scarlet Crusade, all the way to Infernals. There’s also a lot of cards that come with that game that are in the form of weapons, armor, and items to equip your characters with as well as talents, spells, and skills.

The one thing we found out early on is you really need a large table in order to play the game. The board game itself takes up a lot of space, and then you need space around the board game to play your character cards (for 6 people!) and all of the other cards that keep the game going (event cards and quest cards mainly).

The Set Up
As I said earlier, you and your friends really need to devote a lot of time in order to play a full game. The game itself takes about an hour to fully set up, be also prepared to read the rules extensively as it easily takes 5 hours to fully start learning the rules and what you need to do, not my idea of fun! The first thing you do is divide your 6 players into 2 teams of 3. One team will choose Alliance and the other will be Horde. Your teams then choose which class they want to be. As of right, only Alliance can be Paladin’s and only Horde can be Shaman, but you can still choose to be a warrior, priest, mage, hunter, rogue, druid, or warlock. However, the way the character cards are made there’s only going to be one hunter on the board, so expect some possibly arguing as the horde and alliance differ about who should get the hunter and so on.

Once your teams are picked and the characters are selected it’s now time to start putting out all of the other cards. Each team starts out with 4 quest cards they draw from their quest decks. Each quest card then has a specific quest (usually just creatures they have to kill in a specific location). You then start placing these creatures on the map according to the location on the card. Some quest cards also spawn independent creatures (blue creatures) which anyone can fight, but they don’t yield any rewards or experience (this changes in the expansion). However, if you are on a location with a blue creature, you MUST fight that blue creature before you can move on.

After you placed all of the creatures and your heroes in their respective home towns, then you can start equipping your heroes with armor, weapons, items, spells, and skills.

All of the items, skills, spells, etc. are all what you would normally find in the actual World of Warcraft game. So it’s kind of neat to see hunters get summon pets, and rogues with backstab. The customization of the characters is what really makes the board game feel like you’re playing World of Warcraft.

Once you finally equip your character, that’s when we normally would reveal one of the three world bosses we would spawn on the map. The object of the game is to take out this boss in 30 turns or less. The first boss we chose was the dragon, which came with the ability to move and if he moved to a certain area on the map, then the game was over. However, in our game, the dragon never got close to its destination.

The Game Play
Now that everything is in place, you can finally begin playing the game. As said previously the object of the game is to take out the world boss in less than 30 turns and before the other team manages to do so. You’re not taking the boss on at level 1 and with your starting equipment so you need to go out into the world and start questing!

Either you can go alone or your teammates can party up. We’ve found in the game it’s usually better to all just stay in the party throughout the game, maybe in the later levels you can afford to go solo, but it’s usually not recommended I think. When you party up all the rewards (items) and experience you get in the quest is divided up among all of those who completed it.

When you complete your first quest you then draw another quest card, the quest cards you choose are of different difficulty so you can pick one around the same difficulty you just did or choose something with a little higher. The quest cards have 3 levels (green, yellow, and red). I find first level characters should stick to green, 2nd and 3rd to yellow, and then 4th and up red. You only have a maximum of 5 levels in this game.

Once you draw the quest card you place the monsters on the board and then the other team goes out and does whatever they need to do.

Finally after you reach your first level you’ll want to head back to town, buy some equipment with that gold you just earned and learn your first talent. The nice thing about talents is once again, like in World of Warcraft, they can really customize your character. Since I was playing a hunter in this game I decided to go toward the marksmanship spec and in the end it really paid off that I went in that direction, more on that later.

Combat
Combat in the game took a while to get used to, but once figured out it was a pretty easy and straightforward system. You have 21 8-sided dice to use. 7 green, 7 red, and 7 blue. The green signified defense, red signified melee damage (and parry), and blue signified  ranged damage.

Your weapons, armor, talents, spells, and skills all tell you how much you get to roll. So for example, my hunter might have a bow that allows me to roll 3 blue dice, an axe that allows me to roll 2 red dice, and a nice piece of armor that allows me to roll 3 green dice. Now I might have a skill that allows me to roll another additional blue dice and if I roll and get a +7 on a blue dice I get to roll another additional blue dice. This is where combos came in handy because I might have a talent that allows me to automatically spot a blue dice as an 8, so because of that I automatically get an additional roll with my skill I mentioned.

I found out you really want to find the best combo you have of rolling all your dice high and finding a way you can roll all 21 dice in one shot. You can never roll more than 7 dice per color, so the max is 21.

When you fight a creature it gives you a threat number, an attack number, and it’s health. So for example a creature may have 6 threat. If you roll 6 or higher on a dice, then that dice does it’s thing. So if I roll a blue 6, I automatically hit that creature for one damage from range. If I roll a 6 red then it counts toward a parry (and toward my defense) and a 6+ on green is also stored toward my defense.

You want more defense in a round then the creature has attack. So if you only have 3 defense and the creature has 4 attack, you’re taking a point of damage. The red is then moved to the melee combat to finish out the round so if the creature had 5 health and you did 2 to it from ranged, you then go to melee for damage to be dealt. If you did 3 more damage to it with your red rolls, then the creature dies.

You can also do damage by getting what’s called Attrition. I found attrition was mostly given to spell casters, kind of damage over time effect I believe. This is normally added into the damage section as well unless the cards tell you otherwise.

Combat is probably the most fun part of the game I have and I probably didn’t do it justice by trying to explain it here, but it’s more of one of those things you really have to try out to understand how fun it can be, especially when you’re trying to build combos for your characters to get the most maximum dice roles you can.

My Overall Thoughts
To me, the game itself is not worth the price you will pay in the store. While the game itself is massive and takes hours of time to play, that’s also the downfall of it I believe. I’ve owned the game for a few months now and only twice have I been able to gather enough friends around to be able to play the game, and once they played it and once they found out it took 8+ hours to play through a game, very few of them wanted to play another one any time soon.
However, every single person who has played it so far has really enjoyed it, so if you’re able to find a way to shorten the game itself with some of your own house rules, this might be the way to go.

My biggest pet peeve with the game is that while it’s very challenging early on in the first 2 levels, once you hit level 3, the game pretty much will play itself as your characters will become very overpowered. All of our characters were blowing through every quest we were doing and it simply became a race to see who could hit level 5 first and then go take on the World Boss. The most disappointing aspect of the game is once we got to the World Boss to take him on, expecting some massive huge fight that would be very challenging; we actually managed to take him out in one round without anyone taking any damage. I really feel this is where the game ultimately fails is the fact that once you’re 5 hours into it, you become so powerful it becomes very boring.

With all of that in mind, I guess it really comes down to if you and your friends really enjoy board games or not, and a healthy understanding and enthusiasm toward World of Warcraft itself really helps make this game more enjoyable.

The Expansion: Shadow of War
After playing the board game, I soon got to try out the expansion to the board game Shadows of War. The expansion retails for about $25 and if you plan on buying the board game, I would highly encourage getting this add on.

The first thing the expansion did that I really disliked about the original game is it offered rewards and experience for those blue wandering creatures. This was something we really despised in the original since we were forced to fight them we felt we should at least get something for our troubles. This was definitely a nice addition.

The second addition in the game that was nice was the arrival of destiny cards. These would pop off every few turns or so and would introduce things such as bosses to fight, or scenarios you had to meet and got awarded for (or punished if you didn’t). They might even allow you to bid on certain items from the Auction House.

The third addition was the arrival of more talents, spells, items, weapons, armor, etc. In a game like this I feel there is never too much customization and having an even greater inventory to pick from than in our earlier game was really the icing on the cake for us.

Unfortunately, those were the only add-ons for this game. All you got were some new cards, you didn’t get new lands to explore or new bosses to fight and that was something I feel was rather disappointing.

However, if you have the board game already, the expansion is simply a must have simply for the blue creature quests and additional character customization alone. I do hope Fantasy Flight Games decides to make a couple more expansions that could include additional maps, additional quests, and additional world bosses that put up a bit more of a fight than currently. At least that’s my wish list. So go out, get the game and try it out, make sure you get the expansion, and let us know in our forums how you feel about the game and post your own wish lists for us. Hopefully Fantasy Flight Games could take our comments and improve more on this product that with a few tweaks really has a lot of potential!

WoW Stratics Rating: 4/5

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