Wizards Head Down To Skullport Or Delve In Undermountain
July 25, 2013 by brennon
Wizards of the Coast are heading down to Waterdeep again and are uncovering more secrets as they plot in Scoundrels of Skullport. Check out some of the previews below...
The new set contains areas outside of the confines of Waterdeep including Undermountain, one of the most famous landmarks in the Dungeons & Dragons setting. The game is insanely good and offers a lot of replay value even after a dozen or so plays. I cannot recommend this game enough.
As well as the new locations, which you can see above incidentally, they have also added in a few more 'Lords' to include some bad guys. Some of the other true Lords might have had questionable morals but this new lot are going to be truly dark adversaries. This ties in well with their new mechanic which introduces corruption to the game.
As well as that there are brand new and longer quests meaning that your choices and party composition are going to be more important than ever!
I can't wait for this!
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I know that Waterdeep has a fanboy biased score on boardgame geek that makes it seem like a great game so what I’m going to say here will likely get flamed/discounted/scoffed at …but here goes.
First I have to say Lords of Waterdeep is a decent game, realistically it is a 7 out of 10 in my opinion. I very much enjoyed the game in the beginning, the first 3 or 4 plays through. But then our group slowly began to realize we had been getting several major things wrong. We are a pretty experienced gaming group with collectively hundreds of board games in our ownership, well over a decade of weekly game play, all sorts of stuff from 18xx, to Agricola, La Havre, etc. etc. lots of euro, classic Avalon Hill, etc. This was not by any means our first rodeo.
So we realized that in fact Lords of Waterdeep has a truly horrific rules layout, massive number of discrepancies, ambiguities and errors. Simply due to, again, again, again for WoTC poor editing/playtesting/wtf why ever they can’t seem to ever execute anything cleanly. To be expected from WoTC though as I don’t think since they have been WoTC they have released anything without huge amounts of errors, etc. I really like Lords of Waterdeep, the concept the basic mechanics of the game. But the rulebook is just bad.
Beyond even my own core home gaming group. In three different gaming groups that I am part of/have friends in/etc. there were identical experiences. When we started playing this game I ended up encountering very different rules interpretations, which is often to be expected, but with this game it took on a whole new level of WTF. Collectively after we started looking into it we realized it just came down to a very poorly written rulebook. Even the little instructional video WoTC produced was full of holes.
The other boardgames that WoTC has produced as of late have been sort of meh. Some ok D&D minis in some of them (Ravenloft for example) but other than that pretty boring and bland. Waterdeep was a nice departure for them so that trend is refreshing to see them continue. However for me personally I probably won’t even bother with this game based on my experience with Waterdeep.