Don't drown in the hype...

Lords of Waterdeep is the newest in a line of Dungeons & Dragons themed games released by Wizards of the Coast.  The three previous games in the line were large box, miniature-heavy, dungeon crawlers very much in the vein of the original source material.  Lords of Waterdeep also mines the D&D mythos, but in a much different way.  Waterdeep tries to shoehorn all of the action of a D&D campaign into a European style worker placement game.  Waterdeep is very successful at being a Euro, but falls pretty flat at being a Dungeons & Dragons game.

For the record,  I am not a Dungeons & Dragons player.  I attempted one game and it went something like this:

DM: "You walk into this village, the townsfolk move in on you inquisitively.  The leader walks towards you with both arms raised above his head."

Me: "I slice the leader in half, and begin torching the village."

DM: "..."

*10 minutes later*

DM: "OK, all the villagers are dead, the town is ablaze..."

Me: "Awesome, I run back to the beach and steal their boat, and sail off for the treasure island."

DM: "Which direction is the treasure island?"

Me: "Uhhhh....left? I guess I should have looked for a map or something, huh?"

DM: *Sighs, closes notebook, grabs Star Trek CCG deck*  "You seed first, ok?"

Thankfully, you don't really need to know the Dungeon & Dragons brand at all to enjoy Lords of Waterdeep.  In Waterdeep, you play as one of the titular lords; these lords each give some sort of endgame bonus, and can help in directing your strategy as you play.  For example, the lord I played as in my first game gave a 4 point bonus for each Arcana and Warfare quest I completed.

As this is a worker placement game, you can expect that a game turn is pretty simple.  Each player starts the game with two workers...er, "Agents." You will gain a third after four turns.  When it is your turn, you place one agent onto a building and take the benefit of that building.  The board is laid out very well, there is a logical and clearly marked place for each building and card deck in the game.  The illustration on the board is supposed to be Waterdeep, but it looks more like a finished Carcassonne map to me.

The inn is probably the most important building in the game.  As you may suspect in a game themed from role-playing material, the inn is where you can gain more quests.  Since finishing quests is the way to gain points, you'll be visiting the inn quite often.  Each quest requires a number of adventurers to complete, so several of the other buildings on the board are various "adventurer's clubs" where you collect the appropriate people to take along with you.  You may also choose to go first in future turns, get some gold, draw an intrigue card (which may harm the other players), or even build a new building from the Building Hall.  These extra buildings are more powerful than the base buildings.  Unfortunately (for you) they are usable by all players; however, you will gain a small benefit if an opponent uses your building.

Poor attempt at a painfully artistic board shot

Overall, Lords of Waterdeep does the Euro thing extremely well.  Lords of Waterdeep is definitely a light-middle weight game.  There aren't many tricks up this game's sleeves.  The only gotcha moments come from the Intrigue cards.  These are pretty standard "take-that" cards that can help slow your opponents down.  All of this makes Waterdeep a great gateway game into the Euro / Worker Placement world. Where the game fails, for me at least, is in bringing the Dungeons & Dragons theme to the forefront.

As I said before, I'm not a D&D player (or a role-player of any type, to be honest), so I came into the game fearing that I would not "get" what was really going on.  However, that was not an issue at all.  In fact, since I was taught the game, I had no idea what most of the stuff I did actually meant in the world of D&D until I went back and read the rules myself.  Sure, your lords all have funny names, and the quests have text that tells you what your quest is all about, but none of that affects the game in the slightest.  It could have just as easily been a trading in the Mediterranean game.

With that being said, I did enjoy Lords of Waterdeep for what it is.  It is a beginner's Euro.  It's a great gateway game both for new game players, and for people looking to branch out from the role playing world by trying something with a comfortable theme.  Lords of Waterdeep is a fun game, but ultimately not one that I would add to my collection;  because I already have other games that do what this game does, but better such as Stone Age, Agricola, and even Leonardo da Vinci (a game I am more fond of than many, it seems)..