World of Warcraft: The Adventure Game
World of Warcraft: The Adventure Game
World of Warcraft: the Adventure Game is an exciting and fast-paced journey through the world of Azeroth for 2 to 4 players. Choose your favorite hero and embark on an epic journey from humble beginnings to immense power, battling vicious monsters, powerful overlords, and your treacherous fellow players! Will you be the mightiest hero in all the land?
User Ratings and Reviews
2 Stars Thematically perfect, fun-factor flawed
As a former World of Warcraft player and a long-time board gamer, I was anxious to see how this more affordable, quicker version of the humongous World of Warcraft board game pared down. The box is awesome, the rules are tight, and the components are top notch when they are present. Present, you ask? Well, they decided to print the cards double sided. This way you do a task/quest or fight an encounter and on the other side is the item you found. It makes for awkward card handling and less repeatable future game plays (you’ll know if a task is worth the effort).
The game requires you to take on one of the familiar Warcraft classes and each class gets a host of skills/spells to help it along. Unfortunately, some classes just play better on this ruleset than others. This makes for lopsided games rather quickly.
The theme of Warcraft highlights the best of intentions and the worst of gameplay. The board is sectioned off into levels. Green for beginners, yellow for harder, red even harder and so on. Because of the size of the board, there are only a few spaces you can move that will be ‘green’ level when you start. A few bad encounters early and you are stuck pinned in. If you can’t beat the level boss to move to the next tier, it is miserable.
The game truly feels like warcraft in theme. They did an awesome job of tailoring game mechanics to board mechanics. It just does not have the fun element. It is interesting as a game conversion, but fails as a game.
4 Stars Different flavour than the big one. Still fun.
Having played (and enjoyed!) FFG’s other World of Warcraft boardgame (henceforth WoWBG) many times, we thought we’d give the Adventure Game version (henceforth WoWTAG) a try. It was a lot more than just a pared down retranslation of the larger game; in fact, WoWTAG was an entirely different kind of game.
Both games tackle different aspects of the online game whose name they borrow. WoWBG fantastically implemented the different character classes: the feeling of leveling up characters, learning spells, and evolving one’s talent tree. Teamwork was also a big emphasis and mobs were all represented with little plastic figurines (or dolls, if you like). Questing, however, solely involved kill quests.
WoWTAG involves less of the minutiae of character management and focuses more on translating the feeling of Azeroth’s atmosphere. There are travel quests, kill quests, and pvp quests. And the rewards one picks up are much more diverse. The game uses a system of limiting one’s geographical boundaries based on one’s character’s level (much as the online game does) - we found this helpful for keeping us from biting off more than we can chew.
Having played all four character classes, we’re happy at how differently they play and yet how they really do seem to balance well. We’re looking forward to the release of other character packs as expansions next month–which we’re also hoping will allow us to bump the max number of players up from four to around six (four tends to limit who we can play with). WoWTAG also moves at a much quicker clip than WoWBG, which tends to bog down in later rounds when players become embroiled in much more complicated fights.
When comparing the two games, my wife (who’s never played the online game) prefers WoWTAG–as WoWBG is slightly more complicated than she’d prefer. I personally prefer WoWBG (though not by a huge margin) mostly because I really enjoy the character-building aspect of that game (and like putting together a nice frost mage or a feral durid!).
And of course, both of us prefer Puerto Rico! (but since you can’t always play the same game, both WoW boardgames have found happy places in our round of backups.
Filed under: MMORPG Toy Reviews