Fantasy Smackdown 2007

Warhammer Quest… oh how I love thee. Let me count the ways…

I have mentioned a time or two that my local gaming group (3 counts as a group right?), Mike Churchill, John Beaty and I, have recently started playing Warhammer Quest. In fact we will be getting together tomorrow night to finish up an adventure we started last week, so I thought this would a good time to introduce the world of WQ to those of you who haven’t yet experienced this fine game.

I first got introduced to WQ back when I lived in Austin, roughly 8 years ago. My friend Luiz Gaipo invited me to play in a game he was running for Taj, Bill Ard and his wife. I knew nothing about the game, but I’m always up for trying new games, especially in the fantasy realm.

I played an Ogre, Bill played a Troll Slayer (dwarf), Angela played a Pitfighter, and Taj played the Wizard. We only got to play a few game sessions, but it was a ton of fun, and every since then I had been eager to play again.

Sadly, the game is out-of-print, but you can still find copies of it on E-bay if you don’t mind shelling out a lot of clams. I recently picked up a copy, with all the expansions, for $230. Ouch!

The game is a mixture of role-playing and board game. How much of a mixture is purely up to the players/GM, the rules are very flexible. In the purest form, it’s a board game with aspects of role-playing. The game supports solo play up to 4 players (can have more, but 4 is ideal). In fact, you don’t even need a GM.

How the game works, each player first chooses a character, or in this case Warrior, to play. There are a dozen or so “official” Warrior archetypes to choose from. Then you randomly select an Adventure from a list of 30 pre-generated adventures. Once that is out of the way, you randomly select 12 dungeon tile cards and add in the Adventure Objective Room card that was previously chosen. These cards represent the dungeon you must enter and explore to complete the adventure.

Sigurd Jarlsson the King’s Champion (Barbarian), Tanthalas (Elf) both played by John B., and Thorgrim Brokenshield (Dwarf), Garin the Bold (Wizard) both played by Mike C.

At the start of the game, the players place their Warriors on the first tile of the dungeon. Only tiles that they have explored are revealed. The rest are kept secret until such time. Each time the Warriors discover a Room tile a random encounter is generated. Once the bad guys have been dispatched, a random Treasure Card is generated as loot. The players can then decide who gets it, or they can alternate. The loot can be anything from gold, armor, weapons or magical items.

As the Warriors explore the dungeon they collect these treasures to help them complete the adventure. In addition, each time they slay a beast they get experience points in the form of gold. At the end of the adventure, they can exchange their gold for advancement their character a level, purchase better armor, weapons, horses, or a vast number of other things.

The game advances in phases and turns. Each turn is broken down into 4 phases.

* Power Phase
* Warrior Phase
* Monster Phase
* Exploration Phase

During the Power Phase the Wizard of the party rolls a D6. The amount rolled is how many spell points he has available to spend that turn (not counting Reserve Spell points). Any unused points are wasted. If the Wizard happens to roll a 1 in the Power Phase, this also triggers an event, which could be anything from a deadly trap, a discovery of a new room, or another encounter with more bad guys.

Their first encounter, the party faces off against a horde of undead guarding a heavily bound chest.

Once the encounters are dealt with, and assuming the players are still alive, they can continue exploring. The goal here is to find the Objective Room so you can complete the Adventure.

An overview of the map so far. The Heroes managed to clear the room, but we ran out of time to finish the rest of the adventure.

If the Warriors are successful in completing their Objective, they can choose to go travel back to town (which can possibly generate more encounters and events) or start the next adventure.

There’s a lot more to the game than what I’ve outlined here, but this gives you a basic overview of how the game works. If anyone has any specific questions, feel free to ask.

The beauty of WQ is you can make it as random or planned as you want. The game I’m running for John and Mike is a mixture of both. I created the dungeon, the Room encounters, the Objective Room encounters and then let the dice randomly selected everything else.

As Mike, John and even Bill will attest to, it’s a very addictive game, and one that I highly recommend to those of you who enjoy these types of games. You can see the rest of the photos here. I'll post the rest of them next week once we complete the game.

Until next time…

~Michael