Dungeons & Dragons: Lords of Waterdeep

In Lords of Waterdeep, you take on the role of one of the masked Lords of Waterdeep, the secret rulers of the city, you send out agents to recruit adventurers to complete quests in your name in hopes of accruing the most Victory Points to be crowned the greatest Lord in the city.

Basic Gameplay Overview

Waterdeep is played over 8 rounds, players take turns to send out agents from their pool to different locations to gain quests, recruit adventures, build buildings, gain money, or play intrigue cards.

Each player starts the game with a different secret lord card stating what the Lord scores bonus points for at the end of the game, most of these have two of the five quest types listed as their bonus point conditions, with one having bonus points for each building the player controls. This goal is secret from the other players and is a supplemental way to gain extra points at the end of the game.

Throughout the course of the game, you acquire quest cards in a number of different ways. Each quest has a requirement listed on the card consisting of different types of adventures and sometimes money. There are four types of adventures in the game:

You acquire these adventurers by assigning your agents, meeple figures in your player colour, to different locations on the board or playing an intrigue card, these adventurers are then placed on your player board in your tavern till they are used to complete quests. Completed quests reward you with Victory Points, more adventures, or even abilities.

Buildings can be built from a location on the board at a cost shown on the building tile itself, these add new locations with usually more appealing benefits to those standard on the board. However, when another player uses a building, the owner of the building gains a bonus so you can end up assisting another player in the process of gaining good resources.

Another type of card you gain during the game is intrigue cards, these can be played at one location on the board and can gain you adventurers, quests, buildings, or even be used to play a mandatory quest on another player to slow them down.

At the end of the game, you add 1 Victory point to your total for every leftover adventurer in your tavern, 1 Victory Point for every 2 coins, and any bonuses you get from your secret lord card which is now revealed. Whoever has the most Victory Points is the winner.

How It Plays

The basic gameplay sequence for Waterdeep is very easy to pick up and doesn’t get any more complex over the game, your main challenge usually comes from the other players. Most spaces on the board are limited to one agent a round so you are in direct competition to try to secure what you need before other players can, if another player gets there before you it can delay you in completing a quest, this makes the location that gains you the first player token a more valuable space the further into the round you are. That decision of using one of your agents this round to secure that token over gaining money or adventures just to make sure no one else can take those two rogues from you next round may sound like it’s not the best use of a turn from the outside but scoring that 25 Victory Point quest a couple turns quicker can be the difference between winning or not.

So let’s talk about the difference player number makes to the game. I played recently with a four-player group, a five-player group, and a two-player group. First off the gameplay difference between four players and five players is minimal, just takes a little longer and more buildings tend to be built.

Between a four-player game and a two-player, the core game experience itself does not change you still feel like you are making progress towards quests and your secret goal between the games, helped in part by the fact that the number of agents each player starts with is changes depending on the player count. In a two-player game, you start with 4 agents and gain the usual extra agent at the start of the 5th round bringing your total up to 5 agents. While in a four-player game, you start with just two agents and get the extra agent in the 5th round bringing your total up to 3 agents. This allows each round to play fairly similarly between player counts with the board feeling like it has plenty of choice on your first turn but by the time your last turn of the round is here the board is looking full and you need to weigh up which of the limited options left will benefit you best in the long run.

What does change between a two-player game and a four-player game is a sense of more personal competition and playtime. In a two-player game, the only other person at the table is your sole competitor, this is the person you are trying to beat to the best locations, tempt with the buildings you constructed to net you bonuses, and this is the only person each card will affect. If you are playing an intrigue card to gain two Fighters and the card says to choose another player to gain one Fighter, you can’t pick another player who doesn’t need fighters to give it to like in a four-player game, it has to go to the other player and in my experience, it always seemed to benefit them.

This direct competition does sometimes lead you to more carefully observe what the other player is going for, I found it easier to notice a pattern in the quests they were picking up and completing, and it was easier to know what they were working to and figure out if I could block them in a way that didn’t disadvantage myself. It felt like it brought more competition to the game but did mean you couldn’t be as sneaky in a “pay no attention to me or my quests look at the person who just completed two quests back to back and ignore the fact the victory points on my one nearly completed quest is greater than their two combined” like in larger player number games where you can almost hide in plain sight if you don’t draw attention to yourself. Both gameplays felt rewarding but did seem to require a little tweak in how to go about your quests and lord objective.

Though the box says 60 minutes I’d say that would be about right for a three-player game of people who have played at least once before. For the four-player and five-player games, I had multiple people who hadn’t played before so the first 2 rounds were a little slow but even then they both ran 2 hours, I would say the player count means the board changes a lot between your turns and you need to keep adapting your plan and can lead to people needing to take a moment to figure out what they are going to do. While in my two-player game, me and my partner had played a couple of times before so we got right into the swing of things straight away. Even though you have more turns per round, the board does not change a lot between turns so there ends up being fewer pauses to figure out my plan moments in the game. Our two-player game probably lasted about 45 to 50 minutes which was about what I was expecting.

Does knowing anything about D&D matter?

This was the first question I was asked when introducing Waterdeep to my regular group, and I think it was a fair question to ask as Dungeons & Dragons is mentioned on the cover and it is set in a city in the D&D universe. However, the answer is no, you do not need to know D&D to enjoy Waterdeep. You can go as deep into the lore and setting as you want or ignore most of it completely.

I know some of the D&D lore and the first time I played Waterdeep years ago I was playing with D&D lovers so we picked our factions based on who they were, we read each quest title and information sentence, called the adventures by their class names, and made a point to say each of the location names on the board when placing an agent there. But that was because that was what that group wanted to do, and it was enjoyable to play it that way.

My three most recent games have been with people who vary from playing D&D on the regular to knowing basically nothing about the game, and in these gameplays, we picked what faction we wanted to be based on the colour that faction was, we weren’t reading the quest or location names, called the adventures by their cube colours. However, our game experience was just as good. The theme is there if you want it but understanding of the lore isn’t needed to enjoy the game.

Components

I’m going to start this section by mentioning that Waterdeep was originally published in 2012, and unlike other older games has never received an updated version. So all components in Waterdeep are the same as they were when it was originally manufactured, and our expectations for game components have been raised a little in the over a decade since Waterdeep was originally published.

This means the components are a little below most people’s current expectations for a game like this, especially with a company like Wizards of the Coast behind it. It’s nothing drastic and only most noticeable when playing it after a more recently published game.

The element that lets some of these components down comes mostly from the thickness, the punch-out cardboard pieces and the playing cards themselves feel a little thin. Handling the money, buildings, point tokens, and building control markers they don’t feel as robust as other games they are around 2mm thick compared to the current standard being around 3mm. The lord, quest, and intrigue cards feel like they would be easy to accidentally crease or bend in comparison to other game cards.

The other letdown is colour matching, some of the adventurer cubes aren’t the same colours as they are on the board and cards. They are a similar colour but not an exact match, the purple isn’t as vibrant as the colour on the cards, and the white comes across as more of a light cream. These are colours I have seen other games manage to achieve in their wooden components, so it’s not like it’s an impossibility to achieve.

However, there are plenty of good points to be made about the components these include; the unique artwork on the quest cards, the texture of the cards and cardboard pieces, the details of having a hole in each of the money pieces to match the lore, the inclusion of player area boards to make organising your player space accurately easier, just to name a few. The good points of the components help make up for some of the shortcomings of the game’s age.

Final Thoughts

Lords of Waterdeep is a great introduction to worker placement games that is accessible to new and experienced boardgame players. The simple gameplay loop makes it an easy game to teach but you rarely have the same game twice thanks to the different lords, number of quests, intrigue cards, and buildings. The slightly varied play at different player counts makes for a game that’s easy to bring out no matter what group you have around, while still keeping the core gameplay the same.

The theme of the game is well integrated in a way that makes it accessible to both fans and not of the D&D universe and though it isn’t vital to the gameplay it is there to add another layer if you so wish.

The components are a product of the game age, and though I would love to see an updated version with better components, I wouldn’t want to see them change the gameplay or rules as it still plays amazingly. Maybe just a big box that bundles in the expansions, and makes the pieces a little thicker.

Overall a fun welcoming introduction to worker placement that will be on my shelf and my table for years to come.