Playing Games at PAX, Part Three: Dungeon Crawl

I may have mentioned before that, aside from having missed the entirety of Star Trek: The Next Generation, another gap in my geek resume is that I'd never actually played Dungeons & Dragons before. In middle school I made up my own "mazes" for friends, using d6s for attacks and generally just making things up as I went along. Well, with the big RPG contingent at PAX, I figured I'd give it a shot to see what it was like. In addition to D&D, there were several other games this weekend that involved dungeons and monsters. Here are some of the highlights:

• Dungeons & Dragons Red Box
• Thunderstone
• Key Master's Dungeon
• Castle Ravenloft
• Munchkin Zombies and something more...

All in all, I had a fantastic time at PAX and would gladly go again. Except next time my card games are going in my checked luggage. (Keep reading; you'll see.)

In case you missed them earlier, you can read Parts One and Two of Playing Games at PAX.

Fellow GeekDad Michael Harrison arranged for us to try out the Red Box, which is a starter kit in their D&D Essentials line. It has everything you need to get started, including a map, sample adventures, monster and hero tokens, rulebooks and tips on creating characters. After a quick tour of the D&D Party Bus, we settled in for my first-ever D&D adventure.

Mike Mearls of Wizards of the Coast was our DM and provided us with pre-made characters and then ran us through an encounter, which involved some orcs, goblins, a necromancer, and a giant ball of limbs. Our experience with D&D was across the board: I was a total newbie, Dave hadn't played in ages, Ken has just been getting back into it with his sons, and Michael plays pretty regularly. Mike quickly explained things like Armor Class and Saving Rolls and other terms I'd heard lobbed around before but never knew exactly what they meant. The encounter lasted about an hour and a half and we emerged triumphant, though there were some pretty close calls.

I know Michael will be reviewing the Red Box in more detail so I won't go into too much detail here. It was pretty fun and I can definitely see why RPGs can consume hours and hours of your time. Personally, I think I'll still lean towards board games myself, but I wouldn't be opposed to trying some more D&D eventually.

The last game of the day on Friday was Thunderstone with all four GeekDads in atttendance and Cathi. Thunderstone is a "deck-building" game, with (I'm told) some similarities to both Dominion and Ascension, which I haven't played yet. It's not a collectible card game, however—the base game comes with over five hundred cards, which you can randomize or select to have a different experience each time you play. In each game there's a Village area featuring four types of heroes, and twelve other types of cards which can be weapons, spells, helpful villagers, and other items. There's also a dungeon with a bunch of nasty monsters, and the eponymous Thunderstone which everyone is after.

You get six cards from your deck, and then decide to visit the village to stock up on supplies and hire heroes, or tackle the monsters from the dungeon. Everyone builds their own deck, so the trick is to have a good combination of cards in the deck so that you're likely to get six in your hand that will be of use together. It was a pretty fun game, and our fearless leader Ken took the victory with a whopper of a last turn. I played again on Saturday, this time with the Wrath of the Elements expansion thrown in, but it was a pretty rough game with some extremely difficult monsters to fight. I like Thunderstone and I'd like to play more, but I can see that the initial selection of cards can make or break the game.

I should also point out here that if you decide, like me, to take Thunderstone on a trip with you, you should put it in your checked luggage and not your carry-on. This trip was the third time I've been stopped at security for having card games in my suitcase—apparently they're dense and show up as just black on the X-ray. On my way home from PAX I had well over a thousand cards among the various games I was taking home, and ended up spending an extra twenty minutes at security while they got it all sorted out. I did have a fun conversation with the TSA supervisor (who was an Avalon Hill gamer of old) and another TSA guy who admired my GeekDad sweatshirt and asked about it. (If you're reading this, welcome to the site!)

Saturday morning was our very own "Raising Geek Generation 2.0" panel, so I didn't get around to playing games until afterward. At the panel, I was approached by a guy from ITT Technical Institute who said I really needed to stop by their booth to try Key Master's Dungeon, a game designed by a group of students as part of a game design class. Andrew Harshman gave me a quick overview of the game, which involves a randomized modular board, locked doors, and a treasure room at the center. The game is still in development so I'm sure they're still tweaking rules, but it was fun to try it out. It reminded me a little bit of Amazeing Labyrinth only without the shifting walls. You uncover bits of the path as you move, and moving onto each new tile requires you to open a lock, either by rolling a d6 or having the right key. While the game mechanics themselves were not totally original, it was great to see students actively designing and playtesting games, and I think a game design course is a very cool idea.

I chatted with Andrew a little bit about the course and gave him some feedback on the game. The biggest advice I can give a game designer, though, is this: play lots of games. That's how you see what separates a great game from a mediocre game, learn about the many different mechanics for making a game work, and see what's already been done.

At the D&D encounter on Friday, we'd gotten a glimpse of the new D&D board game: Castle Ravenloft. Ken got a copy to take home and is planning to review it with his sons (despite our best efforts to convince him that the box was just too big to fit in his luggage). However, thanks to Andrew at Giant Fire Breathing Robot we got to try it out before PAX ended. Ravenloft uses some of the D&D battle rules, provides pre-made characters and a bunch of scenarios, and turns D&D into a board game that doesn't require a dungeon master to play. It takes a little bit to get set up and learn the rules, but it's not too complex once you get going. Hardcore RPG players might find it a little too simple compared to the full Dungeons & Dragons experience, but for a newbie (and board gamer) like me it was just right.

The board is a modular tile system, and you flip a new tile if you're on an edge at the end of your turn. Each tile comes with a monster, and some have additionally an Encounter—usually something nasty, but very occasionally something that can help. Instead of initiative, each player takes a turn in order, and then activates the monster and trap cards they drew. So it does work out that every hero and monster gets an action each round, in a particular order, without having to keep track of initiative.

We played the basic starting scenario, looking for the sun icon in a chapel, and emerged triumphant although not without nearly losing our wizard once. It's a lot of fun, and I'm considering getting a set for myself—though it wouldn't have fit in my carry-on bag so I opted not to buy one right away. (Thanks for letting us play it through, Andrew!)

You read that right: Munchkin Zombies! Now, I have to admit that I've only played Munchkin once or twice and I'm not a huge fan—it's fun with the right crowd but doesn't offer the depth of strategy that I tend to like. But I love that Munchkin comes in so many different flavors and I like the humorous take on the genres. Munchkin Zombies might actually get me to finally pick up a copy. I didn't get to play, but I did see some Steve Jackson Games employees doing some playtesting at PAX—one guy told me this was the first "outside" playtesting they've done for this so it really is an early peek. You can see that the cards are just plain text, without John Kovalic's excellent artwork.

And speaking of John Kovalic and Munchkin, here's our suggestion for the next in the series: Munchkin GeekDad.

John was kind enough to make these caricatures of us for our GeekDad panel to use in our slideshow, immediately making us the envy of all the other GeekDads (including those who made it to PAX East earlier this year). I think we've got a pretty good start—once we throw in all the rest of the contributors, we might as well turn it into a full-fledged Munchkin game, right?