I love how every player gets a feel for what it’s like to both role play their hero and what it’s like to control monsters, lay out the map, describe encounters etc. These games make it simple enough that even kids who are just starting to get good at reading and math can play. The stat cards use smaller numbers than other editions do so that doing the math in your head is really easy. Your bowshot attack may only do 1 damage for example, but then the creatures you are shooting at may only have 4 HP to start with. Really, playing these games made me have an “aha” moment. I realized just how needlessly inflated the stats for the RPG versions have gotten. If you keep it all in scale, you don’t need big numbers to make things impressive. A huge dragon that does 5 damage with his fire breath might not sound too impressive to those used to the RPGs, but when your hero in the board game only has 12 HP to start with, that’s plenty impressive enough You still get to decide which powers your hero has and you even have a chance to level up to level 2 (assuming you live that long, this game can be as brutally tough on heroes as some of the D&D video games like Eye of the Beholder depending on how you use the healing surges).

Once you’ve played through all of the published scenarios that come with it (and the free ones on the website), you can play them all again since the puzzle-like tiles and randomized monster and encounter cards ensure that each game you play is different from the last one.

It also makes a great starting point for new DMs (or old ones who need some inspiration). You can take the encounters and scenarios from these board games and build whole campaigns out of them. I’m even tempted to take the simplified stats, defenses, attacks etc. and use them in my next “full blown” D&D RPG campaign. It might help some of my players to focus more on the story and less on the “crunch”.

Can’t wait to publish the second issue of Tales of High Adventure too! There’s some good stories there, it’ll be fun.