The kid and I play a lot of games against each other, but if you want my honest opinion I think what we prefer are co-ops. We recently acquired the D&D Board game, Temple of Elemental Evil and have, so far, completed the first two adventures.
The Temple of Elemental Evil is a Board Game by Wizards of the Coast and is designed to be used with the other games in the Dungeons and Dragons Adventure series including, Legend of Drizzt and Castle Ravenloft, however, it also works beautifully as a stand-alone concept. This is a co-op dungeon delver where each player takes on the role of one of several heroes. I chose Talon, the Ranger while the Kid chose Nymmestra the Wizard. These choices are pretty standard for us but after doing a bot of research before starting I found that a higher player count would help us out so we added a third hero to the mix that we play jointly, Alaeros the Fighter. With both the ranger and wizard being ranged based units having a HP soaking melee fighter seemed necessary. I'm glad we did as I'm not sure how we would have completed adventure two without him!
The basic gameplay involves our heroes starting on a single start tile, investigating the rooms around them, building the dungeon as they go. Each new room contains traps, monsters or encounters, and usually in combination. However, each room and its contents are decided at random making it statistically impossible to have the same setup again. The replay value on this is high.
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| The final moments of the final encounter in adventure 2. |
Each adventure has certain rules and victory conditions as well as ways the treasure and encounter decks get modified based on how well you did in the adventure. For example, in each adventure you get two healing surges that can be used to bring a character back to life. If you complete the adventure without using any surges (we didn't) you get additional bonuses and rewards. In the second adventure we rescued a little wyrmling that gave us a positive card to add to our encounter deck (most of the cards in the encounter deck are bad.)
We're enjoying this run. After the first two adventures we're getting a real feel as to how the characters are meant to be played. I wish the trap system was a little easier to manage and have seen some solutions online that I may incorporate into future plays. (Like replacing the traps tokens on the board with gamer stones and putting all the trap tokens in a dice bag and drawing when we need to disarm or trip a trap.)
Overall a good co-op that we will see to it's conclusion.
Dungeons an Dragons: Temple of Elemental Evil
Me: 7 out of 10
The Kid: 8 out of 10
Wins- 2
Loses- 0
Critical Wins (no surges used)- 0
Overall Games Record:
Me-1
The Kid-0
Co-Op Wins-2
Co-Op Loses-0
Coming soon: Beware the Tides of Time!
