I’m not calling this a review, per se, even though I’m including it in the reviews category. I’m also including it in the session reports category, because it’s going to be a bit of both. I’m going to talk about some of my initial impressions of the game after playing it five times, and I’m going to describe (briefly) what happened in each session.

Let me start by saying this: my win-to-loss ratio in Castle Ravenloft is not what you’d call “good”. In fact, at one win and four losses, I’d say it’s pretty bad. That does not, however, mean that I think the game is bad. Quite the opposite actually; I enjoyed each game quite a bit, particularly because I never really felt that losing (or winning) was a foregone conclusion until, once or twice, right near the end. Another thing that I’d like to mention is that this game plays very well solo. Three of my five plays have been solo (using the included solo adventures), and they’ve all been a lot of fun.

Game One: Escape from the Tomb
I played the introductory solo scenario as my first game, using the dragonborn fighter and his recommended-for-beginners loadout of powers. I rolled badly initially and wound up swamped by a bunch of monsters that I hadn’t taken care of, but my dragon breath power got me out of that sticky spot. I used a wand of teleportation to get a wraith out of my hair and ran down a hallway, but I drew too many tiles with white triangles on them (in the initial scenario, these advance the sun track by a step, bringing you closer to Count Strahd’s awakening), and the vampire lord awoke and came to get me. I continued running down my hallway while Strahd and the wraith chased me, and eventually found that it was a dead end. I doubled back, but got stuck in a room with a crushing walls trap, and the two baddies quickly caught up to me. Between those three sources of damage, I went down pretty quickly. Game over.

I feel I made some tactical errors in this game, the most notable being that I had eleven or twelve experience points at the end, and hadn’t spent a single one. I could easily have canceled that crushing walls trap, which would have made things considerably easier, but forgot that I could. Lesson learned: spend your XP, don’t hoard them.

Game Two: Escape from the Tomb, Redux
This time I went in with the ranger. I was a little worried because of her relative squishiness compared to the fighter, but she more than makes up for it with offensive power. Careful attack is easily one of the best at-wills in the game. It may not seem like much, but the ability to automatically deal one damage to an adjacent monster at will is pretty big. Sadly, she didn’t fare much better. Strahd didn’t awaken this time, but pure attrition brought the ranger down. I do feel that, if I had had twin strike as an at-will instead of hunter’s shot, things might have gone better; there was one situation where it would likely have saved my life.

Game Three: Adventure – Impossible
This is a great adventure. It gives you the opportunity to play all (or most) of the characters, and gives you some experience with the villains, too. I started off with the cleric, and very quickly ran into the werewolf. What I discovered in short order is that the werewolf is extremely hard to kill if you don’t have a silver dagger or an at-will that does more than one point of damage. He regenerates one hit point every round, making it very difficult to make any headway against him. I mostly avoided him and explored, and soon ran into the zombie dragon. While the zombie dragon lacks the werewolf’s regeneration, it does have thirteen hit points, which is a challenge in and of itself.

The wizard followed the cleric, and he managed to deal some decent damage to the zombie dragon and take out a number of monsters before he went down. He didn’t last that long, though. Next came the rogue, and she was the one who finally bested the werewolf. A well-timed sneak attack, combined with a snipe shot and a riposte strike, took that beastie down. She also made some decent headway against the zombie dragon, and even leveled up, but failed to kill it. She went down, making way for the ranger.

Because of the ranger’s strong offensive capabilities, I was able to finally slay the zombie dragon, but not before an encounter card drew a tile from the bottom of the stack and teleported the dragon to that tile. Interestingly enough, that tile happened to be another villain-spawning tile, bringing the young vampire onto the board. The ranger killed the zombie dragon while the vampire slipped past her toward the entrance, and when she pursued, he killed her quickly.

Last was the fighter, and I was pretty sure I had it in the bag. Famous last words. Although the fighter is durable and can deal pretty good damage, the vampire heals himself every time he hits, and he was hitting a lot. He finally whittled me down and dropped my last hero.

Game Four: The Icon of Ravenloft
I finally convinced my wife to give the game a try, and she enjoyed it. She played the cleric while I played the rogue, and the two of them make a good team. Between my backstabbing and her lance of faith, we could one-shot pretty much any monster that got in our way, and we did so. We were getting a little worried when we got down to our last two or three hit points each, but we still had both of our healing surges when we found the chapel. We killed the two monsters on the tile (a wraith and a gargoyle), and made off with the Icon for my first win!

Game Five: Klak’s Infernal Artifact
Immediately after playing that game, I convinced her to play again. It wasn’t hard. This time she played the wizard to my fighter, and we went after that sneaky kobold sorcerer. We drew some nasty monsters early (wraiths, blazing skeletons, and gargoyles), and I had the misfortune to pull a spear gauntlet trap that did some significant damage to my poor fighter. We ran in the other direction, leaving it to do its thing. We started down a corridor and ran into a blazing skeleton, but by that time we each had two hit points and we had used both of our healing surges. Actually, I had used both of them; I had taken the tank role a little too seriously. The skeleton took the wizard out, and it was curtains for our mission.

Again, there was a tactical error that we made there. I had the bodyguard utility power, which would have allowed me to turn that hit into a miss. The next treasure card I drew (I killed the skeleton in the hopes that I’d get a healing potion for her) would have allowed us to heal one hit point every time we hit a monster, but that was too little too late. By the time we had figured out our error, though, the game was cleaned up.

Conclusions
I’m enjoying this game so far. I’m going to play some more over the weekend, probably both solo and group play, and I’m itching to try some of the more elaborate scenarios. I like that each of the characters feels different and has powers of varying complexity to use, and the monsters really wind up feeling pretty different from each other. I like that traps are deadly and nasty, and the encounter card system is a nice touch that makes it so that you never know what’s around the corner. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I may have rose-colored glasses on when I look at this game; I’ve been pretty excited about it for a good long time now. On the other hand, I’ve built it up in my head for quite a while, and so far it hasn’t disappointed me. Time will tell, but so far, so good.

Related posts:

1. Castle Ravenloft: The Rust Monster
2. Serenity: First Impressions
3. Impressions of Deliria
4. Oblivion: Preliminary Impressions
5. Keep on the Shadowfell initial impressions