Review: World of Warcraft - The Board Game, Page 2
The First Battle
Both groups were within one movement action of a quest group, so the second round saw us all in battle. The first battle went to the Horde.
The battle mechanics are quite interesting. Each character gets a number of dice of three different colors, based on their stats, skills, and equipment. Blue dice represent ranged attacks or direct damage, red dice represent melee attacks, and green dice represent defense. Each creature has a 'threat' value, which determines what is needed to hit them - in our first battle, the Horde was fighting a single Murloc, which has a threat value of five.
Each player takes turns totalling up their number of dice, which can be modified by their skills, and rolling them against the creature in a single roll. Note that there are only seven die of each color - this is actually an important limit as any number greater than this is lost, so you don't want to focus your character too narrowly. Once the dice are rolled, the player has a chance to use any skills that modify dice rolls or that allow a reroll. Finally, all the dice that are greater than the threat of the target creature are totaled up, and markers are placed on a special section of the game board to represent the hits. Once all the players are done rolling, and all the markers for the round are on the board, we move to damage resolution.
Before any damage is done by the target creature, all damage in the direct damage box is applied. If there's enough markers in the Damage box to kill a creature, that many markers and the creature are removed from the battle. Unfortunately, in this case, there was only one marker in the Damage area, from the ranged attacks, which wasn't enough to kill the Murloc (which has a whopping two hit points). Since we're still going, the creature now gets its chance to attack.
When a creature attacks, you take its attack rating (which is three in the case of the Murloc) and start removing tokens from the Melee/Defense box, starting with the defense tokens. With two defense tokens and four damage tokens in the box, this left three damage tokens at the end. Now that the creature has gotten its attack, the remaining tokens are moved to the Damage box. These counters pushed the total up to four, and that was more than enough to slay the Murloc! The quest was complete, and the Horde gained a bit of gold and experience, as well as a new quest.
Battle Mechanics
That battle system sounds a bit confusing, doesn't it? It takes a few battles to get used to, but once you understand it, it makes a lot of sense. Here's a bit more detail on how it plays out, and how that reflects game characters:
- Direct Damage Kills
If you get enough ranged damage, which goes directly into the damage box, you can kill creatures before their turn. Some skills can also convert melee damage to direct damage, like rogue ambush skills, or defense tokens into direct damage, like damage shields. This represents being able to kill things before they counter. - Defense = Defense
When the creatures attack, your have to be able to take the hits. Ideally, you'll have more defensive tokens than the targets have attack. Rolling a lot of defensive die represents heavy armor or damage prevention spells. - Melee Damage = Defense
If you don't have enough defense tokens, your melee damage tokens will be used as defense. Anything left will be converted to damage. If you still don't have enough, you'll have to distribute whatever you couldn't prevent amongst the characters in the battle. - Damage Carries Over
Even if you can't kill the target(s) in one round, any damage from the previous round will carry over. As soon as the tokens in the damage box exceed the hit points of the target, it gets removed from battle.
What does this mean? Well, ranged damage is great, if you can kill a creature before it gets to attack. If you can't, you're better off having melee and defense instead though, because that will keep you from getting hurt. Of course, melee damage is better than defense, because it can be used for both, but with the limit of seven die you really need to balance it out.
Moving On
Like the Horde battle, the Alliance had no problem with their initial quest, and both sides quickly moved on to their next quest target. Because the team members were all sticking together, the initial batch of quests wasn't generating much in the way of rewards - it takes five experience to get to level two, while these quests were only giving four to be divided amongst all the members.
The next set of quests, both quite easy, went equally as well. Unfortunately, things took a turn for the worse for the Alliance. When we chose to draw a new quest card after completion we went for a yellow card, and it spawned a 'random' Wildkin right on top of us. Unfortunately, the rules of the game say that if there's a random mob in your space, you cannot do any action other than challenging it to battle. We were pretty much stuck.
Next round, the Horde group managed to finish their third quest, and Azhrarn's shaman hit level two, with the others only needing one more xp each. Instead of moving on to another quest, the Alliance had to challenge the Wildkin, and things got pretty ugly. Perhaps we didn't choose the best skills for our characters, maybe we can blame things on bad rolls, but the first round of battle ended with two damage on the Wildkin and five hit points worth of damage on us. It was obvious how this was going to end. Two more rounds later and it was over - Wildkin: 3, Alliance: 0.
The death sent all three of us back to the nearest graveyard, which happened to also be in our starter town, and removed all the rest of our actions, which ended the round. On the other side, the binkplayboy and missus Hunter/Druid duo hit level two, restoring their health and earning them their first talents. Scooting back to town, the Horde all trained up some new level two skills before heading back out.
With only one hit point and one energy each, our first action of the next round had to be devoted to rest. We had also accumulated a bit of gold, so we took our second actions and bought another skill each. Although there was no penalty for the death, losing these two full rounds definitely made us the weaker faction, and ended up making us a lot more cautious in picking the higher level quest cards.
