Wrath of Ravenloft... Erm, I mean, Castle Ashardalon

We finally gathered a couple friends for some expeditions into Castle Ravenloft on Saturday night, and we had a pretty damn good time. We played the adventure with the kobold sorcerer Klak, who is an obnoxious, cowardly villain, as he regularly explores more of the board, which spawns more and more monsters to get in our way. We did eventually defeat him and his chaos-inducing artifact, though. 

The second adventure we played was the revenge of the Night Hag, and we managed to handle that one pretty well. Good rolls helped a lot. It was definitely an interesting one, as each of the players start play at each of four corners of a five-by-five tile grid, and often got teleported around the board by the Night Hag. 

In the morning, we played a Wrath of Ashardalon adventure with our two boys, aged 6 and 9. The goal was to sneak into Ashardalon's lair, recover a certain treasure, and then escape with it. We had to use three healing surges, but it worked out at the last second, as Gabby found the treasure and we escaped by the skin of our teeth. It was definitely a tense few moments there, especially as the monsters ganged up on Gabby in the turn before she could escape, and the Rage Drake, the Cave Bear, and Ashardalon himself ALL missed! Whew!

On another note, my friend Kevin, who joined us for Ravenloft last night, came bearing a gift: the World of Warcraft board game. He apparently got it on sale over a year ago, at half-price, played it once, found it to be entirely too complicated, and never did much with it since. So he brought it over and gave it to us! While it is definitely a complicated game, with a lot of moving parts and stuff to keep track of, it does come with a SHIT-TON of miniatures! Good God! Over a hundred monsters and a dozen heroes and villains! Some are perfect fits for custom homebrewed Heroes and Monsters for the D&D Adventure System games, and most of them will get extensive use in our regular 4th Edition game, whenever the hell we actually get to play again. There's like 18 Gnolls, so I'm thrilled, not to mention great figures for elementals, wraiths, sahuagin, demons, younger dragons and drakes, werewolves, human bandits/warriors... The heroes and villains are also all very nice, and I think several of them will find use in Castle Ravenloft and the Wrath of Ashardalon. I used one of them for the Ranger in the game this morning with the kids! The wife and I are fixing to start painting a lot of the figures this week, and I'll be posting up photos of the final products as we finish them.