Play On! - Lords of Waterdeep
“Welcome to Waterdeep, the City of Splendors! You are a Lord of Waterdeep, one of the secret rulers of this great city. Through your Agents, you recruit Adventurers to complete Quests and advance your agendas. The Lords of Waterdeep all have the safety of their city at heart, but each one is also laying his or her own plans! Through backdoor dealings, mercenaries, and plain old bribery, can you guide the city to become the greatest Lord of Waterdeep?”
Who doesn’t want to play a game whose first words immediately immerse you into the fictional realm of the game? Lords of Waterdeep is a Dungeons and Dragons themed board game with four core elements of gameplay: assuming the role of a lord, recruiting adventurers, accepting and completing quests, and working to claim victory as the top lord over the entire city. Of course, performing these actions always comes at a price. Coins are the currency of Waterdeep, but they are almost a worthless currency as they are only used to buy buildings. Everything else is done through the exchange of agents. In a three player game, each lord receives three agents and a fourth after the fifth round of gameplay. These agents are used to recruit adventurers, claim victory points, gain quests, and acquire the ability to do backdoor dealings like stealing resources from other lords. In each round, players take turns placing their agents on the board and completing the actions of their agents. After each turn, a lord may complete a quest, thereby acquiring victory points. The player with the most victory points by the end of the eighth round is deemed the highest lord of the city and thus the winner of the game.
When my boyfriend first told me the title of this game, I had immediate thoughts of games I’d played previously with equally complex titles and absurdly complex rules to match. I groaned and pleaded not to play this game, because I am not a fan of large campaign games that take hours and hours of my life. This was a case where I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong as this game was not at all hard to learn nor did it take forever to play and it was fun. I was also very impressed with the structure of the rulebook. Despite being a ten page rulebook, it took little than fifteen minutes to read and completely understand. As the three of us played, we encountered few problems in the beginning. Each of us had our own agendas to accomplish and we seemed to need different resources. There was momentum in all of our actions as we all were able to swoop in and gather what we needed. Then the fifth turn hit, and we all received our fourth agent. This is when game behaviors changed drastically. Having a fourth agent reduced the number of resources for all by about a third. Players became greedier in their strategies for agent placement. We had wondered what the point was of having a resource that allowed for the first player spot to be stolen before this point. There seemed no obvious benefit to being first player. However, once the fourth agents arrived, it was clear that this resource was precious in allowing a player to grab for their resources first. It was a battle of wits from there to the end of the game, working to inhibit other player’s movements while advancing my own. In the end, I came out victorious due to my strategy of procuring the first player spot more often than my opponents.
Throughout the game, we mostly ignored buying buildings in favor of directly gaining resources from the pool. Instant gratification and the fear of being the last to grab resources kept us from pursuing this strategy. We minimized our risk taking to avoid having to invest long-term in a plan that may or may not work in favor of plans that could be executed within one turn successfully. However, at the introduction of the fourth agent, we realized that the need to fiercely compete for resources could have been alleviated with the building of more resource pools. At this point, though, it was too late to begin investing in buildings as they take up valuable agents and take time to build up value for the player who invested. Being unaware of this until the end greatly limited our ability to vary our strategies throughout the game.
For me, the lack of risk taking in the game signified to me a betrayal in one of James Paul Gee’s fundamental traits of game play. He says that a good game should encourage players to take more and more risks as the game progresses, but the way in which we played Lords of Waterdeep did not encourage this type of play. However, other traits of good games did show themselves such as system thinking. Resource management, being able to read your opponents for their next moves, and resource allocation were individual moves that forced players to figure out how their own moves linked together would maximize their earning potential while minimizing their opponents’. Player manipulation and distributed knowledge also made their appearance in this game through the lord that you assume and his hidden agenda that you are in charge of exploiting.
Overall this game is a great teacher of micromanaging resources, learning how to read other player's’ behaviors to manipulate gameplay, as well as forming and reforming strategies based on in the moment evaluations. This is a game that will get a lot of replayability in my house, because it was easy, fun, and has the potential for more types of strategies even though we got pigeonholed into just a few our first time playing it through.