Lords of Waterdeep: A Review (Gameplay)

Tonight we played Lords of Waterdeep for the first time.  I have to admit that I did not expect to enjoy the game as much as I did.  By the third turn, the other two players in our three-man game were also commenting about how much they were enjoying the game.

The player actions are divided into turns and rounds.  In each round, each player gets to perform two actions: assign an agent to a particular place in Waterdeep and, if he has enough resources, perform a quest.  After all players have had an opportunity to assign an agent and do a quest, the round is over but not the turn.  If players still have agents in their pool, another round is played.  A turn is over when there are no agents available in any of the players' pool.  For example, in our three-man game, we started with three agents each.  That means we played three rounds per turn. The game ends after the eighth turn.

Being my first Euro-style game, a few things baffled me at first.  For example, before the first turn of the game, all players receive a certain amount of gold.  If on your first turn you go straight to the Builder's Hall to buy a building, that can leave you without a single gold piece.  I expected we'd all get additional gold at the beginning of each following turn.  Not so.  That's where the fun of managing resources in this game resides.

When your turn comes to send out an agent, there's a few things you have to consider.  Do you want to send your agent to the Cliffwatch Inn for a quest?  After all, completing quests will give you immediate victory points and resources, and may also give you an end game bonus if the quest is part of your Lord's secret end.  However, you need gold and adventurers to complete quests.  Maybe you need to send him somewhere else to start hiring the adventurers you will need and gathering the gold for the quest.  Sometimes your best bet for advancement is hindering your opponents.  With the right intrigue card, you can send your agent to the Waterdeep Harbor and find someone to kill one or two of your opponents' adventurers.

My randomly assigned Lord for this game was Durnan the Wanderer - A retired adventurer, Durnan owns the Yawning Portal, a tavern that stands above an entrance to Undermountain.  Since Durnan grants you 4 victory points at the end of the game for each commerce quest and warfare quest completed, my initial strategy was to start gathering those types of quests.  Unfortunately, Cliffwatch Inn was full of skullduggery quests.  Thus, I focused on playing intrigue cards in order to hinder the advancement of the other players.  In retrospect, that was not the best thing to do.  If I could do it all over again, I'd focus instead on gathering adventurers and gold for the turns when the commerce and warfare quests eventually hit the table.  Regardless, I finished in second place.

The game plays pretty fast as the rules are few and simple.  The lead also changed two or three times.  So did the player that would go first at the beginning of the turn.  In the end, I think we all enjoyed the game and would gladly play it again.  Personally, I found it a lot of fun and am looking forward to my next game.