It was a good call, it turned out be a pretty pathetic game.
Den of the Wererats comes in a box the same size as a Magic: The Gathering theme deck box. It has 55 cards, consisting of 3 character cards, 7 quest cards, 10 map cards, 31 cards for items and enemies, 3 cards with turn order and tracking points and 1 card to be cut up for the characters.
The map is to be set up randomly, I suppose this is to create replay value, but it's utterly pointless. Some of the quests depend on the relative placement of two of the map cards. One quest involves for all intents and purposes moving from one point on the map to another. With the random placement of the map cards, you can have the two points on the map be directly next to each other, making the quest ridiculously easy. Of the 10 cards, 5 are set out immediately, and then turn by turn the remaining cards are put out. That's 3 turns in and the map is all out. It would be much better to lay the map out in advance, based on the quests to create some proper distance, but that of course decreases the replay value.
The quest cards are pretty lame. Some of them are flavoured as rescuing a waitress, but essentially it's go from one point to another. Others just involve going to a point on the map and fighting a monster there. Sometimes it's just there, and sometimes you have to search for it, which involves rolling a die and hoping the result is high enough. And finally, for sheer ridiculousness, you can complete a quest simply by paying 1 life point while at a certain map card. Since you win the game by completing 3 quests, this is pretty stupid. I was quite disappointed with the quests, and the other player said they were really stupid.
The item and monster cards are spent using resources of glory and peril. Glory is used to pay for items and enchantments, peril is used to pay for monsters and curses. The problem is how glory and peril are required. As you move from one place to another, you acquire glory and peril. Simply walking around the map increases both of them. Obviously the game needs some sort of mechanic, but that certainly has an effect of ruining suspension of disbelief. I know it's not supposed to be a full RPG, but I kind of expect something more reasonable. Some of the quests award you with glory, and items, and if the quests were simply to get glory and acquire items it would have made more sense.
A somewhat fun aspect is that you can play monsters against other players (using their peril), which of course makes it adversarial. Defeating these monsters results in acquiring glory, which also makes more sense than acquiring it by walking around. It would certainly be better if moving resulted in acquiring peril, and overcoming peril results in acquiring glory, but evidently that makes too much sense for this game. The monsters are also pretty interesting, and the artwork is evocative, although it's a bit odd having a rather small amount of wererats to fight, and dealing with demons and vampires instead.
The same set of cards includes items which you can acquire, which can make your character nigh unbeatable. The mechanic is 1d6+X vs target number. Some of the cards let you roll an extra die, and choose the highest one. If you have two of these cards equipped you're rolling 3d6, choose the highest +X, which really reduces your chances of losing.
Den of the Wererats comes with 3 characters, a Guard, a Thief and an Alchemist. The Alchemist's special power is spending glory to grab a potion off the discard pile. Unfortunately that never came up because there was only 1 potion in the whole set. The Guard's ability is to spend glory to send a monster back to the hand, which did get used to save the Dwarf's life. The Thief's ability is to draw an extra card during the draw/discard phase. I'm sure that would be of some use - card advantage always helps in a card game. A 4th card has tokens of the 3 characters which can be cut out.
2 cards have the turn summary on one side, and on the other side have glory and peril counters. This was pretty annoying, because we had to use the glory and peril counters (which are stupidly marked 1-10 and then 20, no 11-19) so we couldn't actually follow the turn order easily and had to look at the fold out rule sheet. The 3rd card also had glory and peril counters on one side (strange given it's only a 2 player game, and it's only needed for 2), but has a legend of symbols. This was actually pretty useful for figuring out some of the less obvious symbols on the map cards, but doubling up the cards like this really didn't help. It would have been somewhat more helpful to have one card with turn summary/legend, another with legend/counters and a third with counters/turn summary, so you have some better choice about which to use and which not to use. Even better would have been 1 turn summary, 1 legend and 2 dedicated turn counter cards - 1 extra card wouldn't have made the box break.
It was not a fun game, at all. The quests were boring. The map was ridiculous as it was randomly laid out. The combat was tedious, there wasn't much measure of choice, beyond whether you attack by physical or magical means, and with the guard using the special power to bounce the monster back if you're losing (which is hard to relate to anything in the imaginary space). The characters already being created made them harder to relate to and get any involvement with them, and they weirdly have 4 levels to them. Most of the quests raise you one level, so if you complete the 3 quests, you'd be level 4, but would already have won the game. If you carry the character into a new expansion, you're already 4th level, which means you can't actually level up beyond that, and if the monsters are of equivalent difficulty, you're not actually going to have a challenge once you're 4th level. It's also disappointing that the quests are competitive rather than having any cooperative options with them. It would be nice to have the characters team up against monsters, and work on quests together, but that would require some hacking.
The only reason I'm giving it a 3 for style is that the artwork on the cards is pretty damn cool. Also, if I wanted to mine it for ideas for an actual RPG I could get something out of the cards. The 1 for substance is because I really do feel it was a waste of money, and I regret cutting out the token cards as it decreases the resale value to someone who might enjoy the game and want the expansion. Obviously this is comparing apples to oranges, but for the same price you can buy Savage Worlds Explorer Edition and get way more play time out of it, and also some real fun. You can also get a Magic: The Gathering theme deck for the same price, and get more fun out of it. It isn't even a fun dungeon bash type game.
