Shout out that phrase in a suitably exaggerated voice in any sufficiently large group of gamers (in the UK, at least) and you're almost guaranteed to have at least one person respond "Fire of Wrath!". The culprit is HeroQuest, a classic and long out-of-print Games Workshop boardgame of dungeon crawling. Several modern games have provided a similar style of play (Mage Knight Dungeons, and Orcs At The Gates) but none have managed to equal the old game - until now. The Dungeons and Dragons board game revisits the traditional HeroQuest turf (copying a number of its mechanics in the process) but tightens things up and adds extra flexibility which notably improves the overall game.
The board game comes in a huge box which includes 5 double-sided map tiles, cardboard standup trees and pillars, character cards for four heroes, a deck of cards describing items and monsters, a large number of counters, and a set of 40 plastic miniature figures for the heroes and monsters. The miniatures show eleven different types of moster, plus the four hero characters, who are the four example characters from the D&D books (Regdar the fighter, Mialee the wizard, Jozan the cleric and Lidda the thief). The miniatures are of fairly good quality, although some are a little bizarre (something very strange seems to have happened to Mialee's face). They are not painted, but they are made from different colours of plastic. Two rulebooks are included - a Player's Guide and a Dungeon Master's Guide. The designers have tried to make them resemble the corresponding D&D books, but have made an amusing howler - the colours of the covers are the wrong way round! The rulebooks basically cover the same rules from two different angles - the only significant differenc between them is that the Dungeon Master's Guide contains the 11 example adventures.
Now, just to be absolutely clear, there is no role-playing here. In fact, the Player's Guide tells the Players that "you are trying to defeat the Dungeon Master, who aims to destroy you". The "adventures" are really just DM maps which show how the tiles should be arranged, where monsters should be placed and similar. The map tiles show closed chambers in different arrangements, and the map is created by placing them beside each other and then connecting the closed chambers with cardboard door tokens, thus increasing the variety of maps available. (Heroquest fans may miss the stand-up doors which were used for the same purpose in that game; I don't, as their main function that I recall was to fall off their hinges when a fat-fingered player tried to open them)
The character cards each represent one of the four heroes. Each hero has a tracker for hit points, and stats for movement, carrying capacity, and armor class. The magic users additionally have trackers for spell points. The game supports the concept of "levelling up" in a rather unusual way: each hero's sheet has different sets of statistics for them at each level from 1 to 3 (although usually it's only hit points and spell points that change) . Each card in the deck of item cards is also rated from level 1 to 3, and the starting equipment for each hero varies with level as well. However, the big twist is that rather than being a property of each hero, the level is a property of the adventure; it determines which set of stats the heroes use and what items are available to be found. The intent is that you should play through all the level 1 adventures first, then the level 2's and finally the level 3's, thus creating the effect of the heroes levelling up; but in practice, you can do them in any order and adapting to different levels is very easy. Quite a nice touch, in practise.
What isn't quite so easily adapted to is what to do if you don't have five players handy (four heroes and a dungeon master). There doesn't really appear to be any choice other than assigning multiple heroes to a single player, as the adventures don't specify how to rebalance them for smaller parties.
The set-up is simple: the GM lays out the map sections and the players position their pieces in the first room, which is guaranteed to be empty. The first action the heroes must take is to open the door, which triggers a room set-up phase; the turn order ("initiative order") is randomised via cards while the DM sets out any monsters and doors in the room the heroes are entering. The DM's map will state which monsters are in each room, and the DM is given free reign over where the monsters are placed, but is not permitted to view his place in the turn order until after the monsters are in place.
Each turn, a player gets to take two actions: one or both of these can be move actions, which allow them to move their PC a number of squares stated on their character card. Aside from moving, the only other actions that every PC can take are fighting, opening things and inventory manipulation.
There are two kinds of things to open: chests and doors. Opening a chest lets the player draw a card from the item deck. Opening a door triggers the whole setup cycle to happen again: the turn order is randomized, the DM lays out the monsters and the content of the room, and a new round begins from the player who gets turn order 1.
As for inventory manipulation, each PC has a limit on the number of things they can carry with them, and also a limit on the number and type of things they can use. For example, Regdar is the only character who can use two weapons at once (including a sword and a bow at the same time - quite how that works I'm not sure, but they even picture him doing so, so presumably he's got it down pretty well). Items which a PC can't use are put in their knapsack, and it takes an action to get an item out so it's ready to use. An action can also be used to pass an item to an adjacent PC.
Apart from the item type usage restrictions, there are relatively few limits on what items each character can use - the rulebook mentions them, but I only found one or two items which had these limits applied.
Every other action that a PC can take is represented by one or more of the custom dice included with the game. This can help speed up play quite a bit: the player need not even declare their action if they don't want to, as they can just roll the appropriate dice and it'll be evident from which dice they rolled, what action they were taking.
Obviously, fighting is a fairly popular action, and six of the dice are dedicated to it. These dice are colour-coded, and each one has faces which show varying numbers of swords. Yellow dice have 0-0-1-1-1-1, orange dice have 2-2-1-1-1-1, red dice have 0-1-2-2-2-3 and purple dice have 2-2-2-2-3-3. Fighting is very simple: your weapon assigns you a set of dice to roll; grab them, roll them, count your swords, subtract the opponent's Armor Class (AC) as written on their monster card, and that's how many HP they lose. You must have a weapon to fight (there are no rules for bare-handed fighting), you can't attack other players, and there's no real concept of missing, other than having your damage lowered to 0 by AC.
Monster ACs range from 0 to 3 and it quickly becomes apparant that they make a huge difference. Indeed, the Wizard and Cleric have starting weapons which roll two yellow dice and therefore they can't even hit monsters with AC 2 until they've found some better equipment. Regdar, the PC fighter, gets to add 1 to any damage roll he makes, which again turns out to make a huge difference because it negates a point of AC.
When it comes to monsters fighting players, by the way, the rules are exactly the same except that monsters don't have changable weapons so their damage dice are just shown on the monster card. All the heroes have AC 2, but the monsters have slightly nastier dice pools (even a stock Goblin rolls two yellow and an orange) to make up for this; by and large, though, the PCs don't feel too vulnerable.
Weapons come in two varieties, melee and ranged; ranged weapons don't have any special rules other than the fact you can fire them at range (range is always line-of-sight) and CAN'T fire them in melee. Some weapons, and monster attacks, have special abilities. Usually these are triggered by rolling the "magic" dice (star-star-star-blank-blank-blank) at the same time as the damage; the special effect kicks in if a star is rolled. There are other effects, which are reserved for the players' weapons only: one allows one of the dice to be rerolled, and the other is a "power attack", which allows the bearer to roll a more favourable set of dice in exchange for a 50% chance of the weapon breaking (and being discarded) after the swing.
So, how about those other actions? Regdar, the Fighter, doesn't get any special actions, but everyone else does. Lidda, the Thief, has the most unique special actions. First of all, she can sneak - this lets her move through squares occupied by monsters; and if she attacks a monster in the same turn she moved through it, that's a sneak attack, gaining her +1 to her roll. If you have munchkin players, as I do, they'll immediately spot the possibility of Lidda using her high movement score to walk up to the monster's square, pass through it, then walk back to where she started and attack to gain the +1. Nothing in the rules bans this, but it seems a bit iffy to me...
Of course, where there's a thief, there have to be traps. And there are traps. LOTS of traps. Traps take up a single square each, and are marked on the DM's map, but are not normally revealed to the players until a PC stands on one, whereupon their turn is forced to end and another negative effect (typically damage or the resurrection of a monster) takes place. Lidda can search for traps by rolling a custom die, 0-0-1-1-2-H, which reveals the number of traps equal to the roll that are nearest her. Searching can be done multiple times, but the Hand symbol (H) on the dice bars any further searching in that room. Once a trap is found, she can try to disarm it by rolling yet another custom dice: d-d-d-d-d-s. Roll a d and the trap is disarmed; roll an s and the trap springs on her.
One slightly odd rule is that Lidda gets hitpoints back for every three traps she disarms; you can see why this has been done (to encourage disarming) but it's a bit weird when the thief, being low on hitpoints, decides to go back to a previous chamber and disarm traps in order to regenerate health. (It's also intensely amusing when the same thief, due to an incredible series of bad rolls, falls in the same pit 5 times and dies while trying to regenerate health that way.)
Jozan the cleric can turn undead; he has yet another custom dice for doing this, which has 0-0-0-1-2-3 skulls. Every undead monster has an "undead number" representing the difficulty of turning it; when Jozan turns undead, all monsters with an undead number equal to or less than the number Jozan rolled are frozen and can't move next turn.
Jozan and Mialee are also spellcasters. Spells basically behave exactly like equipment, including the way they're stored and equipped, with the difference that you have to pay Spell Points for casting them. Some spells can be used only by one of the two casters, but a surprising number can be used by both, although the two casters pay different costs for different spells; Jozan gets cheaper healing, but Mialee gets cheaper damage spells. Damage spells basically act exactly the same as weapons, except they're more likely to have special effects applied to them . Jozan also has an innate healing ability, which allows him to trade spell points one-to-one for hit points for either himself or other party members.
The way in which Jozan and Mialee recover spell points is rather unusual: certain weapons - mostly ranged weapons - have a special effect which grants the user a 50% chance of regaining 1 spell point when they are used in an attack. Thus Mialee and Jozan must attack conventionally in order to recover spell points, which - while being a little unusual - actually works quite well. It also effectively encourages the spellcasters to use the weaker weapons which provide this ability, which is quite appropriate as it ensures they won't outshine the combat-oriented characters.
A concern I have with these rules is with Mialee, the wizard. Mialee's only special ability other than spells, is actually a handicap: she loses AC when her spell points drop low. I can see two reasons why this has been done: first, to make the wizard vulnerable as in full-blown D&D; and second, to give her a tradeoff, as with Jozan who trades off potential use of his healing ability by casting spells. The problem is that even a single point of AC is so significant, especially given the fact that she must enter combat in order to restore her magic points, that it winds up being such a great risk that the wizard player never allows her spell points to fall low enough to even enter the first penalty band. This effectively nullifies Mialee's cheaper spells, so you wind up with a wizard who only rarely casts spells and is reduced to pinging with a peashooter crossbow.
However, aside from that small issue, the game is very playable, fast moving, and fun. Assuming you don't want too much in the way of detailed strategy, the combat is fast and interesting and the equipment just about varied enough to keep interest alive without bogging down play too much. The play aids are well designed and keep things moving very well.
One distinct omission in the rules is the lack of any explicit rule for "downtime" - ie, the moments when there are no monsters or anything around. The problem is that at these times, players tend to get bored of using the "unnecessary" movement rules and say "well, I'm just going to go here, I'd get there eventually and it doesn't matter how many turns it takes, right?" Usually they are right and this can be allowed to speed up the game, but it's still a bit of an omission that it wasn't addressed in the main book.
One majory worry, though - and it applied to Heroquest as well - is the replay value. Once you've played through the 11 missions, you can start making up your own, but the players might be unfortuately aware that they're seeing more of the same; and the item deck isn't really that big, so players will quickly start seeing repetitions. This may make things become rather dull on later games and replays, although expansion material can be downloaded from the web site, which might help...
Ah yes. The website. Let me be very restrained and polite about this. The website for the D&D board game is a festering, stinking pile of garbage that leaves me heartily hoping that Macromedia have some kind of license withdrawal scheme for those who use their tools for evil. They've had the brilliant idea of structuring the web site to feel like a play of the board game. So you start by "choosing your hero", from four options, all represented by nice big images in a Flash script - have fun, 56k-ers. Have fun, parents who are just interested in the game and don't want to play it. You then get to "explore the dungeon" by clicking on rooms to see what's inside - yep, you guessed it, Mystery Meat Navigation at its finest.
But by far the golden clanger prizes on this site have to go to the monster fighting and the FAQ. Yes, you have to fight monsters as you're exploring the web site. You do this with a simplified version of the dice system from the game, where you just pass the dice back and forth without any of the other tactical concerns that come up. Great move - make the game look worse than it is! The dice rolling and passing animations are horribly slow, and you have to click during them so you can't just leave them to run. Even better, you can lose the monster fight, and if you do, it kicks you back to the start page where you have to return and do the same thing again. Who on God's green earth thought that this was a good idea!? What it came down to is that, to obtain 9 pieces of extension content from the website, on a high speed connection, took half an hour because of the stupid navigation and monster fighting. That's ridiculous.
The FAQ is another great mess-up. It's quite informative and useful. But you won't be reading it offline, or printing it to put in the box with your rulebook - because it's all Flash text, so you can't save it, or print it, or even cut'n'paste it. Oh, and you have to view it one question at a time. Brilliant move! Now, your FAQ is useless to anyone unless they happen to have an internet capable PC sitting next to their gaming table. I suppose this isn't in fact particularly uncommon, but good luck at cons.
(And another thing is that I can't find anyone to take responsibility for the game. I had some rules questions, and my box had a tile missing; I contacted Wizards, who passed me off to Hasbro, and when I wrote to Hasbro with an e-mail containing five specific rules questions, I got a response from them which asked me to state exactly what my questions were. Fortunately, the missing tile was replaced by Leisure Games (quick but deserved plug) without any such hassle.)
One other slight niggle is the use of this game to introduce people to full-blown D&D. The attitudes it instils - that of pure dungeon hacking and especially the view that the DM's goal is purely to kill the PC's - are not positive ones and I'm sure I can foresee "I used to play the D&D board game" meaning 'munchkin alert' to any group that such a new player tries to join.
But aside from that, the D&D board game is a fast and amusing (if unchallenging) diversion that should provide plenty of entertainment for any group interested in that kind of thing. Just watch out for that replay value issue.
