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WORLD OF WARCRAFT ADVENTURE GAME - FANTASY FLIGHT'S NEXT DELVE INTO AZEROTH | | An exclusive look inside the upcoming World of Warcraft Adventure Game with designer Corey Konieczka | | | By Thorin McGee | | Posted 6/30/2008 | |  | |  "Some games are meant to be played all day. This isn't that type of game because it doesn't take itself as seriously," says Cory Konieczka, lead designer of the World of Warcraft: Adventure Game, about this upcoming romp through Azeroth. "It's more like WOW [the MMO]. We tried to capture some of the humor with some of the funny flavor text and different encounters you would expect."
World of Warcraft is the dominant property in gaming bar none. Earth's most played computer game has spawned a collectible card game, toys, an upcoming collectible minis game, its own board game, a board game for the real-time strategy game that launched the franchise... And now, World of Warcraft: the Adventure Game is coming from Fantasy Flight Games (FFG) this Summer.
How can Fantasy Flight, one of the best in the business at producing top-shelf big-box games, come up with yet another way for players to slash and burn through Azeroth? We caught up with Konieczka for a first look at this new World of Warcraft. | |  VG BGs? LOVE IS ALL YOU NEED
"People just love the richness and the theme" of World of Warcraft, says Konieczka. "It has a really strong following. It has an interesting universe that's already built, and it's mostly up to us to decide how we want to translate that into a board game."
It's hard for some to understand the appeal of board games based on video games, but from Doom to StarCraft to the World of Warcraft, FFG has proven that gamers want to enjoy their favorite worlds and stories in real life when they get together. "The experience you get with a board game is much more personal," says Konieczka. "You're sitting down around a table with friends and family, whoever, and you can actually play or have this experience with people face to face." | |  ADVENTURE GAME VS. STRATEGY BOARD GAME
FFG already has one World of Warcraft Board Game on the market--with two expansions as proof of its success--that Konieczka calls "very popular, but more niche." It incorporated a fair amount of complexity to recreate both the Horde vs. Alliance aspect of WoW and the intricate character building that's at the heart of the MMO. The idea was to grind your team's 3 characters up so they can beat the other faction. That's something hardcore WoW MMO players can embrace and strategy gamers can sink their teeth into. But the focus is on your characters, not so much the adventure. The Adventure game goes in another direction.
"We realized there was so much more to explore here," says Konieczka. "We really wanted come back and not only explore stuff we hadn't done yet, but also take it from a different perspective. And make it, again, a little more approachable to people who may not be as familiar with board gaming."
In the upcoming Adventure Game, the four characters--Warrior, Hunter, Mage and Warlock--are ready to rumble right out of the box; call them 'pre-ground.' "You do progress, it's just not the same level of progression" as in FFG's first WoW board game, says Konieczka. That means each character has four levels, each represented by a different character card, but few character-building decisions. For the most part, players pick their guys and start going on quests. The strategic elements are focused on adventuring and player interaction.
| |  Each of the 16 character cards (one for each character at each level) has two sides representing two different states of that hero. The warrior has a battle stance and berserker stance that he can choose between. The Warlock has his normal state and a voidwalker pet on the flip side, but he has to pay to be able to flip to it. Each character's options are different, so they play very differently.
Each character also has its own deck of cards representing powers and abilities it has access to. These aren't put on the character like FFG's first WOW game. Instead they play like card game cards. You use your power for the turn to play a card, it has an effect and usually goes away. There are cards that stay in play until they have their effect, like traps, but they don't stay on your character as a repeating ability. It's fire and forget. These decks will also have cards that affect the other players outside of combat, encouraging player interaction.
"The interesting aspect in this game as opposed to our original WOW Board Game," says Konieczka, "is we really tried to focus on the player vs. player interaction. There will be a lot of different quests and event cards and ability cards that will specially effect the other players on the board." That interaction will range from the simple (a quest to go defeat another player) to the ridiculous. For example, the quest "separation anxiety" can only be completed by following another player around for several turns, which becomes difficult if someone plays the card "a bounty on your head. | |  THE MECHANICS
The game is played on an overland map of the Eastern continent of Azeroth, the world of WOW. Spaces on the board represent cities and encounter areas. Cities are essentially safe zones where characters begin the game and can return to get more quests.
Quests are how you win the game. Each quest has certain conditions: go here, kill that, etc. Once you've done the deeds, you log it into your quest log and score the number of points that quest is worth. First player to eight points wins.
"It is pretty much a race game where you're working against the other players," says Konieczka. "There is also so wacky interactive stuff that will happen to different people. For Example ... the Warlock has a summon card that can summon any other character to his space. There are also some sorts of wacky stuff that characters can do to affect each other and change things on the board."
There are easy starting quests, but also more advanced quests that are worth more points. You can also score points for defeating the continent's overlords, all of whom are in the game. According to Konieczka, the overlords "are fairly difficult to beat. You'll have to make sure you have really good equipment and are able to travel through the dangerous the path in order to reach them."
At the start of your turn, you roll a six-sided die that tells you how much power you have for the turn and how far you can move. These are inversely proportionate, so if you roll a lot of power, you'll have less movement, and vice versa. | |  As you move along the trails to the site of your next quest, you'll have to battle monsters along the way. Each trail has a color-- Gray, Green, Yellow and Red-- and each color corresponds to a deck of double-sided encounter cards that list the encounter monster on one side and the treasure you get for defeating it on the other. Red encounters are the most dangerous, gray the least. The decks sit in opaque plastic trays so the draws are still random, but this allows FFG to match up powerful items with powerful creatures to make sure players don't get the elite loot for killing some rats.
Along with monsters, spaces will have built-in abilities that [surviving] players on them can use. They may let the player heal or draw cards, or place "discovery" tokens.
"Discoveries are little tokens that let you [seed the board]," says Konieczka. They're different mysterious things you can find on the board that aren't like other monsters." The player who draws the token gets to look at it, then place it on the board. Half of them are good, half bad. So depending on the situation and equipment he has, a player may place the token close to get it on his next turn, or far away so someone else might try it. Or, if another player's in the area, he might place it close to bluff that it's good so the other player goes out of its way to step on a world of hurt. "It adds a little more bluffing element and other little interactive elements. So even though you are on the other side of board from me, I can still affect things that are happening to you."
There are other interactions as well. Characters can move monsters, turn them to "aggro," and change the board in other ways as they move. Although character can fight, death isn't penalized to harshly. The dead guy teleports back to town and the survivor gets one of his non-equipped (i.e., not useful) items. The emphasis, according to Konieczka, is on running around the board and having fun in the World of Warcraft, not so much screwing your neighbor. (Although he also tells us that the warlock isn't going to be very well liked by the other players.)
If that sounds like loot you'd raid for, check it out when the game drops next month. The price tag should be $39.95, far less than the $80 games FFG has been pushing out of late. You might even be able to find one at your local book store; the first WoW board game is still at my Barnes & Nobles, and this one looks even more appealing to you average civilian. | | | |
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