They then draw a monster card, to represent what appears from out of the gloom and attacks, following a pre-set AI routine printed on the card, and often an encounter card representing such things as events and traps.

In spite of the fact that it has a decent amount of board game style strategic meat on its bones it really feels like a stripped down role-playing session: each turn the heroes move and the dungeon unfurls slowly before them as they draw tiles from a stack and add them to the board. The first is that this quite possibly does the best job ever of capturing the spirit of those old-fashioned role-playing game dungeon crawls that were so much fun in the days of my youth. The very first time that I played this game, I was rapidly struck by two things. So I've already been lucky enough to play this ten times or so, plenty on which to form an opinion. The kind folks at Wizards of the Coast were good enough to whet my appetite further by indulging my request for a review copy which came a few days prior to release. So in spite of not having touched a D&D line product in over a decade, when I saw that Wizards of the Coast were re-entering the boardgame market with a co-operative Ravenloft adventure game I was instantly intrigued. The Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game was the first hobby game I ever played, and the first adventure module for that game that I ever saw and lusted after was the vampire romp Ravenloft.

Castle ravenloft rulebook