Quote from: From their websiteLong ago, the sorcerer Medivh opened a portal to another world. Through this dark gateway came the Horde — armies of orcs and ogres driven by a simple purpose: war. Since then, the land of Azeroth has not known peace. For those bold enough to adventure, the dangers are great... but so are the opportunities.

World of Warcraft: the Adventure Game is an exciting journey through Azeroth, the setting of Blizzard Entertainment's award-winning MMORPG World of Warcraft. Players will take on the roles of Warcraft heroes, battle monsters, complete quests, and collect powerful treasures in their bid for supremacy.

I got my chance to play it on the weekend with a couple friends (Andrew and James).  I had read through the rules earlier, but without actually playing through them in the process they didn't stick beyond the overall concept.

The initial setup and first turn took about an hour to sort things out.  After that point play sped up dramatically.  I'd say the average turn time was about 10 minutes to get through everyone.   I think this would actually speed up a little more as you get used to the game and the options the cards present.  Also in the future the setup phase is extremely minimal.  Open the board, pick a character and seperate some counters. Which I would imagine most people will have divided into baggies and what not ahead of time.

The rules are fairly straight forward and there were only a few questions about some of the events once we got going, like exactly what you can do in a city and the correct use of event markers.  The answers to those are; in a city you get to use 1 resource per turn and don't draw an encounter card and an event marker you draw as a resource and can place anywhere you don't play it immediately.  This was stated in the rules, just on first reading through and initial playing it didn't stick.

Combat was quick and I rather enjoyed it.  You get to play cards on your character that boost his abilities and the variety of cards and the impact they made were interesting.  It had a light CCG feel to it and (for me at least) it was fun managing your collection of action cards and when to use them for optimal effect.  Also each of the 4 classes played very differently because of their individual special abilities as well as the way their action cards were put to use.

* As a side note, I think the character packs for Rune Bound are probably a fantastic expansion to that game after seeing the concept put to use in WoW:TAG.

In combat my one complaint is that each board encountered monster can only take 1 hit each.  Which is fine for the basic random encounters.  But I think the bosses should have been able to take a little more damage.  Fortunately that could be an easy modification if you wanted to beef up your game.

Character advancement felt a tad to simple.  Basically you just beat the boss for your current level and you go up to the next one.  Each level (of which there are only 4) gives you a slight boost.  Which is nice that the game difficulty doesn't have a massive shift at later stages.  But getting there could have benefited form a little more of an accomplishment feeling.   It's just a tad to easy.  However it does fit in well with the rest of the game.  So I guess that's the trade off they made simplification that leads to a faster game vs complication that leads to a lot of grinding before you are ready to move on.  I can't fault them for the choice, but I personally wish they had gone some where in the middle.

Player interaction and quests.  This is really where this game shines.
The basic interaction will be one player attacking a monster and the other player rolling for the monster.  It's simple, but fun and creates for some nice cut throat tension without being really aggressive, plus everyone gets some pay back in that respect.

The other way is through the event resources.  There are 4 good and 4 bad types of events that get placed around the board.  The idea being to set it up so that you can trigger the good events and trick the other players into triggering the bad ones.  That's where some of the strategy comes in as you try to play even resources with the greatest benefit to yourself.   This can get even more tricky as they can stack.

To our discredit we didn't use these resources as much as we should have and we played pretty friendly in general.  But now in knowing what they can do I definitely see how they add to the dynamic of the game.  It's ultimately in the use of these events resources that you really effect the other players.  Which is probably the best way of giving your character the edge and slowing down the others.

Quests.  The quests are the core of the game.  Each quest gives you a number of victory points, you need 8 in total to win the game.   The quests we collected were amusing and felt a lot like the quests you find in the video game.  For example.  Each player starts with 2 basic quests.  Andrew's one quest was completed if 2 other characters were defeated (killed in combat) (James managed to help him in that respect - by getting killed at least twice).  James' quest was Head Collecting in that he had to defeat another character in combat (sorry bout your luck)  and one of my quests was that I had to actually be defeated in combat (which, I couldn't bring myself to do).  It was cool to see how the quests brought the players together with different players competing for similar things.  It reminded me of the way players in Ticket to Ride fight over the same tracks to get their routes completed.

Player vs Player coombat is also well setup in that being defeated isn't a huge penalty that sets you back in the game.  You take your licken and then truck along.  It means that the race between all the characters stays fairly competitive and no one really gets left behind.

The game lists it's duration as being about 90 mins and I can see that being achievable if you play it in a distraction free environment where everyone is focusing on their quests and has played at least once before.  But if your group gets into explore mode the game will run longer and could turn into a 3hr game rather easily.  In our case, if you take the excruciatingly long initial learning turn out of the equation, we played solidly for about 1 1/2 hrs (there were other distractions from spouses and my daughter).  In that time I'd say we got about half way through our first game.   More importantly we all had a pretty good time of it and look forward to playing it again.  It's a solid game, well paced and sits at a pretty good sweet spot between a more hard core adventure game like Rune Bound and a more simplistic roll and move game like Talisman (which is a game that I have no desire to play again now that I've played WoW:tAG).

Overall I'd rate this game a solid 4 out of 5.  It's a generally solid game but could benefit from just a little bit more in a few areas.

I'm definitely looking forward to expansions with added characters and a board expansion for the other realms of WoW.

Hmm.  I hadn't heard of this one, and a 4 out of 5 makes it sound like something to give a try.