A little while back, my son and I both contracted COVID and were sequestered up in my bedroom with a pile of board games and Waterdeep was probably our most played game during that time. This has led to some unfortunate mental associations every time I consider bringing it out but not enough to fully dissuade me which was how it came to be our main menu item at my regular Wednesday game night.
My lovely British boys over at Shut Up and Sit Down uncharitably called it “aggressively mediocre” and they are entitled to their opinion but I have found over the decade I’ve been playing it that it sits at a sweet intersection of complexity and ease of play.
The premise of the game is that the players are the titular and secret lords of the Forgotten Realms metropolis Waterdeep vying for supremacy in the form of victory points by recruiting heroes, collecting gold, underhandedly intriguing, and fulfilling various quests. Every round players take turns putting their agents in a fairly straightforward worker placement game. Every game is exactly 8 rounds so players have to time things just right to maximize their point potential before facing the Great Accounting.
The core of the game of getting Quests from Castle Waterdeep which fall under various categories – Arcana, Commerce, Piety, Skullduggery, and Warfare. To fulfill these quests, players need to collect and subsequently spend gold and heroes. (this incidentally is my favorite mental image of the game as players acquire and discard adventurers like so much lumber and sheep.) Most quests give rewards in the form of points and resources although some quests are Plot Quests that offer up bonuses for the rest of the game. Choosing the right quests and paying attention to other players’ quests makes up a large strategic element of the game.
Different locations on the board give you the resources you need and exclusively block out other players so in games where clerics are in high demand and short supply, going first can be a cut throat business. One location allows players to spend gold to build a new location which can help mitigate some of these shortages while also giving a nice bonus to the builders. Halfway through the game, players get an additional agent to help them take even more actions. By the end of the game you have a very different and active board then the one you started with but the choices and base mechanic are still largely the same throughout.
The most finnicky location are the Skullport Docks which allow players to play Intrigue cards from their hands which can do everything from give them additional resources or force their rivals to waste their time on mandatory quests. After all the agents have been assigned, any agents at the docks get to take a second turn which can lead to some interesting late round choices.
For a game with as many moving parts as Lords of Waterdeep, set up and gameplay go fast. There are always just enough interesting choices without too much analysis paralysis. The art is nice and thematic and scoring doesn’t take an age and a day. I highly recommend it for folks wanting to encourage their roleplaying group to try their hand at economic style board games. It’s a nicely steep slope from taming owlbears to growing algae on Mars. Get to it!