Lords of Waterdeep is a really good game. Caylus meets Ticket to Ride. Two of the best parts of Caylus, the worker placement and the ability to construct buildings for more actions and a varied board, are married with the “ticket” mechanism, which provides structure to the game and allows new players to quickly pick up the flow of the game. And now it has its first expansion set.
Scoundrels of Skullport provides additional options for the game. It actually provides two expansions, Undermountain and Skullport. You can use either one with the base game or include both at the same time. In this review, I’ll look at how they play individually and together. Each expansion consists of 25 new Intrigue cards, 30 new quest cards, 3 new Lords, and a small board with three new basic action spaces. Skullport also has a few extra components.
Scoundrels also provides pieces for a sixth player, although I haven’t availed myself of them.
Undermountain
Undermountain does not deviate much from the established play of Lords of Waterdeep. You’re still gathering adventurers and sending on quests. What’s different is that things are somewhat “bigger”.
Five 40-point quest cards make this “bigger” theme obvious, and are significantly higher than the basic games 25-point quests; however, the requirements for completing these quests are also more challenging. Looking through the other quests in Undermountain reveals that there are a lot of “big” effects; the one that surprised me the most was Threaten the Builders’ Guild, which puts all of the buildings in the Builders’ Guild directly into play! At a cost of 2 warriors, 4 rogues, 2 wizards and 10 gold, it is hardly a cheap effect, but it is certainly effective. Some of the new quests aren’t so high in point values, but provide large numbers of resources – gold and adventurers – in return, providing for greater chaining between quests. It may be harder to start completing some of the new quests, but the pay-off is worth it.
Intrigue cards also gain more prominence in Undermountain; one of the three new action spaces allows you to draw two Intrigue cards, another allows you to take a Quest card and play an Intrigue card. There are some rather effective attack cards which will make the battle over the harbour more important, and there is also a card that protects you from these attack cards. It’s implementation is somewhat controversial, however. Open Lord reveals your hidden Lord card and makes you immune to Mandatory Quest cards and other attack cards. Although I like the card, it is certainly not universally popular – how much of a drawback is revealing your Lord, anyway? It’s one of two game elements in Scoundrels I find particularly hard to assess. Inevitable Betrayal, which debuted as a promotional card, is included in the set as a standard card.
Undermountain also introduces a new mechanic: certain cards and buildings place resources on action spaces as a potential drawback of using the action; whoever next takes the action gets those resources. For instance, Citadel of the Bloody Hand allows you to take 4 fighters from the supply and you also place two fighters from the supply on 2 different action spaces. This can increase the resources available in the game significantly, which feeds back to the new quests.
All of this combines to make a game where the stakes are higher. The game play of the basic game remains, but I felt that I needed to pay a lot more attention. Chaining quests so that the rewards of one quest feed into the requirements of the next became even more important for good play. Is it more challenging than the basic game? It certainly is!
However, the bigger quests don’t mean that the scores will necessarily higher than the basic game. From my play of this expansion, there are some games where the resources are there for completion of the bigger quests, but other times everyone is struggling.
Skullport
While Undermountain primarily gives you greater goals, Skullport gives you more resources, but at a cost. And that cost is corruption. It’s worth taking a moment to look at this mechanic, as it is truly inspired.
The basics are fairly simple: certain actions require you to take a corruption token from a general supply. At the end of the game, each corruption token reduces your points. This is not that dissimilar to the loan mechanics in Steam and related games. However, it isn’t a set penalty: instead, the penalty for each token depends on how many have been taken by the entire group in the game. Basically, the penalty increases by one for every three tokens taken. The penalty is represented on the corruption board; all the tokens begin on the board, and as each space is cleared, the penalty increases.
The majority of the new quests and intrigue cards in this expansion support this mechanic, with ways of gaining corruption, removing corruption tokens from your tavern to the board, or even removing them from the game entirely. You can gather resources much quicker than in the base game, but at a cost. Balancing the corruption you gain against the benefits of extra resources is tricky, and significantly raises the interaction between players as each manipulates the corruption track.
Because you’re unsure of what the final penalty for corruption is, I found it a lot harder to judge who was winning when this expansion was being used. One thing I am sure of: playing with Skullport is a lot of fun, and the challenge of managing corruption really adds to the game.
Together
Playing with both expansions together requires more than just adding all the cards to the decks: it requires the removal of some cards from the basic quest and intrigue decks first, as well as some buildings, so that the proportion of expansion cards from each set remains constant. This is particularly important for two of the new Lords who give bonus points based on the number of buildings constructed and quests completed from either Skullport or Undermountain, but it also allows the new mechanics to shine.
Undermountain has higher requirements on its quests, Skullport allows you to gather those resources more quickly. The two paths complement each other very well, and everything becomes heightened. With six extra spaces to place agent, each player is given an extra agent to maintain the pressure of available action spaces. This, of course, also has the effect of lengthening the game – with 2-4 players, the game lengthens from about 60 minutes to about 90 minutes.
I was pleasantly surprised by how well the two expansions played together; my limited experience with this form of the game also has had pretty tight scores, which was not what I expected. The balance seems pretty good.
Highlights
Corruption is the big winner as a new mechanic; I’ve seen corruption-like mechanics in many other games, but the way it is implemented here is elegant and new and extremely effective.
Intrigue cards also become much more important in this game, perhaps too much so for some players. Yes, there are more mandatory quests, and Skullport provides new ways of getting rid of them.
All of this means that you have to think more. Yes, this is a highlight of the game; I like being challenged.
A really big highlight is that despite the much bigger quests and resources, the games we've played have still been quite close. It wasn't what I was expecting, and I believe it's still possible for a blowout, but, in general, everything works fine – and that's a real highlight of the game.
Potential Problems:
If you don’t like intrigue cards messing with your plans, you’re really not going to like a few of the cards here. Taking two rogues or fighters from an opponent’s tavern is a big deal, and the contest for spaces on Waterdeep Harbour will be greater than before.
Bigger also means the potential of bigger failures. Although most of my games with the expansions have been quite close affairs, there is no doubt that bad luck or poor play will hurt you more than in the basic game.
Component-wise, the game has two issues. The first is that some copies have cards that don’t quite have the same size as the originals; this seems to vary from set to set so that some people have cards that are greatly different whilst others are identical.
The issue everyone agrees with is the insert. The Lords of Waterdeep insert was lauded as one of the best ever made for a game; the one in Scoundrels does not come close. There isn’t enough room for the agents to fit into the insert, and without a board fitting on top, things tend to go everywhere when it’s tipped on its side.
A minor point is that the quest cards are printed upside-down compared to the basic set. It’s not a major problem, but it can get annoying as you’re flipping them from the deck.
Conclusion
Ultimately, Scoundrels of Skullport has been a great success with my friends. It adds something extra to Lords of Waterdeep whilst keeping the structure that made the game a hit in the first place and, though there’s more to consider, the level of complexity isn’t such so that it confuses people. We’ve introduced people to their first game of Lords with Scoundrels added, and they haven’t had that much trouble; the quest cards, like the tickets in Ticket to Ride, help guide them as they get used to the mechanics, and corruption – the most complicated new mechanic in the game – is easy to grasp.
This is in complete contrast to the trouble we had when adding Cities & Knights of Catan to its base game. Settlers was our go-to game for new players for many years, but even the experienced players ran into problems with C&K; in particular, the trading became much, much more difficult, and with the major “fun” mechanic of the game gone, the point of the game was lost. Scoundrels doesn’t remove the fun parts of Lords from the game and, for our group, significantly added to the game’s enjoyment.
In short, this is a superb expansion. It provides new challenges for experienced players without taking away from the elements that made the game good in the first place. If you didn’t like the confrontational elements of Lords, this expansion isn’t going to fix things. However, if you do like how the original game plays, the expansion is well worth considering, and stands as a stellar example of exactly how an expansion should be produced.