September 22, 2024: Are You Sure That's What Attacked You?!

I don't think I've shared this story . . . or, at the very least, I haven't shared it here – and it's continued to delight our family for about a decade now, so why not inflict it on you?

We had purchased the Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of Ashardalon Board Game and were trying to learn the rules as we played it. It's not a terribly difficult game; basically, it's a light boardgame experience where you play fantasy heroes on a randomly generated board, drawing tiles for rooms you explore, cards for monsters you face, and so on.

We thought we had set up the first game well enough, and we proceeded to take our first turn. We flipped over the tile, which triggered a monster to spawn, which we dutifully drew from the deck. And the very first card we drew . . . was the gargantuan red dragon Ashardalon.

We all went "yikes" as we dug up the huge miniature from the box and plunked it onto the board. Looking at the stats for the thing, I noted: "This is going to absolutely kill us all." I also noted that this didn't feel right; the box was named after this guy, so just drawing Ashardalon on the first turn in the first scenario seemed kind of anticlimactic – in a "we're all going to die" kind of way.

Looking over the rulebook again, we realized that there were certain "boss fight" cards that were specifically tied to certain scenarios – for example, the titular Ashardalon was part of the last adventure the group would face. We hadn't noticed that in the scenario instructions when we set up the board; we just shuffled all the cards together.

So we dutifully rewound the game by half a turn, taking the huge chunk of death-dealing plastic off the board and replacing it with a new monster: a kobold.

Which we promptly defeated.

For the rest of the game, we joked that the giant dragon we thought we'd seen was actually three kobolds in a trenchcoat. To this day, any threat we face which turns out to be much easier than we originally expected is "three kobolds in a trenchcoat."

That's probably my family's funniest "we didn't understand the rules" story; if you have any, I'd love to hear about them on the forums.

-- Steven Marsh