Review of the Haunted Woods of Malthorin

In previous posts, I've deconstructed the setting and characters of the Dungeoneer set **Haunted Woods of Malthorin). In this post, I review its gameplay.

Hanted Woods of Malthorin is a small Dungeoneer deck, with just 55 cards in it. This has a fex different effects on gameplay. First, it results in a quicker game. I don't think it's a drastic difference, but no matter what there's less potential to be standing around waiting for a Quest location to be revealed on the map becuase there are just fewer Map cards available.

There are also fewer monsters the Dungeon Lord can choose from, and many of the monsters are pretty expensive to play. It's not impossible to have a round where there's not enough Peril for the Duneon Lord to play anything.

Environmental threats

It's not unusual for a Dungeoneer set to consider the type of terrain to give a monster or a player a boost in some attribute, but I feel like Malthorin makes the most of it. Your player character either naturally has, or can gain through magic items, a preferred terrain or enemy type that enables you to either hit harder or defend better. Additionally, there are traps and ensnaring effects either in specific locations or as Peril cards. I haven't taken a tally of these kinds of effects and comparted them to a tally from some other set, but anyway it _feels _like the environment is espectially alive in this deck.

Excursion into darkness

As you might expect from a small deck, Haunted Woods feels like a small play space, I'm not sure just how small it is compared to where my dungeons usually are by the time somebody wins in other Dungeoneer sets, but it's hard not to notice that you're cycling (or about to cycle) through the Encounter deck, or that you've used up all the Map cards but you're still playing. There's a feeling of close quarters not only because the map is small, but because you start to get to know the monsters of the forest. There's the big spider, some dark elves, some really angry ghosts, and Malthorin himself. You exactly get cozy with them, mostly because they're all trying to kill you or displace you, but you do start to feel a familiarity, and while it's hard to plan for every oppising strategy the woods has in store for you, it can be comforting to at least know what's in store.

Take what you can get

There's a similar objective familiarity with the Quest deck. It's smaller than a full-size Dungeoneer game so, whether you've played this set before or not, there's immediate pressure to decide whether you're happy with your personal Quests or not. Each time another player completes a Quest or swaps a Quest out for a new one, your choices become more limited. So maybe your choices have improved (depending on what another player has discarded in a swap.) Whatever the case, it's surprising what a smaller Quest deck does to your priorities. In a full-size deck, I rarely swap out Quests. It's expensive to do, and it's not a guarantee that you'll get anything better. But in Haunted Woods it's a strategy that can deliver you a Quest you're ideally suited to complete, or it may be a devious way to impose a tough Quest on another player.

Haunted woods and haunted houses

Haunted Woods is a small deck, so you're likely to see everything it has to offer within just one game. It occurred to me as I was playing a game with the centaur ranger Karn Darkhoof and the druid Tolin Briarwood, that this set is actually an excellent expression of a haunted house. You start to view the obstacles as old classics, so you don't take it personally when they try to kill you. That's their job. The question is, have you done everything you can to kill them back?