I got my first two plays of Lords of Waterdeep in a session the other night, and haven't had much chance to discuss it. Looking around, I see at least half a dozen threads where LoW is being hotly debated, and rather than get involved in all those discussions, and inevitably end up repeating myself, I've decided to write a short review so I can gather my early thoughts on the game in one place. Others with more experience have already reviewed the game, so if you want in depth analysis, rules summaries or lots of pretty pictures, I advise you to read one of those. All you'll find here are my own early impressions.
Overview
The system is very clean and easy to absorb. We came up to speed very quickly, even though one of the players knew absolutely nothing about the game before we sat down to play, and I was the only one who had read all the rules. We all had a solid grasp of what we were trying to accomplish before we were half way through our first game. We wasted relatively little time looking up rules, and only had a couple of questions we wanted to look up after playing.
I'm confident that the game will scale well. The game is designed for 2-5 players, and my experience is that 3 is often a troublesome number. That was not the case here; it worked fine with 3. The number of turns in a game is determined by the number of Agents each player receives, and that varies with how many are playing, so playing time shouldn't vary much as you add or remove players. You have opportunities to do good or harm to others, but this isn't a system that encourages long term alliances. There is a map, and players will acquire buildings to place on it, but there is no geographical adjacency factor; everybody will contend with everyone else.
Theme
The box has Dungeons & Dragons prominently displayed on the cover. Players are leading named factions, have named Lords, send Agents on quests, purchase buildings which provide various advantages, play intrigue cards, etc. The Quests and Intrigue cards have flavor text, taken I presume from the D&D universe. You also hire Adventurers - wooden cubes of various colors which are supposed to represent wizards, fighters, rogues and clerics.
All of that sounds very thematic, but you could change the Lords to Famous Chefs, the Adventurers to Recipe Ingredients and the Quests to Menu Items, and you'd have a game about running the most successful restaurant. 386
You wouldn't have to change any play mechanics. If being drawn into a narrative is crucial for you, LoW is not going to ring that bell.
While the theme is plastered on rather than tightly bound to player actions, that plaster is well and consistently applied. If you know who <PERSON> is, and are familiar with the Red Sashes, seeing them in the game will probably please you. I'm not a D&D player, and don't know them, but the types are familiar and I wouldn't have been as likely to play a restaurant game in the first place. Once in, I found a game that is weak in terms of narrative, but well worth playing.
DiscWorld: Ankh-Waterdeep
LoW reminds me somewhat of D:A-M. I found D:A-M's card text and illustrations so interesting that I followed up and have now read a couple of Discworld books. I think it's entirely possible that some Eurogamers might follow a similar course, checking out D&D related titles after playing LoW. In both games, a great deal of effort was put into art and flavor text, and that can be interesting, but neither game tells much of a story despite the thematic underpinnings. The theme isn't bound to the mechanics.
One interesting parallel is that in both LoW and D:A-M, the players draw a card during setup representing a powerful figure in the city portrayed, and the identity of that figure establishes the long term strategy for the player. In D:A-M there are 3 lords who have identical victory conditions, and 4 others with unique conditions. This keeps the players guessing about the motives of their opponents nicely.
In LoW, there are 5 different quest types, and 10 of the 11 lords receive bonus points at game's end for having completed quests for 2 of those 5 types. There is also one 1 lord (lady) with a different agenda; she provides an end game bonus for buildings held rather than quests completed. There is less mystery in the LoW assignments, but it works well, and serves the purpose of obscuring scores until the final reckoning.
Components
There are several threads in the LoW forums with ominous sounding names, possibly giving the impression that various components (cards, wooden bits, box, insert) are defective or poorly designed. I attribute this to jaded gamer syndrome. The game I received is top quality. 755