Manor House Haunt at GenCon

As promised, here are more pictures from GenCon as well as my experience playing Manor House Haunt on Sunday and a quick review of Crit Game’s New Player Kit and Condition Cards.  Also, there are a couple of pictures and a video, if that’s what you are looking for.

Manor House Haunt was a short (about an hour long) game of D&D 5E where the players were ghosts  (Katherine) and bezekira (me and one other player) led by Robert “BJ” Beatty, the owner of Crit Games.  While this game was showcasing Crit Games’ “New Player Kits” it was highly entertaining in its own right.  Being able to smell your opponents (a party of NPCs) from a distance and to phase through walls to attack and retreat was a novel concept and felt like a good change from the normal hack-and-slash or puzzle-solving of a typical game.

While I’m not going to go too into too much depth discussing the New Player Kits here as I don’t think I’d be able to explain them as well as the link above does, I will give them a brief mention.  While this isn’t something that I really need (e.g. I have dozens of sets of dice and know which one is which), I would definitely recommend these for groups that have a lot of new players.  The wooden box seemed to be of high quality, is great for keeping your dice from rolling off the table, and will hold several minis in the smaller compartment.  The dry erase card could potentially be useful, but I prefer a character sheet so that I can see all of my stats/saves/etc. in one place.

What I found more useful as someone who has played D&D for decades were decks of effect cards.  I’ve played in a number of sessions where our group lost track of which orc was poisoned or which goblin was unconscious.  Thes cards work well for helping to remember which effects are still on your character as well.  And, if you put a die on them, you can turn it to the number of rounds the condition will last (just remember to turn the die each round).

In short, the box itself could potentially be great for any player; but the contents really are geared towards new players.  The Condition Cards, however, would definitely be useful for any group.