No one who knows us is going to be surprised at the sheer number of videos, posts, and gameplays that are going to come out for Lords of Waterdeep. To put it simply: this is our jam. One of Old Man Callahan’s favorite games, he introduced this to our D&D group. I never believed in love at first sight. Then we all played Lords of Waterdeep.
This instantly shot into the top three board games for both Braden and I. Braden bought the game and the expansion right away, and the only thing stopping Shane from doing the same was that he rents from Braden, so why double up on the board games? The moment he moves away, you can get this will be his house warming gift to himself.
Bring on Lords of Waterdeep (with Expansions!)
Lords of Waterdeep is an amazing Euro-style board game in its own right. When you add in the Lords of Waterdeep expansions which slide in perfectly to make a truly amazing game even better, you have a game that holds up for hundreds of hours of gameplay and STILL creates excitement every time you break it out in a group.
So here’s a review of our favorite board game:
This YouTube video on the best and worst Lords of Waterdeep is one of our early episodes and one we were all (minus The Xanathar) excited to produce. There were some pretty passionate thoughts on these topics and some well reasoned disagreements to give you a good look at the best and worst the lord cards of this game have to offer.
Hey – We’re In Total Agreement!
Look for all you D&D aficionados who really enjoy 5E Xanathar is a great writer. Xanathar’s Guide to Everything is fantastic as a guide, but as a lord in Lords of Waterdeep he is terrible. I even do the math in the “Ultimate Strategy Guide to Lords of Waterdeep” to show just how bad it is (link further down the page). The Xanathar is bad.
In fact, he is so bad that we use the house rule to remove him completely as a choice from the deck. When we’re playing multi-player online version on Steam the rule is to yell “Damn It!” if you get Xanathar and we generally avoid mandatory questing that person in the game while laughing at their misfortune.
What the Bad Lords Have in Common
They have contrary styles of quests that result in you needing all four piece types in large numbers. They often require amazing amounts of gold that the average game won’t produce nearly enough of. In short, the worst lords require a friendly board to work well. Which is a problem since a resource heavy board helps other players, as well. Especially if one of them has a lord that shares one of the same types of bonus quest type as you.
What the Best Lords Have in Common
The best lords tend to synergize really well. They need the same types of pieces the most often, they don’t require an overabundance of resources, and they have some degree of flexibility that makes them hard to block. Some of the top choices here are going to be based on playing style.
All Kinds of Lords of Waterdeep Content
If you are huge LOW fans like we are, then you will appreciate some of this amazing content we’ve already done on this board game, including:
- Ultimate Strategy Guide to Lords of Waterdeep
- Best Plot Quests in Lords of Waterdeep
- Meeples Long Play Board Games: Lords of Waterdeep Playthrough
- Lords of Waterdeep Online Play
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Proud to embrace the locally created moniker of “Corrupt Overlord” from one of the all time great Lords of Waterdeep runs, Shane is one member of the Assorted Meeples crew and will be hard at work creating awesome content for the website. He is a long-time player of board games, one time semi-professional poker player, and tends to run to the quirky or RPG side of things when it comes to playing video games. He loves tabletop roleplaying systems like Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, Werewolf, Fate, and others, and not only has been a player but has run games as DM for years. You can find his other work in publications like Level Skip or Hobby Lark.