Forges of Ravenshire Review

Forges of Ravenshire available now on Kickstarter  will have you and friends competing with each other to fire up your forges and produce the best items in all the land. Through upgrades and contracts, players will earn gain resources, make products, and earn points. With some dice placement and little manipulation, does the game work as well as you might like? Let’s take a look.

I will not be doing an in depth How to Play for this game, but if you want a great visual overview of the game, check out this video from Alex Radcliffe and Board Game Co!

In Forges of Ravenshire, players will be placing and taking dice off the central board to complete a number of different actions. In most situations, the pip-value of the dice will represent which items you might get to add to your player board.

Placing a die on the main board will get you stuff to propel you towards victory, after which you will use that stuff to create items, finish contracts, upgrade your forge, and make money.

There are a number of different coloured dice in the game, representing the different guilds you can do work for. In some situations, these colours don’t matter at all, but in others they will.

The game really is about using the dice, and the numbers on them, as best as you possibly can. There is a bit of luck with how the dice are rolled and where they end up on the board, but it’s worth noting that all players are dealing with the same inherent disadvantages, making the game truly equal.

What I like about Forges of Ravenshire is that you are always getting something, so each and every turn feels memorable and impactful. Pull a die off the board, and get some stuff.

Place a die on the board, get some stuff. Upgrade your forge, and guess what? You can get more stuff, do more stuff, and have more fun. Too many games today force you to waste turns grabbing workers back into your supply, or limit your actions so severely that multiple times throughout your evening, you are stuck taking turns that are meaningless. That really isn’t the case in Forges of Ravenshire, and I really appreciate that about this experience.

What I like here is how much upgrading you can do to create a great player board. Your guild tableaus can be added to over the course of the game, and when you reassign dice you pulled off the main board into your various guilds, you get to gain all the benefits you’ve unlocked in that particular guild. You might, therefore, work a bit harder on one guild over another, but realizing you’ll need to be very careful deciding which dice to pull off the main board.

One thing that makes a game for me is a detailed, yet not intrusive, game board. While it might look like a lot when you get it onto the table, the concept behind Forges of Ravenshire is actually pretty basic, yet still deep.

When placing dice on the central board in the slots (love the dual layered boards!), you will get the printed value equal to the result of the die. So if you have a die with a number 3 on it, you will get the benefits printed on the board near that die slot for a roll of 3 or 4.

This is a fairly light weight board game, so if you have friends who aren’t really into deep experiences with lots of moving parts, I think this a great game to get. Even more veteran board game fans are going to have a lot of fun with this one, although it is likely to get to the table less because of the simplistic nature of what you are going to be doing. Overall, however, we still highly recommend you check this one out!