Retro Recall: Dungeons & Dragons – The Fantasy Adventure Game
June 6, 2019 by brennon
Back when I was younger during the fabled year 2003 a friend of mine got Dungeons & Dragons: The Fantasy Adventure Board Game for us to play from his parents. To this day I don't actually know how deep this game could have been because we lost pretty much every game we ever played of it...
So, in this Retro Recall, I am looking back at a game which I remember fondly not because it was any good but because we were genuinely stumped by it.
How Do We Keep Losing!?
Dungeons & Dragons: The Fantasy Adventure Game was effectively Wizards Of The Coast's and Hasbro's attempt at HeroQuest. The box game with plastic heroes and enemies and had you battling through quests set forth by the dungeons we delved into.
You might recognise the characters from the front of the box as the iconic heroes from Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition and 3.5. Each had their own focus and with the use of special abilities, weapons, custom dice and more you could battle through the game and level up as you went.
The problem was...we just kept losing. None of us understood why but the game was so different from actual D&D. Every encounter we went into the enemies just seemed better than us. We spent more time hiding behind pillars and avoiding skeletons than we did fighting them! Whenever we saw anything relatively big we were utterly screwed!
We looked at the back of the box...
...and were immediately annoyed at how happy these kids looked! I mean, seriously, how are they having so much fun when all we faced was misery?!
In 2003 I was sixteen years old so we should have been able to play this bloody game but somehow...we were utterly defeated by it. To this day I have all of the components, custom dice and plastic figures from this game and one day maybe we'll go back and play it again. I mean seriously, we couldn't have been so bad at reading rules, could we?
Whenever we played, the Dungeon Master always won. Maybe this has fuelled my dislike of adversarial games over the years. Descent, Mansions Of Madness and more are cool, but they're much better as fully cooperative adventures.
You won't be surprised to know that we eventually dropped this game and went back to playing actual sessions of Dungeons & Dragons. Did you ever have as much of a problem with this game as I did?
This game will forever be my nemesis...
"To this day I don't actually know how deep this game could have been because we lost pretty much every game we ever played of it..."
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"Maybe this has fuelled my dislike of adversarial games over the years..."
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I picked this up on ebay a few years back for £10, mainly out of curiosity.
The minis are awful.
Not played it. May never do. But it’s there, hiding behind the good stuff.
2003? I was 28 back then and that somehow totally past me…. was it even released in Germany? *looks up BGG* yes it was…. how did I miss that?
I justed looked up the prices on ebay.de for the German version…. 85€ and up… oO this is sure just because noone has it, is it? XD
as advertised on stranger things?
I read that this game had expansions based on the Dwarf and Wizard Heroquest expansions that were never released?
Used to play this with my son and father-in-law after finding it in a discount store, probably around 2008. I’ll agree it was very much like Heroquest but with a more modular board set-up. Can’t say we struggled much with any one sidedness but it did get abandoned quite sharpish when I got my hands on Descent. My son still plays it with his friends occasionally, but that’s only because he’s moved out now and it’s the only dungeon crawler he’s got.
lol… when I read this title I thought it was going to be talking about 1st edition D&D … which is what I would call Retro …2003 was only a few weeks agor right… ahh crap I am getting old….
Bought it when i was 13 and still have it 🙂 We still play it from thime to thime
I guess I’m just an old fart, because I actually played Heroquest when it was new. So . . . yeah . . . I’m old.
Snickers… a mere babe you are.
I played Dungeons and Dragons for the first time at the ripe old age of 9, in 1979!
You’re only 9 years older than I. We should game together. LOL. Reminds me of the meme going around featuring Bane from the Batman movie. “You merely adopted D&D. We were born in it, molded by it. We still used THAC0 until we were men.”
Some youngsters on this site these days
Tell me about it… born in the 70’s… juvenile delinquents.
I’m so old that England hadn’t yet beat the germans for the third time (1918, 1945, 1966) when I was born and no one had heard of Neil Armstrong.
I still amuse my sons to no end with my talk of THACO and Elves/Dwarves/Halflings being character classes!
Picked this up in a charity shop a couple weeks back for £2 and have been playing it with my 5 year old. She loved it at first but the quests all start to become a bit samey but it has inspired her to create her own d&d style games
While I already knew about Dragonstrike (thanks to VHS tape that come with it) this is first time I learned about this one and based on this I would take Dragonstrike over this game any day.
Not only have I played this game (reasonable to good in its day) but I have all the minis painted (badly).