HomeEver wanted to create a party of fantasy characters and tackle a simple dungeon? Love board games? Look no further! D&D Onslaught by Wizkids is just the game to get you comfortably dabbling into skirmish style games – with a fantasy twist.
Players assemble a handful of adventurers, the ‘party’ and use simple stat cards associated with each member to complete objectives and survive each scenario, with both PvP (player vs. player) and PvE (player vs. enemy) concepts core to the game’s design. It’s fun, simple and it involves two things: miniatures and a D20. It’s designed for 1-2 players in the normal base game but has supplements which add more players, with room for solo adventures too which is great if you have no friends.
Perfect for strategy lovers and miniature collectors, it brings a warm welcome to the skirmish scene, and with Dungeons & Dragons always stealing the spotlight in fantasy gaming there’s no wonder as to why: it’s fun!
There is one drawback to the base game: the price; it retails at £120. For this you will get a bunch of miniatures including a big Dragon, kobolds, an Ettin, a troll and enough heroes (or villains) to make up a party of adventurers for two factions you get in the base game, I’ll detail the exact contents at the end of the article – let’s delve into how to play real quick!
As well as a double-sided board the game comes with a rulebook that’s like less than 20 pages for the actual core rules, a bunch of tokens and dungeon furniture tokens (like portals and walls) plus some custom D20’s which have the faction logo in place of the 20 for each set. It also has a scenario booklet which comes with a setup guide – this will act as your storytelling booklet, it tells you everything you need to do with pictures guiding the setup itself.
Once you’ve set up your scenario, you will create a party and aim for whatever the scenario objective is; from helping prisoners escape to slaying dragons!
Each party consists of a handful of adventurers which come with an accompanying card representing that specific adventurer; the character card uses a dial system which you’ll use to denote when you’ve done things like lost or gained health, spells and even movement; movement for example is per square and your dial card may let you move 5 squares, and if you take X amount of damage or are subject to a spell that reduces this, you’ll just simply move the dial the amount of notches the effect tells you to.
Same with spells and special attacks, the card itself will tell you to turn the dial X amount of notches one way. You can level up, which is explained on the character card, it’ll be something simple from knocking enemies out to casting spells to gain xp, and when you gain enough (also recorded on a dial on the card) you get to pick one of two level up cards to add to your character card – levelling up usually means you simply get an additional trait like buffs and new features to use.
The game encourages you to use minis as you battle your way through each scenario and you get a load of tokens to represent other things that may crop up during the game, such as minics inside of treasure chests or skeletons which can be summoned by necromancers.
Your actual party must consist of members of the same faction, the base game comes with the Zhentarim and the Harpers as the two factions and a selection of different adventurers to customise your party with, from a Goblin Ranger to naughty, naughty Sorcerers. Factions must be banded together, so you can’t play a party of mixed factions (I mean, you *could*), with the exception of booster packs such as the Sellswords allowing you to add them to any party. Oh yeah, you can buy booster packs for every faction and the miniatures inside them are just as beautiful! You can buy Faction Packs too such as the Many Arrows one to play as them should you want to mix things up.
Onslaught truly is easy to play and the scenario book has an introductory session that helps you learn the core rules of the game, using 3 party members per team, with 5 being the normal number for party selection.
Movement is simple: your character card tells you how many tiles you can move, attacking is just as easy with those familiar with D&D finding it intuitive, with one exception: you always roll two D20 and take the higher result when fighting. This helps push a faster game with hits being quite common, but bear in mind that enemies are tougher in this than they may be in the actual Monster Manual for 5E due to a change in stats and game mechanics for Onslaught. You need to think about other elements too such as terrain features, treasure locations and enemy positions – each member of your party is a valuable resource which, with good dice rolls and tactical thinking, will help you achieve the goal of the scenario, so you don’t want to lose them.
Once each scenario is complete, you can swap out your party and head into the next one!
Initiative is also really cool here, you don’t roll for it, you select cards at random which denote each initiative turn, with monsters being allocated an initiative in-between the ones given to players. I found during our games that initiative made a massive difference (for better or worse) and the sighs and cheers from each of us as we saw our initiative cards was funny. You put the initiative card face down over your character card until it’s your turn to reveal it (monsters always have theirs revealed) which makes for some sneaky moves and critical thinking when planning your next move.
Again, the miniatures are really beautiful and they’ve had a lot of care taken with them unlike the Baldur’s Gate 3 miniature issue that rocked the D&D world this year. You can also use the miniatures in your D&D games and on top of that, you get some lush new D20s!
The only recommendation I would suggest is using dice (I use the 7mm D6 ones) to record HP next to NPCs just to make tracking it easier. The group I play with are looking at playing the latest expansion as of writing this, which is Tendrils of the Lichen Lich introducing both the Lord’s Alliance and Emerald Enclave factions to the game.
To recap, the contents of the base game are:
- 1 Double-sided game board
- 21 Fully painted miniatures
- 4 D20’s (2 per faction)
- 16 Dial cards
- 26 Standard cards
- 44 Mini cards
- 71 Tokens
- 14 Terrain elements
- 1 Rulebook
- 1 Scenario Guide
- 4 Plastic standees