Being a big fan of both Warhammer fantasy and cooperative games, I bought the game a couple of days ago. After playing the tutorial and the first two quests of the campaign with a couple of friends, we ended up with mixed feelings.

The game is neat and fun. It plays fast, the adventures seem pretty well balanced and as always, the component of upgrading your characters after each adventure is appealing. Yet I have a main concern right now that puts me off from wanting to invest in this game, as I did for example with The Lord of the Rings lcg. The story itself feels empty, very empty I would say. On one hand, you read some introductory lines (which are very nice) to set the mood of the adventure, check a peril progress tracker which also sets you in the adventure mood and then... We found that the locations you explore are too generic and too disconnected from the adventure setting, the same applies to some of the creatures that you encounter. This produced in us a total detachment from the nice initial feeling that we were going on an adventure, and the game became an "explore this random location", "kill these random guys" and "move on to complete the card and win the game".

For example, in our first game, we had to explore the sewers, because Jod tells you there is a funny smell coming from there. In this adventure, you have to explore 3 random locations and one final location (which is the only one related to the setting of the adventure). Our first location was Throng of webs, our second location was dwarven forge and our third location was winding tunnels. So, we ended up like "where are the sewers?", "where are we?" So, we go down the sewer and first we encounter webs, but no spider enemies, then a dwarven forge... really? right under the city? It was a letdown. If instead the first location would have been, I don't know, "sewer entrance", then for example "sewer system" and then "pestilent pool" (to say some names", the feeling of a consistent adventure would have been way bigger.

Similar, but in a less manner happens with enemies. In less manner because not all enemies are randomised, opposite to the case of locations, the adventure card presets some enemies which are thematic, like bats and goblins, for that sewer adventure. Then you introduce some randomised enemies, which ok, it was not terrible, but it does not help on the immersion to find a couple of bats and a ghoul in a dwarven forge while you were exploring the sewers. But compared to the locations, the randomisation of the enemies is much more bearable.

This way of randomised dungeon works well if you play for example the Delve quest, where you expect nothing but going down into the earth bashing random enemies like in old D&D or Advanced Hero Quest, and improve your character.

If I could chose the future direction of the game, or the design of the future campaign expansions, I would make locations way more thematic and related with the setting of the adventure in play. I would make each single adventure with its set of thematic locations, and it would be from that set that you generate your location deck for that adventure.

These are my two cents about the game.

There is a story, but there is also a game. Any dungeon exploration game has to steer a path between these two. It runs the risk of either being over constraining (keeping tightly to a story and setting) or else providing some random combinations of character and location. The Pathfinder Adventure Card Game fell into both traps by offering tight scenarios on one hand, populated with some odd, random Monsters on the other. I don't know which side is favoured by the LotR game, but the sense of a storyline must be aided by the fact that Tolkien's powerful trilogy dominates the player's mind.

The Warhammer Quest ACG is the best compromise I've come across so far. The characters and locations are just sufficiently generic for me to work them into a reasonable sequence of events. The dwarven forge under the city doesn't upset me. If I always encountered a sewer entrance before the sewer system before the pestilent pool there would be little opportunity for variety and the game would suffer. So the trick is to provide some variety, while keeping the peculiar combinations within most people's generic comfort zone. More importantly, the game mechanisms used in WHACG are excellent.

You could also not randomly select enemies, and instead pick ones that you feel are more thematic to the quest. I've done it both ways and it doesn't really impact the difficulty (unless you cheated and specifically avoided enemies that you didn't want to encounter).

I agree more could be done to make the locations and overall progress feel more thematic.

I think the core set had to address the need of providing a variety of generic locations and enemies however, to lay the foundation for a possible series of expansions, and this therefore forced them to cobble together locations and enemies for the core set adventures that might not really mesh smoothly with each other.

If they release expansions with more quests and locations and enemies, I suspect it will become all the easier to create more appropriately thematic adventures.

If I always encountered a sewer entrance before the sewer system before the pestilent pool there would be little opportunity for variety and the game would suffer.

I was thinking more like having small subsets of locations which you can still randomise, the number of cards in the subset depending its usefulness, like 6 cards for sewers, 12 cards for caves, 12 cards for dungeons etc. Notice that the locations have traits, like civilised, lair etc. That is the sort of thing I am talking about.

I think the core set had to address the need of providing a variety of generic locations and enemies however, to lay the foundation for a possible series of expansions, and this therefore forced them to cobble together locations and enemies for the core set adventures that might not really mesh smoothly with each other.

If they release expansions with more quests and locations and enemies, I suspect it will become all the easier to create more appropriately thematic adventures.

I think so too.