Lords of Waterdeep takes place in the Dungeons & Dragons universe. You place your workers ("agents") in various buildings of the city of Waterdeep. These buildings give you quest cards, money, and adventurer tokens (which represent fighters, clerics, rogues, and wizards). Once you've accumulated the adventurer tokens required by a quest card, you cash in that quest card for victory points. (Meaning that your adventurers have gone on the quest and completed it.) Each player works for one of the city's Masked Lords, and their identity is known only to that player. If you complete the types of quests your Masked Lord favors, you get even more points.
You can even use your money to build new locations in Waterdeep, giving everyone more opportunities to gain resources. And when a rival player puts an agent on your building, you earn a small bonus.
It's super fun to examine the available quest cards, decide which ones are most advantageous, snatch up those cards before others do, and hire the adventurers to complete those quest cards before others block you from them. You can also play Intrigue cards that interact with other players, sometimes to mutual benefit and sometimes to their detriment. There's nothing like using an Intrigue card to give the leading player a Mandatory Quest that they have to complete before any others. Mandatory Quests give very few victory points and waste the time of the player that's saddled with them, giving the other players a chance to catch up. It's also fun to watch what happens in the final round, when players cash in the huge-point quest cards they've been working on and earn come-from-behind victories.
You can play against AI players, and the AI is pretty competent. Although I can routinely win on the base game, I rarely win when I use the expansions. And it's fun to watch the AIs play. Cards and tokens fly across the board faster than I can follow, making me feel like I'm at a high-stakes poker game.
I also like the generally seedy atmosphere of Waterdeep. The game takes place on a map of the grungy-looking city that cycles from day to night. Tiny ships float in the harbors. A mysterious "up to no good" tune plays in the background. Each building plays a different sound effect when you place an agent there. You hear a clerk humming and shuffling papers when you get a quest card from Cliffwatch Inn, and you hear a gong when you hire a cleric from the temple.
If there's one thing I'm missing, it's lore. I've never played the D&D tabletop game, so I don't know much about the story here. But from a couple of YouTube videos I've watched about Waterdeep lore, it seems really cool. It would be nice if the quest and intrigue cards gave a bit more story. As it is, each card just has one pithy sentence of flavor text. As this is a board game, it wouldn't be reasonable to expect more than that. Still, it would still be nice to know who this Xanathar guy is.
