GRY-PLANSZOWE.pl

The Action System
In the old game, your options for the turn were fairly limited. The biggest decision you had to make was usually which enemy to hit, and the correct choice was usually fairly obvious. When you lost, it most often felt like bad luck, not bad strategy. You were very rarely saying "Maybe if we had done this instead..." but simply saying, "Well, we sure did roll a lot of 1's that game." For a game in 1995, when Monopoly, Clue and Risk were still considered to be "good" board games (at least by me and everyone I knew) this was acceptable. In modern times, I want my losses to be followed immediately by a discussion of what I did wrong, or could've done better.

Silver Tower addresses this with a system for determining what actions you can use in a turn. You roll 4 dice (fewer if you're wounded) at the start of your turn. All of your actions (moving, attacking, etc) require you to spend one of these dice. Most of the more powerful actions require a die of at least a certain number, and some of them get more powerful if you spend a higher number. Finally, there is a pool of dice in the middle that anyone can use (with certain limitations).

This creates an interesting system of resource management. Yes, it is still obviously subject to the whims of luck, and sometimes a bad roll will make you much less effective during a given turn. However, deciding which of your dice to use for which action, in which order, and which party member gets to use the dice in the middle are all decisions that usually bear at least a little bit of thought. It's a little puzzle within the game that's fun and just challenging enough to make each turn a bit more interesting.

Damage and recovery:
The original Warhammer Quest had a fairly standard system of "hit points." If you ran out of them, and you couldn't get healing before the end of the turn, you were dead, simple as that. There were lots of ways to heal (especially later on) so you had ways to mitigate this harsh system, but death was still pretty common.

In Silver Tower, damage is done in much smaller numbers. Each hero can only take 5 damage before he's out of commission. Oh, and remember those dice that you have to spend to take actions? Each wound reduces how many of those you can roll, causing your hero to become less effective as his wounds slow him down and tire him out.

Healing in Silver Tower is also much easier; one of the actions you can spend dice on is healing. But of course, doing so means you're effectively taking even fewer actions that turn (one fewer for the damage itself and one fewer for the one you spent recovering it) so it slows your progress down. And while you're standing there doing something besides attacking, your enemies are trying to hurt you more. Again, interesting decisions to be made! Great stuff.

Story:
As I said in the "Number of Adventures" section, Silver Tower makes each adventure more unique with different rooms available to discover and different encounters possible in those rooms. While this is a problem from a replayability standpoint, it is a huge perk from a story standpoint. The "choose your own adventure" style of the adventure book keeps you guessing, and allows for many surprises on your first time through an adventure. I don't know if it will still be fun on my 20th play of this game, but I can be sure that the first 8 or 9 will be much more interesting. This brings up a similar discussion as Pandemic vs Pandemic Legacy; would you rather have a fantastic game that's a completely new experience for a finite number of plays but stops really being appealing after that or a game that's still good (just not fantastic) that doesn't rely on surprise? If you're reading a review on BGG (and you've made it this far) you probably already have opinions on this subject, so you can decide based on those. I personally think the story is a really cool thing to have.

Variable Number of Heroes:
In old Warhammer Quest, the game was balanced around there being 4 heroes; no more, no less. If you only had 2 or 3 players, someone had to take control of more than one hero. This always felt awkward.

In the new game, the challenges are made to scale with the number of heroes; the book might tell you to spawn one of a certain monster for every hero, for example. This means that when you play with 2 or 3 players, each player can just control exactly one hero. Which is good.

Where the complexity lies:
This is sort-of a more general statement that encompasses what I was saying about the action system and damage and recovery. The complexity in Silver Tower is in resource management and meaningful decisions. Much of the complexity in the original was spent figuring out what you needed to roll in order to hit by comparing your "Weapon Skill" to that of your opponent and consulting a chart. Many have complained about the "static to-hit value" rules that Age of Sigmar brought to Warhammer and now to Warhammer Quest, but I like them a lot. Good game design, imo, takes as much complexity as possible away from understanding how to do something, and puts it instead in deciding whether to do it.

Enemy "AI":
In the original game, the enemies followed a specific set of rules to govern their actions. This set of rules was slightly different for certain foes (ranged combatants obviously didn't walk toward you) but for the most part, it was the same across the board. This made them very predictable, almost robotic.

The new system still doesn't approach realism (some enemies will move forward to attack you in hand-to-hand combat one turn, then try to move away the next turn to shoot you at range; it's very random) but the one thing it does accomplish is unpredictability. You don't know for sure what an enemy is going to do on it's turn. This is definitely an improvement, if only a minor one.