1146: Doing It Wrong

We’ve had a day of board gaming today, including a game of Agricola, a game of Small World and finishing off with a quest and a half worth’s of Descent: Second Edition.

Partway through our Descent session, I looked up something on a whim, and it transpires that we’ve been playing a certain rule completely wrong for the duration of our campaign. It turns out the Stun condition, which we’d been playing as completely eliminating a figure’s go (i.e. the only action they could take that turn is getting rid of Stun status) actually only removes one of a figure’s two actions per turn. Given that one of the hero characters has an ability that automatically inflicts Stun on any monster figure that begins their turn adjacent to them — and, more to the point, has been making extensive use of that ability — this has likely had a significant knock-on effect on our campaign. I knew that ability as we had been playing it felt distinctly unbalanced, and now I know why — the way we were playing it, it was!

Fortunately, Descent 2 is fun enough that even with the hero players being armed to the teeth with a variety of ill-gotten gains through earlier quests that they might not necessarily have won had my Overlord’s forces not spent most of their time staggering around in a daze, it’s still enjoyable to play. I’m still losing pretty much every quest and it’s entirely likely that I will lose the entire campaign as a result of our earlier fuckup, but it doesn’t matter too much. We know now, at least, and from the sound of the conversation around our gaming table this evening it looks highly likely that we’re going to do another run through the campaign once we’re finished, with everyone in different roles.

This is the one tricky thing about board games versus video games. In video games, assuming they have been programmed correctly, there is no way to do that wrong. Had Descent 2 been made as a Fire Emblem-style video game (which would be fantastic, incidentally — I would pay good money for a video game version of it, particularly with multiplayer) then there would have been no ambiguity about the rules. We’d always be using the correct skills, we wouldn’t inadvertently be breaking the rules and there’d be no disputes over what the wording of certain cards meant.

This is actually a common problem with the theme-heavy games that I’m such a fan of. Because theme-heavy games tend to have a lot of rules, many of which only apply to very specific situations (usually tied to happenings in the “narrative” of the play session), it’s very easy to misunderstand, forget or otherwise mutilate the rules in some way. If everyone agrees on a variation, it hurts no-one, but it can be frustrating to have played something for a hefty period of time and discover that you’ve been Doing It Wrong.

Oh well. As I say, I’m not too worried. I’ve had a blast playing through the Descent 2 campaign so far, and we’re coming up on the finale. Once that’s done and dusted, we’ll be able to start a new game — possibly with the recently-released expansion pack — and play it, you know, properly. We have a running joke in our gaming group that if we fuck something up rules-wise and it’s too late to do anything about it, the game in question is a “training game”. When it comes to a multi-session campaign like this, it’s a little harder to justify, but as I say, since we’re highly likely to be playing it again we can chalk our experiences this time around up to learning the ropes, and hopefully do a better job next time around.

If I haven’t made it clear by the several other posts I’ve written on this subject to date, Descent 2 is a really good game. It’s been a big hit with our gaming group due to the fact that it marries genuinely strategic gameplay with theme-heavy shenanigans and lovely-quality components — the miniatures in particular are beautifully-detailed, if rendered in rather bendy plastic — and thus appeals to both the people who enjoy games with “stories” and a lot of theme, and those who enjoy competitive, strategic play. I can highly recommend it for anyone looking for a good, relatively easy to understand (rules for the Stun condition aside) game with a lot of variety and huge replay value.