1514: New Journeys in the Dark

We finally got around to starting a new campaign of Descent: Journeys in the Dark 2nd Edition (hereafer Descent to save my own sanity) recently. We eventually abandoned our original campaign on the “finale” quest after getting a number of rules exceedingly wrong for the entire campaign, which meant that the party of heroes were exceedingly overpowered, while the Overlord (me) was vastly underpowered.

This time around, we’re going to do it right. I’m playing a hero this time around, so it’ll be fun to be on the other side of the table, and we’re also playing with the Lair of the Wyrm expansion, which adds a couple of new character classes plus rules for “rumors” and extra quests that bolt on to the existing campaign. They’re mostly fairly minor changes, but it should be fun.

The new class I’m playing as — a Geomancer — is looking like it has potential to be fun. Beginning with a ranged magic weapon and the ability to summon a stone familiar which can subsequently make use of aforementioned ranged magic weapon, levelling up eventually equips me with the ability to summon more than one stone, detonate them and blast enemies in the vicinity, and all sort of other happy funtimes.

I actually haven’t really explored the other classes all that much, but the way Descent is designed makes for an interesting set of combinations. Each player gets to pick a hero character, and that hero has fixed stats and special abilities (one of which can always be used, one of which may only be used once per “encounter” in a quest) — but from there, you can pick one of several specific classes for that hero’s archetype. This allows for a ton of variety, particularly given that the game and the expansion certainly don’t skimp on the available heroes. I’m looking forward to working through the campaign and getting a feel for how my character fits into the party as a whole.

The game continues to impress me as a good balance between cooperative and competitive, strategic and thematic play. It is, I think, one of the best games in our collection for keeping pretty much everyone around the table happy for one reason or another, and thus I’m always glad to be able to get it out.

As I think I’ve probably mentioned before, one of the things I particularly like is that it isn’t a straightforward dungeon crawl, despite how it positions itself on its packaging and in its marketing. No, instead it’s more of a small-scale skirmish game in which a small team of heroes faces off against a modest force of monsters, with both sides trying to complete objectives that are usually a lot more interesting than just “kill all of the other team”. In the introductory quest, for example, the Overlord’s task is to get five goblins off the map — and said goblins keep respawning even if the heroes kill them. The heroes, meanwhile, are tasked with defeating a strong boss monster while simultaneously attempting to block the flow of goblins. All of the quests are like this to one degree or another; it gives the game a pleasant feeling of asymmetry while keeping things interesting for both sides and preventing it from becoming mindless hack-and-slash.

There’s also a really nice system of dice for combat. A basic attack uses a blue six-sided die, which determines whether or not you hit and a small amount of damage. Equipped weapons then add additional dice to this basic die of either the yellow or red variety. Yellow dice do less damage overall, but they have more in the way of “surges” — energy markers that, when rolled, can be used to trigger special abilities. They can also be used to increase the range of ranged weapons — in order to hit something at range, you have to roll a high enough number as well as hitting with the blue die. Red dice, meanwhile, are largely focused on dealing more damage.

On top of that, there are brown, grey and black defense dice that reflect how much protection a character has thanks to their equipment and innate abilities — but then certain weapons have a “pierce” skill that allows them to ignore some defense. The systems all gradually build on top of each other, but things never get overwhelmingly complicated. It’s satisfying.

In fact, the only thing I’m really not a fan of about Descent is that the box insert it comes with is absolute garbage — in fact, I chucked in in order to get everything fitting in the box a bit better. Between all the miniatures, the zillion tokens and the big thick cardboard map tiles, there’s a lot of stuff in that box, though, and it’s tricky to keep it organised. I’m going to have to look into a better storage solution for it if I want to play it a bit more often, I think!

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.

#oneaday Day 939: Deeper Into the Dark

Last night, I had the good fortune of being able to spend some more time with my friends playing Descent: Journeys in the Dark Second Edition (hereafter, once again, referred to as Descent 2). The game has been a big hit so far, which is pleasing, as there’s a hell of a lot to it and a significant amount of replay value even once your group plays through the 20+ hour campaign once.

This time we had a full complement of five players — me as the Overlord and four hero characters, two of whom we “boosted” up to an equivalent level to the two who played the first quests in our first session. We took on a new quest and played it through to completion. It took significantly longer with five people as this (1) meant that there were four people to argue about the best way through which to eviscerate my monster minions and (2) I had more monster minions with which to attempt to eviscerate my four opponents. Overall, I found it a much more satisfying experience with five players total, which perhaps explains why the game’s BoardGameGeek page rates it as “best with 5 players”.

The game has so far appeared to be weighted quite heavily in favour of the heroes in that they have won every quest so far. I’m not complaining about this, mind — it’s quite fun to struggle against these difficult odds, and I’m assuming (hoping, really) that the odds will even or perhaps tip in my favour as the campaign progresses to more difficult challenges. Or, of course, I could just be rubbish at being the Overlord. (I know for a fact on more than one occasion I screwed myself out of a potentially significant advantage by forgetting to play Overlord cards such as “pit trap” and “tripwire” that could have stopped players from moving and thus blocking me off from completing objectives — but this is entirely my fault, so I didn’t ask for a “do-over” as that wouldn’t really be in the spirit of things. I have learned my lesson.)

There are a ton of things to like about the game, though. Unlike many “dungeon crawlers” (which, as I’ve previously said, Descent 2 really isn’t) the rules are relatively lightweight, but pretty flexible, and the custom dice used for combat allow for a large amount of variety. For the unfamiliar, every attack roll uses a blue “attack” die, which has a 1 in 6 chance of missing and does varying degrees of damage on its other faces. Each weapon or special attack then uses one or more of the red and yellow dice — red ones offer the potential for more damage, while yellow ones offer more in the way of “surges” — little lightning-bolt symbols that can be spent to perform a weapon’s special actions — some might be able to “pierce” the enemy’s defensive dice, for example, while others might do additional damage, apply an effect or knock the unfortunate victim backwards. Combine the various weapon, skill and item cards with the pool of dice available and you have a wide variety of possibilities that keeps combat constantly interesting.

And that’s just within a single encounter. Pulling back to look at the bigger picture, the entire campaign can play out completely differently according to how the heroes and Overlord perform, and the quest choices that the hero players make. Rather smartly, the game only requires players to complete three out of five possible “Act I” quests before an “interlude”, followed by three out a possible ten “Act II” quests, each of which is presented as part of a pair according to whether the heroes or Overlord won the corresponding act I quest. I didn’t explain that very well. Basically, Act II’s available quests change according to who won various quests in Act I. There, that’s better.

On top of that, the Descent 2 Conversion Kit allows content from the original Descent: Journeys in the Dark to be used with Descent 2, opening up a whole swathe of possibilities. And then you can guarantee that Descent 2 will also have its own expansions ready to roll before long, meaning that this is a game with a potentially very long lifespan — which is why I’m so very pleased that my group has taken to it so well. Anything that puts off yet another humiliating, crushing (and bewildering) defeat in Agricola is just fine with me.

#oneaday Day 925: Journeys in the Dark

I remember catching a glimpse of the first Descent: Journeys in the Dark a good few years back now. It was when my friends and I were just starting to discover the joy of board gaming, and had been experimenting with everything from Risk to Space Crusade via Catan and several others. Descent was noteworthy for 1) coming in a massive box and 2) costing £60, which put it slightly out of “impulse purchase” territory. I mean, if it sucked, that was a lot of money and shelf space to have wasted.

I did some reading up on it, though, and found that it seemed to be a well-regarded game, and one of the favourite “dungeon crawlers” among the community. I kept an eye on it with interest, but never got around to picking up a copy.

A month or two back, I decided that I really actually quite did want to give it a try, so I paid a visit to a couple of online UK board game distributors that I knew of and tried to order a copy. It was, as Sod’s Law tends to have it, nowhere to be seen.

A little research, and I discovered that the reason it was no longer available was because publisher Fantasy Flight Games was beavering away on a brand new edition. Descent: Journeys in the Dark Second Edition to give it its full, and rather grandiose title, in fact — hereafter referred to as Descent 2 to save my sanity. (Not to be confused with the video game Descent 2, however, which is something entirely different.)

Descent 2, it seemed, was to be a complete reimagining of the original game. The core mechanics had been overhauled entirely, a variation on the “campaign” rules from the original game’s Road to Legend expansion were to be included as standard and a whole new series of quests was produced. And the whole thing somehow came in a box half the size of the original while still cramming in a ridiculous amount of cardboard and plastic.

I haven’t played the original Descent so I can’t comment with any authority on the differences between it and the follow-up. But I can comment on how Descent 2 plays, because we gave it a try last night.

I honestly wasn’t quite sure what to expect. From reading the rules, it was clear that Descent 2 would be a little different from the other “dungeon crawlers” I’ve played in the past. It didn’t appear to have the sheer brutality of DungeonQuest, the heavily random nature of Advanced Heroquest and Warhammer Quest, or the purely cooperative “GM-free” gameplay of Legend of Drizzt. And it was considerably more complex than Hero Quest, a game which brought many people to the genre in the first place — and one which they should really rerelease for the modern world.

In fact, I’d argue that calling Descent 2 a “dungeon crawler” is actually rather inaccurate. It’s a competitive scenario-based strategy game in which a team of players (the “heroes”) take on a single opponent (the “overlord”) over a series of quests, with both sides gradually growing in strength as the campaign proceeds. (It’s also possible to play the game’s quests as “one-shot” adventures, but one would argue some of the satisfaction of watching your characters grow and evolve over time would be lost.)

Each of Descent 2’s quests is actually made up of two separate encounters, with a couple of exceptions. Each encounter takes place on a prebuilt map, the entirety of which is visible to both sides from the start. Both sides are also fully aware of the victory conditions for the map, rather than the heroes having to explore and uncover the mysteries of the quest for themselves. And once play begins, it is full-on competition between the overlord and the heroes for supremacy.

That latter aspect right there is the key difference between Descent 2 and the previously-mentioned dungeon crawlers. In most cases, the “evil” player (the respective games’ overlord-equivalent) acted as a facilitator, pushing the story forward and occasionally bending the rules in the player’s favour if things looked like they might be getting out of control. (After all, where’s the fun in composing an epic five-act quest if the heroes just get killed by goblins in the first dungeon?) In Descent 2, meanwhile, the overlord is trying their best to accomplish their own victory conditions, rather than simply trying to stop the heroes from accomplishing theirs. Notably, knocking a hero’s health down to zero does not kill them off (unless the group is playing the final battle of the campaign) — it simply causes them to spend a turn knocked to the ground, hopefully allowing the overlord time to gain an advantage.

The campaign unfolds over the course of two three-quest Acts, with additional shorter introduction, interlude and finale quests at appropriate points. For each quest, the victor (be it overlord or heroes) is recorded, with the available quests in Act 2 being determined by who won corresponding quests in the first Act. It all comes down to the final battle in the end, though, because victory for the entire campaign can be secured by either side in both of the two finale quests, regardless of how well (or badly) they have done up until that point. A poor performance could put one side or the other at a disadvantage come this final battle, however, so it is in the interests of everyone to give each quest their all.

In terms of base mechanics during play, they are relatively simple but very flexible. Weapons and skills provide players with varying numbers of dice to roll in combat, with some dice having the potential to deal more damage, others specialising in “surges” (which can trigger special abilities) or ranged combat. There’s a heavy degree of tactical play during each scenario, particularly in those where the heroes are accompanied by civilian characters and are also able to use them to their advantage. Should they get a civilian to close the door, forcing the slobbering monster outside to waste one of its two actions opening it again? Should they run away? Should they hide behind a hero or get as far away from the action as possible? Should the heroes defeat the monsters, or focus on the objectives? Is there time to pick up the hidden treasures scattered around the map? A Descent 2 encounter is a series of decisions like this, culminating in a charge for the finish.

So far we’ve played the introduction quest (which is very short and simple) and one of the Act 1 quests. Both seemed to be slightly weighted in favour of the hero players (though I may just be saying that because Overlord Pete lost both quests) but I’ll be interested to see how the game evolves over time — both heroes and the overlord have the opportunity to spend experience points on new skills between quests, and the overlord’s forces get an appropriate jump in power between Act 1 and 2. The game is also pretty well balanced according to the number of hero players, and from next session onwards we’ll have an extra hero in play, so it will be interesting to see what effect that has, too.

The game was a big hit with the two other participants I played it with last night, and I’d only describe one of them as a particular enthusiast of the dungeon crawl genre. But there’s the point, really — despite Descent 2 featuring a variety of dungeons, and quests, and equipment, and monsters, and experience points — all things readily associated with “dungeon crawling” — it’s really more of a scenario-based battle game. And it’s all the better for it. It’s easy to understand, surprisingly quick to play, and very satisfying. Also, the dynamic nature of the campaign means that it has a lot of replay value, too. A single campaign playthrough is supposed to take about 20 hours in total — multiply that by all the possible combinations of quests that you can play throughout and there’s an impressive amount of content in that box. And, if Descent 2 is anything like its predecessor, it will enjoy a healthy amount of official expansions and fan-created content, making it all but certain to keep a regular place in gaming groups’ rotations for months and years to come.