Golden Anvil

Today MrsKheldar and I spent most of the day playing Descent: Journeys in the Dark. This is a big board game with lots of counters and markers and such, kind of like Arkham Horror (for those of you who've played that). This was MrsKheldar's Christmas gift to me, and it definitely looks like a winner. We had a lot of fun playing, although the game too waaaay longer than expected, in part due to time to punch out all the markers and having to do a lot of searches through the rules as we were playing. I suspect our next game will be a good deal shorter.

The game is semi-cooperative. One player takes the part of the overlord, playing the part of all the monsters, traps, etc in the dungeon. The rest of the players cooperate in an effort to make their way through the dungeon and complete the quest objective. There are 10 published quests that come with the game, with a few additional official ones available online and a large number of user-made ones as well.

The dungeon setup is defined by the quest, and is created using tiles that interlock together to create the base floorplan. When players enter a room, rubble, holes, water, doors, teleporters, treasure, and monsters are added according to the quest definition. Players make their way through the dungeon killing the monsters as they go, trying to reach the end before they're killed too often. They can go back to visit the town to spend some of the wealth they've found in order to gain power and stock up on useful potions.

The overlord player gets cards from a special deck which can be played to spring traps on the players, spawn new groups of monsters, or gain a variety of new one-shot or permanent abilities.

For our first game, I played the overlord and MrsKheldar played two characters (suggested for when you only have two players; normally each of the non-overlord players has a single character). The rules weren't too hard to get into. Definitely easier than Arkham Horror.

At first, MrsKheldar was having a rough time of things, and it looked like she was going to go out fairly early. However, then she rallied, and managed to get into a very nice position, and it looked like she'd have no problems winning. Then I laid down a long series of attacks that managed to kill her characters off a number of times. This put her in a rather bad position for entering the final room. There, I was able to use some carefully hoarded cards to turn the tide and finally put her down for good.

All in all, we both had a lot of fun playing. We're definitely looking forward to playing again, and we'll definitely be sharing this game with the rest of you guys as the opportunity presents itself. MrsKheldar did manage to get some pictures taken. You can check those out below.

Definitely a fun way to start off the year!

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