Descent - Journeys in the Dark

Having been brought up on Heroquest and Warhammer Quest, this product had a lot to live up to.

This game is in the best tradition of those games, with plenty of variety in terms of quests and monsters. The box is briming full of goodies (does make it heavy to carry if you don't drive to you club of course!) and the production quality is great.

It also plays very well and it seems to have playtested throughtly. The fact it is based on Doom (and seems to deal with the flaws from that game) does help.

My only niggle is this: the campaign system feels rather false. At the end of the adventure you lose all the kit and skills you had accumulated and apart from a bit more gold you are a starting player. This removes the need to absudly over-engineer scenarios to compensate and ensures balance, but you lose the sense you are developing a character rather than playing one-off games.

Overall a great game and very good value.

Descent is great fun, it really reminds all of us fantasy rpg veterans of the old school dungeon crawl adventures.

With a lot of variation possible regarding scenarios and map, characters, skills and gear, this game can be played for a long time before getting old. Luckily expansions are also available.

One player plays the Evil overlord, while the rest play the heroes. A lot depends on being in agreement of the playing style. If this fails, the game is less enjoyable IMHO.
If the Overlord is really out to get you in the shortest possible time, and knows what he's doing, maxing all attacks, and the heroes want to play a lax style, just for fun, things won't work out that well. But if the Overlord is too nice, and the heroes are played in perfect tactical coordination, the game is a cakewalk. Of course, since there are dice involved, a lot rests of the whims of lady luck.

I enjoy this game, it's fun. And since it's a board game, it does what it's supposed to, and what else you put into it with regards to actuallu roleplaying your character, just adds to the fun.

As someone fairly new to the genre, this is an excellent game. The rules are a little complicated on the first couple of plays but then you're flying. The sheer range of scenarios, characters, monsters and weapons makes it a new challenge every time.

Some of the expansions do get a bit hard though, and some missions are better than others. You also need a massive table!!

As someone who played through the Doom campaign and enjoyed both the theme and the mechanics (if not the 'whining' from the weak marines that it was too difficult), I was torn as to whether or not to get Descent. Having now purchased and played the first campaign level of Descent I can honestly say I am glad that I did purchase it.

My initial thoughts of this game upon opening the box, were “why is there so much empty space?”. This was answered when I began punching the pieces out and realised with the current insert in the box there wasn’t enough space to store everything. I therefore had to turn the insert around the other way and cut (I know this pained me too!) a piece of card out to make a central part to store small pieces. Once I looked at the characters my second thought was this is Doom + Runebound, as many of the characters are from Runebound. This didn’t faze me and in actual fact gave me a slight warm fuzzy feeling that my trusted but underused Runebound heroes might earn their hero stripes yet.

Having played Doom there was around 50% of the rules I could merrily skip through thinking "yep know that" and "ooh goody they kept that in". The remaining 50% is the fantasy clothing this game dons and looks so good in. The main differences and thus the main parts of the rules I had to read in full were

1. The character differences.
Each character now has differing health points, base armour and fatigue (which can be used to add additional dice to attacks or give additional movement) as well as a melee, magic and ranged affinity which is denoted by an additional number of power dice rolled when attacking with the relevant form. The character also has a fighting, subterfuge and spell casting ability which translates as a set number of skill cards from the corresponding deck (as opposed to the generic skill deck in Doom). The heroes also have an additional skill printed on their card which should be heeded as it can be valuable in the correct situation.

2. The idea of a town
This is the start point for the marines before they delve into the dungeon. Although in reality the game begins in the dungeon the heroes are allowed to spend their 300 coins (increasing if they successfully complete levels) on health potions, weapons or armour. They can also hop back here at any time through an activated glyph for a shopping spree.

3. The map.
The map is fully built at the beginning of the game, but monsters items etc. are only added as the hero gains line of sight to an area; which in reality generally means opens the door. The monsters allocated by the scenario are no longer colour coded (as in Doom) so that more players no longer mean more monsters from the off (more of this in the threat section).

4. Threat
This is the way the game manages the difficulty dependant on the number of players as each round the overlord draws threat tokens equal to the number of heroes. Threat tokens are paid to play the spawn, trap or event cards during the game to make the hero’s lives more difficult

5. Conquest
Conquest tokens are a measure of how well the heroes are performing on their quest and are essentially their life rating. If a hero is killed they lose conquest tokens, but they gain more for opening chests, activating glyphs or killing named (and therefore more powerful monsters).

6. Effects and monster abilities
There are far more of these in Descent than previously experienced in Doom and add more variety and more to think about.

The game feels more interesting for the overlord with more types of monster to control, more rounded and tactical for the hero with more customisation allowed and generally more ‘even’ when compared to Doom. For those that haven’t played Doom, this game stands alone and although learning it will take slightly longer it will be well worth the investment in time. The 9 missions mean this game has reasonable longevity and the expansions and upcoming mission book will only add to this.