Masmorra: Dungeons of Arcadia

Jan Solostar7.5

Mazmorreo con gestión de dados y evolución de personajes. Muy vistoso.

EvEvanstar5.9

I kickstarted this game so that I could get the new characters to play in Arcadia Quest, since Arcadia Quest is a fantastic game, and the characters from Masamorra are cross compatible. I hoped that this game wouldn't turn out to be garbage but if it was, that would have been ok with me. As a hedge, I made sure to get the extra addon stuff for the game regardless of if it was all cross compatible or not. If this game turned out to be anything, I didn't want to have to hunt down promos or unreleased expansions or god forbid exclusives. So this weekend, my group gave this game two plays. For play 1 we used the all vs all mode, and for play 2 we did the fully cooperative mode. The game also comes with a longer, all vs all epic mode, but we didn't give that a try. For those unfamiliar, this game is a dungeon crawler game, where the monsters are printed on dice. When you enter a room, you take monster dice corresponding to the symbols printed on the tile, roll them, and that determines the monster(s) you fight. The base game comes with only a few dice, but the KS had plenty of extra types to use. As a player, what you do is you roll your 6 action dice. Then you can keep whichever you like, and re-roll the rest once. Then you spend the dice as best you can to move around pick things up and punch monsters. The first player who gets to 16 experience points wins, or in the case of the co-op mode, once the players beat the final boss before player turn 21 ends then they all win. In terms of decision points, and feel, the game is fine. With 4 players, it felt like the downtime between turns was just about as long as I'd ever want it to be. Maybe the downtime between turns sweet spot is 3 players? I really liked the smoothness of the monsters being dice. This got even better when one of the expansions added more types of monsters, and also bags to draw the dice from, so if you are a character who gets a benefit for fighting undead, you can't just chose the 5/6 undead sided die every time. As much as I love the crawlers with tons of minis, the economy of components here really felt fresh and exciting. The illustrations on the dice were maybe a little too detailed for the sake of clarity as to which monster was which, but I give the game huge props for having a full player aid available for each of the 5 players, in terms of what monster's abilities are. Like pretty much every dungeon crawler ever, the rulebook isn't great. There are game mechanisms printed on the player aid that aren't included in the rulebook. The rulebook isn't organized particularly well, I had to flip back and forth and read and re-read passages to make sure we were getting things right. There are also some rules that feel very ambiguous. We did our best to interpret things, but I would be lying if I said I wasn't a little disappointed that even a simpler dungeon crawler can't manage a fully clear rulebook. My dungeon crawlers consist of Level 7 [Omega Protocol], Myth, Arcadia Quest, Descent: Journeys in the Dark, Shadows of Brimstone: City of the Ancients and Krosmaster: Quest, and I do think Masmorra is not as good as any of those. That being said, Masmorra is flexible both in player count, and in gameplay style (being both co-op and all vs all), and it easily takes at least half the time to play as any of the games above. I'm also pleased at the ability to have a second game to use the Arcadia Quest character minis in. It's overall a good experience, and I think it's a keeper, even though I fully admit that I wouldn't have sought it out if not for the AQ tie in.