Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition)

Vic Granellstar8.5

Played a ton but didn't finish the original campaign years ago. Restarted it recently! Ome of the best Dungeon crawlerd out there

Neveststar6.4

I think my general problem with games like this is that they’re taking the least interesting part of a role-playing game (the combat system) and turning that into the entire game. Even just looking at combat, in a full role-playing game, the interesting thing is when players think outside of the box and do something unforseen to take advantage of the environment or use an ability in a novel way. You lose all of that in these stripped-down dungeon crawlers with some pasted on story at the beginning and end of each mission. Mechanically, this game is ok. Each character we’ve played so far does feel different and you will do much better if you use each character’s strengths and play off of each others’ abilities. Some of the rules are very fiddly though and could be streamlined. There are some balance problems with some missions and some monsters being much easier/harder than others. It would be nice if there was some mechanism to balance a mission in-progress to make it closer throughout. Instead, most of the mechanisms serve to make the winners stronger. This game shares a common problem with many co-op games. It can easily devolve into one of the hero players quarterbacking all of the hero turns. Over time, as the heroes level up, it can get harder to hold all of the info for every hero in one person’s head, but it’s certainly do-able.

EvEvanstar3.5

It's a pseudo-RPG/Adventure game, where players compete against the GM player to try to complete a scenario goal first. This game has a lot of cool looking minis, and I enjoy the way players increase in skills and powers as they invest experience points into their various skill trees. Frequently base game quests are hard to understand the rules to, leading to game play effecting mistakes being made. This improves with expansion quest book, in particular the Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition) – Labyrinth of Ruin quests seemed very well thought out. Frustrating that there are minis included for characters, for monster groups, but not for bosses. Boss monster minis are sold separately. I wish hero players could invest points into multiple professions. There's so much content in this game, it feels a little overwhelming that you can play the same class and have a near infinite character/skilltree combinations to pick from. For a player like me who enjoys exploring game systems, locking a character into one tree of skills for however many sessions it takes to beat a campaign feels overly restrictive. I wore on this game as I wore myself out of 1 vs many games, and dungeon crawl games generally. When I do crawl, I've been more interested in playing fully co-op games with less dice luck. Part of the disconnect for Descent 2 in particular is that most games are more of a race to the end and less of a crawl. Often monsters just serve to delay and distract the heroes rather than being something to overcome. The balance of the game is also such that it's not uncommon for players to take down monsters before they get a single activation, which leads to situations that look like they should feel epic being very dull. ★ Art, Iconography and components functional ☆ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ★ Multiple plays stay interesting ☆ Low or mitigatable luck elements ★★☆☆☆ Raw enjoyment