I have a love/hate relationship with Descent 2nd Edition. I love the looks and can't resist buying everything, but hate the gameplay and general experience. Let me explain... no, there is too much. Let me sum up:
When it first came out, I was both excited and leery of the game. As with most FFG games, it looked great, and at a glance some of the mechanics felt like a good step up from 1st Ed. However, once I got the game and played it a few times with my friends, it fell short in a major way with a bunch of minor problems adding up to a not-so-fun game for us. The worst parts for us were less the mechanics and more the changes from a 'dungeon crawl' to an 'adventure' game. When it's more important for the heroes to run and grab wheat than kill the bloody goblins, it's not so fun for us.
Low and behold, FFG announcted Game Night Kits for Descent. These kits promised a change in mechanics, from a 1vMany style game play, to a pure co-op. But even better, these kits promised some things that we found missing from the game, such as "leveling up" during a quest, finding treasure during a quest, a mechanical reason for killing monsters, and what appeared to be a fun game playable in one night.
So, needless to say, I had high expectations for this kit. I got my grubby little hands on the kit this week...
Descent Game Night Kit: Forgotten Souls
The kit was relatively light. Packed in a non-discrete cardboard shipping box, it contained a Getting Started booklet, a Rule booklet, 10 Monster Activation Cards, 12 Exploration Cards, 10 Peril Cards, and 3 POD sized sheets for tracking doom and monster kills. It also contained acrylic health tokens and blue dice.
The acrylic pieces are kind of cool, but the transparent dice are not very different from the normal dice. Maybe if I had a whole set I'd notice it, but so far, meh. The rulebook wasn't very large, 16 pages with 5 of those being setups for specific encounters. The modified gameplay was light enough that if you know the core rules, it takes tops 10 minutes to explain how this co-op works.
How does it work?
The co-op is embodied in a quest. The one included in the kit is called Forgotten Souls. 386
The heroes stumble on a village where everyone is dead and a small boy leads them to a cave. Boy disappears, door slams shut, and the heroes now have to go through this dungeon to the end to find a way out. The villagers are in here, but now zombies. There are also barghests, flesh mulders, and dragons, and a big bad dragon deep at the end.
Enough flavor text, how does it actually work? The game is played very similar to the core game. There's a board with the heroes and monsters on it, the heroes play exactly as the do in the base game, the "Overlord" has a turn as well but it's been automated. The heroes win by going through the encounters and accomplishing a specific goal. The heroes lose if the Doom token ever reaches the same space as the Fate token (they are on the same track, Doom goes up, Fate goes down).
How the game differs from the core game in the following ways:
- Encounters
- Overlord's Turn
- XP & Loot
Encounters
Encounters are the main way of playing this game. There is an Encounter deck, and as the heroes explore the dungeon, they draw encounter cards that describe the map and monsters. There are three 'stages' to the game, and this is represented by special encounter cards. The first stage encounter is shuffled with the first 3 cards, the second stage is shuffled with the next 3 cards, and the final stage is shuffled with the last 2 cards. At the end of each stage, Heroes are rewarded XP and can immediately spend on skills (more on that later).
An Encounter indicates how the map is built, what monsters start on the map, and the specific goals for that part of the map. An Encounter is a card and a map description. Each encounter has an Entrance and an Exit, the Entrance hooks to the previous Encounter's Exit. The Exit has a door. The door cannot be opened until the Encounter card has been discarded (the objective of that particular encounter fulfilled or failed). Succeeding quests usually just refreshes the Fate track (one part of the 'timer' in the game). Failing a quest usually involves increasing the Doom track (the other part of the timer). Once the encounter is done, heroes can open the door exploring the next encounter. 884