My copy arrived last night and I've played the game a few times and before I start rambling, let me just say that this game has possibly the best adventuring game system I have ever seen in a board game. I'll be surprised if this will not be 'borrowed' by other game designs in the future.
Assault on Doomrock could be the sleeper hit of the year that I fear will fly under a lot of radars due to being really difficult to get due to it being from a new company. I think it's still possible to be bought at the moment, but I fear that this may fly quickly into Robinson Crusoe availability zone of late 2012.
So what is this game about? This game encapsulates what I can best describe as a D&D dungeon crawl adventure into a two-hour game. It's not like Descent, where it's about cleaning a specific dungeon, but it's about an entire adventure in the scope of, say, Lord of the Rings. Players play a group of peculiar characters with peculiar traits and adventure through different areas and encounter viscious beasts on their journey. In a way it's like an adventure fantasy movie with an epic finish.
In fact, if there's anything negative I can say about my first impressions, it is that the box art is slightly offputting and many players may not enjoy the Small-World type fantasy humor in the game.
The rules are also somewhat clunky in places, as evident by the Rules subforum already getting a lot of threads. But reality is that common sense applies in most cases and there's nothing major that doesn't seem clear in the rulebook. Rulebook itself is really nice however.
But now about the game itself.
The game consists of two parts: adventuring on the map (where the players have a choice to move between three different area cards and conduct actions on those cards) and then the tactical battles with the opponents.
The game does not have a 'map' per se, which may sound strange at first. At any time the players see three areas which they can move between, spending time. They can also advance further, which means that the furthest-away area gets discarded. This means that players are never locked in place and that the 'map' is different each game. 386
This allows for interesting dynamic, as players have to carefully manage the time that they have to reach the area of Doomrock - where the end of the game takes place and the epic bad guys have to be defeated by the group.
Every area includes different common actions that a typical dungeon crawler party can do: from looting to trading to resting and looking for secrets. The main goal of moving between these areas is to gather equipment and build up abilities so that progressing further and ending up in combat will not result in a loss of a game. A demonstration of this mechanic is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfoDpi2dVBU
But while so far the game may sound like your average dungeon crawl, where the game is absolute genius is in its tactical combat. Mark my words: this battle mechanic may become a staple in this genre. It's thoroughly innovative, something I've never seen in games like this before. This almost makes you feel like it's an abstract miniature battle game mechanic, but at the same time it gets rid of all the bloat. Battle consists of markers on the table which represent heroes and creatures that they battle. Life points are based on how many markers are in a stack for each creature. If markers touch one another, they are considered adjacent, if one hero has multiple markers adjacent to him/her, the hero is considered surrounded. Battles are very tactical, as players roll dice before the battle round and assign dice to their various abilities that they can then execute on their turn. I highly recommend the creators demonstration video of the battle here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPdCM49ToGk as well as <PERSON>'s own video about it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p1ZyEYGAB4
So the game manages to get rid of having to roll for each hit or calculate distances or everything that makes games like Descent feel for me like a huge micromanagement session that is barely nothing more than a fraction of an epic story in the scale of Lord of the Rings.
This one isn't Lord of the Rings, but it's a full journey, full of interesting decisions and possibly one of the most fun tactical battle systems I've seen in a board game.
<PERSON> is a game designer from Poland and it's my personal opinion that this game is a work of a game designer who pays a lot of attention to not having game mechanics become a bloat over the game experience. Well done! 884