Descent has been the boss monster of dungeon crawling franchises for a long time. Its first edition put players into sprawling, random dungeons where they fought off waves of monsters. The second went for a more compact scenario structure. In both cases it cast one player as the Overlord, who controlled the creatures and unveiled terrain, competing against the others who played as a party of heroes.
Later, the second edition got an app that did away with the Overlord role and turned it into a fully cooperative game. To the dismay of some fans, a similar app is the only way you can run this new edition, Descent: Legends of the Dark. There is no Overlord any more. It’s a bold design choice which publisher Fantasy Flight Games will be hoping puts the game back on top of the pile.
Box and What’s Inside
Descent: Legends of the Dark comes in a huge cubic box which is oddly top-heavy. Once unpacked, it’s clear why. The top portion contains a ton of cardboard terrain which you need to pop out and put together in three-dimensional glory. The bottom half, which starts empty, is then big enough to hold all the assembled pieces.
Cardboard terrain has a bad history, but this stuff is great. It’s robust, imposing and is easy and fast to build. There’s also a lot of it, from tiny treasure chests to a huge dragon skeleton. Even more impressive, however, are the trays of plastic miniatures. Chunky yet detailed, they’re not quite up to the best on the wargame market, but you’ll not find better in a boxed board game.
Fans of the franchise will also be expecting multiple card decks and bags of cardboard counters. There are some, illustrated in a curious cartoon style that’s eye-catching while sometimes failing to capture the required fantasy flavor. But they’re slimmed down, thanks to that app, which does most of the admin for you. Most notable are the six hero cards, offering a pleasingly diverse -- in every sense of the word -- selection to choose from.
Rules and How to Play
Since an app is necessary to play the game, you might expect it to include a tutorial mission to start things off. However, the first quest does little more hand-holding than telling you where to check in the rulebook as the action unfolds. It also doesn’t take you through important details of setup: there’s no avoiding a read through the rules booklet.
What the app does do is instruct you to place tiles, scenery and monsters, slowly revealing the map as you explore. It also handles combat damage and interactions with terrain. It’s an able games master, removing a lot of heavy lifting while still offering the thrill of exploring into the unknown. It also offers monster variants and interrupts, meaning you’ll encounter a bigger palette of foes than the figures in the box.
It doesn’t track figure movement, otherwise it would almost entirely be a video game. And that would be unfortunate, because the maps that unfold are stunning. The figures and terrain pop a living, breathing fantasy world into life on your table. Some dungeons are even multi-level, with pillars supporting floors of different heights and staircases in between. Finding the right pieces for each new map section is a minor pain, but it’s far easier than previous editions of Descent with their dozens of tiles.
On each hero’s turn they can take up to three actions: movement, plus two others. They can move again, attack, explore -- which lets you interact with the map -- or “ready.” This latter choice is key to the game’s strategy: all the cards, from weapons to skills, even the hero’s card itself, are double sided. Each side has different special abilities. The “ready” action lets you flip a card, spending a valuable action in the hope of ensuring you’re better able to meet the challenges on the board.
There’s more to it than chopping and changing, however. Most special abilities require you place fatigue tokens on the card until it’s no longer usable. Cards can also acquire negative conditions like Infected or Terrified as well as positive ones like Focus which lets you re-roll a dice. When a card is flipped, all tokens on it, good or bad, are lost. It’s often a tough challenge to decide whether it’s worth flipping a good card that’s accrued a lot of bad effects.
Beyond this, it’s all about tactical positioning and bringing the right weapons to bear, either in melee or ranged. Each enemy has weaknesses to certain damage types you won’t know until they’re hit with it, to encourage experimentation. Combat is handled by custom dice which roll successes, “advantages” that let you take a fatigue for a success, and surges which you can spend for a powerful custom effect on a card of your choice.
Between the card-flipping and the dice-rolling, there’s some worthwhile light strategy to enjoy. But despite the variety of maps and foes, there’s not enough depth to stop a sense of repetition creeping in across missions. Mostly it’s a matter of finding enemies, probing for weaknesses and hoping for the best. Still, rolling off against increasingly powerful monsters offers plenty of excitement, and there’s some smart scenario design, making full use of the app with surprise reveals and environmental puzzles.
The app also weaves scenarios together into a campaign. There’s an unfortunate lack of voice acting, meaning that if you’re playing in a group, someone’s got to do a lot of reading out loud. Your party is centered in a city, where you can spend collected resources to craft new potions and upgrade your gear. You always seem to have more recipes than components, so choosing what to buy and equip is an interesting collaboration, although only one player at a time actually interacts with the app.
While traveling to and from your adventures, the app throws a variety of random and scripted events at you. Together, they form a solid, if generic, fantasy epic of saving the land from a demonic incursion. What stands out is that each hero has choices that specifically help shape their character motivations. In reality these are just more binary options, but they’re presented in a way that feels like the heroes are growing into their identities as you play.
Throughout this review we’ve shied away from the elephant in the cubic box, which is the eye-watering price tag. We didn’t talk about it in our Age of Sigmar: Dominion review because there it’s the entry fee for an entire hobby, whereas this is just a single board game. In terms of production quality, you can see where the money has gone. The bigger question is whether it’s worth it in gameplay terms and that’s harder to justify.
Where to Buy
Descent: Legends of the Dark is available to purchase at various retailers.
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