Descent: Legends of the Dark Review - with Tom Vasel

[Music] [Music] and now it's time for another dice tower review with tom vassell hey everybody i'm tom vassell and today we're taking a look at descent legends of the dark i have a lot of history with descent the original game which was a follow-up to a to the game from fantasy flight called doom uh was a dungeon crawl there are dozens and dozens of dungeon crawls but 15 years ago there was basically one defining one which was descent they eventually added a campaign mode to the game and then descent the second edition so in essence when we heard about this one it was like ooh the third edition of descent but that is not the case here they said that when they announced the game that this is not the third edition of the scent this is kind of a descent game but it goes off differently and that's very true this game is much more similar to manchester madness 2nd edition and the lord of the rings journeys of middle earth and that's because this game heavily depends in fact i more than heavily depends on an app which i've been running an early version of the app to test this out on the computer but it's going to be available on other devices also you're going to be playing it together as a group or solo through a campaign using from a group of six different characters to go through and fight enemies and do different things but following an app so in this review we want to take that into account look i want to be really clear i'm not going into this game i didn't go into this game expecting descent three i have no baggage if i want to play descent i have second edition and everything for it so i know this is a new game so let's dive into that but to do so we got to turn on the app first [Music] so this is the app when you pull it up and you can play a previously done campaign or you can start a new campaign so here we put in the party name we'll call the dice tower um people all right so anyway whatever you call your thing and then you can pick the difficulty now i will say so far i've only played on standard difficulty um i don't really like games that are tremendously difficult i found the game pretty decently tough here on standard not the basic quest but you pick this and so then it kind of takes you to this loading screen you have to click continue down here something i missed all the time because they may continue and that looked the same and at this point it goes through a story there's some voice over work here at the beginning of this story but that's pretty much it i don't want to kind of really show too much of this story although this kind of stained glass window artwork i really like i want to point this out because i don't like all the artwork in this but it talks about this anyway i'm going to skip the story for now but what it's going to do here is it gives you kind of a a background and it's going to have the different characters start talking to each other and i want to mention this because this is one aspect of the game that i really don't like first of all not a fan of the artwork of the characters that's very much a personal taste thing i get that although this one's not so bad in fact this particular character is my favorite but i don't like how they do this dialogue here so basically you can see here at the bottom it's this this person here is talking and then this person comes up and talks back and honestly i really dislike this because it will also sometimes have text at the bottom that is not quote they don't put the the people talking in quotes they don't really have different voices and they there's a ton of this talking so then here you pick like an option which doesn't matter at all at the beginning but they do matter later on but the dialogue i found to be very i didn't like it i didn't like the stories of this game very much i don't like the dialogue back and forth and also there is a ton of this dialogue before you get to the main game so you know here i'm just trying to speed through the dialogue then you get to a quest now many quests in this game have a required hero there are six possible heroes but you would pick you always have to pick at least two so even if you're playing solo which i did play a lot you have to go through with two people but you can pick all four of these people and at this point they might give you something here it says who's on watch and you pick somebody and then it's going to talk a little bit about different things going on this is to tutorial app and this is going to show you how you place the map up so you're going to follow this you're going to look for these tiles and place the map on the board now before we get into this much more i want to take a look at the characters there are six characters that you'll be playing throughout the game and you'll play with all of them actually they have different things on him when they take a move action that's how far they move this is their starting hit points and in this game you have little dials that will keep track of your hit points this shows you what dice you'll use on both attack and defense there are three different dice in the game this sometimes you have to make a test in the game and these numbers modify your test this is the number of fatigue this card can hold and we'll talk a bit more about that this is a special ability and down here is a surge special ability that you have this also shows what kind of armor you can wear so this shows heavy armor and each character has all sorts of different things that they can do so let's also take a look here at gallaudet each person is going to start by the way this is my least favorite art in the entire game i don't dislike this character and how they play i just dislike this art a lot although again um this is the dumbest helmet not in this game but in any game i've ever seen anyhow each character comes with some starting weapons so for example gallatin here starts with a mirror blades and a blood wood bow they both have an upgraded side to them but you don't start with them upgrade it so you're going to put them back to back in a sleeve like this and the reason you do that is because over the course of a battle you're going to be able to flip back and forth on a player's turn they're going to have three actions one of those actions will be moving on the board and the other two could be moving again but usually the other two might be attacking but you can also flip your cards that you have now there's a couple reasons you're going to do this you have your own character card you have a weapon and as the game goes by you also have like special abilities that you get from leveling up so this one here for example costs one experience point and i i might have this card next to the board too so over the course of the game you're going to do various things that are going to cause fatigue to be put on the cards each card has a fatigue limit so he has you know three fatigue limit i can put here one fatigue and one fatigue here i don't want to take more than that that can cause damage but one of the actions a player has is ready so when you take that action of ready you'll take all the tokens off a card and flip it to the other side now if you do it to your character your special abilities are going to change um if you do it to your this again and your weapon will change because i might want to use these mirror blades which are going to do three damage for each success and have slash in this special ability but i might want to use the bow which has a range of four it only does two damage you know so these are probably better in hand-to-hand combat but i sometimes you want to shoot so you can switch back and forth but it takes a whole action to do so let's take a moment and talk about terrain this is the bottom half of descent the box and this is entirely full of terrain it takes up the entire box now you have a lot of terrain pieces that are double-sided and they have little numbers on them so that you can build the map you also have these underlays which show different kinds of terrain and this these are really thin i don't like these at all but they're to be put underneath something so for example you could do this here and okay there's some you know lava here next to the bricks now inside here is a ton of extra terrain and in this you are you have to build all this ahead of time the game comes with a sheet of paper that shows how to build everything all the different terrain pieces and this took me an hour and i didn't even and i don't have it shown here i don't even have the big dragon statue that the game comes with um it built in this box but this took a really long time and i disliked every single second of it i didn't like putting all this together i also don't like how this stores it does fall apart a little bit you're going to need to probably glue it together or some of it's just going to fall apart but what the reason this terrain is here is because you're going to be placing different terrain pieces like for example a tree on the tile and the good thing about this is when you interact with something you can interact with almost every piece of terrain you're going to run into the same train over and over again you're going to run into trees all the time you're going to run into bookcases all the time lecterns call drawings etc and so if you see that there you know you can interact with it in the app well that's all well and good they also have levels in this game so there's these pillars there's small pillars and large pillars these pillars can attach here to the sides of the terrain where it will stand up and be above other terrain and then you will use these steps here to go up into the terrain the terrain here is obviously a feature of this game and as you set it up but i'll show you a setup in a second as you set it up it looks really cool but man i have a problem with it first of all it is a good chunk of the box it's a chunk of the price here i don't think it's worth that much i would have been okay with a picture of a tree if that would have cus cut the cost of the game down that you interacted with and while it looks cool setting it up and tearing it down is very problematic especially the 3d element that the the whole thing about the scent here is oh look it's 3d levels well okay that's all well and good but i could have just put the two things next to each other and put stairs in between the stairs and going from one level to the next is essentially the same as a door that's really the only difference except that sometimes at a higher level you can jump down from the higher level to the lower level bad guys tend to do that sort of thing or there might be a rope that pulls you up but this terrain which is the crowning achievement of this game that and the app right they're the two big things that are going to attract people i just found the terrain to be a pain in the neck but that being said i do like that when you set it up it does look cool there's no denying that so in this game you're going to be interacting with terrain so there are different things like you'll put site tokens here and you might have someone interact with one if they just walk by it and every space next to this will interact to that so you do that you'll get rid of the site token and what it does is it then puts stuff on the map and by the way the you can move around the map here you can't rotate which i thought was a little odd at least i can't find a way to rotate but there are some really good things about this map so this tells you hey put a tree on you know and then it talks about this is the tutorial still that it's talking about and aha it shows you where to spawn a monster although you've got to be careful here when you spawn the monster as soon as they click continue that monster no longer shows up in the app because the monsters are going to be moving around and attacking you and it will show you how monsters attack it shows you where your people start and boom now we have a new objective fight the enemies we'll talk a little bit about that so here you can see the map is slowly growing now i do want to say a couple good things about this one thing i like about the app is i can click on different types of terrain like water here and it says when spending movement to move out of order space a hero enemy must spend one additional movement point that's great i like being able to do that another thing here i'm sorry it's in this one is line of sight if you pick a spot on the board here it will show you what spots that can see there are rules about line of sight but what do i care i just pick a spot and what spots can that see so if i'm here i'm adjacent to all the red spots if i have a weapon with reach i can get to the orange spots and any yellow spot is within line of sight like this square in the back back area i can't see this is fantastic and it saves you a lot of arguments over whether something's in line of sight because the app just shows you so i'm a big fan of that the app also like i said every piece of terrain is interactable so i can click on this tree you can spend an action to do that so oh you have to you'd have to drag a hero up to do this they would have to be adjacent to it and then you have options here i could try to climb the tree i could forage the plants pick the fruit i might forage the plants and that gives me a bunch of resources we'll talk a little bit more about what those resources are used they're used between missions and not during a mission so this is what the first scenario might look like to some degree you can see that it's using up a lot of space and this is not even everything in it i'm not showing you all the different things that are here but you're going to be moving your heroes around you'll be fighting enemies and like i said there's different things to interact with and you can see a little bit about what the 3d terrain might look like and so you'll go through doors there might even be a door here at the top of the steps there's just different things that will happen when you interact the door it will open up a new room so the next thing i want to kind of take a look as you see the 3d terrain and i talked about the enemies so a big part of this game is going to be combat how does that work so here we have combat and what you'll do when you are in range is someone want to attack them and have an action where you can do so you'll drag your hero to show that you're attacking that creature you're going to pick which of your weapons you're going to use and it's going to be the weapon that you're equipped with remember you can take a ready action to kind of switch between your two different weapons so i said i'm going to use this one so now it shows a little bit here here i'm fighting a zealot at the top you can see the zealot has 18 hit points and has one armor it has weaknesses to something i don't know what type hopefully it's the crush damage which my weapon tends to do so now i'm going to be rolling dice and using my special abilities to get a certain number of successes there are three different types of dice included in this game a six sided and eight sided and a twelve sided having more sides is not necessarily better in fact the six sided is the most solid of all the dice bryn here who's attacking uses a six sided to attack so i'll roll the die here i've gotten three successes there are different sides of dice that you'll get you'll get stars which are successes there are also a little plus symbol so this is two successes and these plus symbols those can be converted into successes but at the cost of putting fatigue on your objects as long as you can afford to do so then there is a surge symbol and this is not on all the sides of this one in fact it's you'll have that show up more often on the 12 sided diet does less damage but the surge if i roll this surge simple i can use a surge special ability here it says add a success and an adjacent hero may discard one fatigue here i can just spend two fatigue on my weight at warhammer to during your attack add one success after this attack you may move the enemy one space from you so at the beginning remember i rolled three successes so i'll say okay i rolled three successes i'm going to spend two on here to add a fourth success i could also do this to do something here now i don't want to do any of that so four successes i've done to this enemy so then you simply go here on the screen and you'll say okay i did four successes sometimes a weapon might do something else it might cause them to be afflicted and feeble days exposed doom slowed what does all that mean you don't need to know the app takes care of that for you so i do four successes and i confirm i just hit the enemy for 11 damage you can even click on this arrow here to show you how i did that damage so i did four successes or each one does three damage i did 12 and they blocked one of it so it's a total of 11. and had they been weak to my type it would have shown that you know i don't worry about that i click continue now maybe i have a second attack so i might say i'm going to hit him again and i'm going to use my thing again and this time i get two successes so i would do two successes or let's say three successes because i want to kill them so i get another three successes and i attack them nine damage they're dead and now tells me to pull them off the board now each enemy has special abilities too and you can also go to a different screen here where it just shows the enemy and when you attack an enemy and so let's say cirrus attacks them with a glimmering rom it shows you their special ability so this says for example these guys after the attack they shift two away from the hero which means basically they move two spaces away from you so i hit them for four damage and then it will even remind you here in the app and this is a really nice thing it says hey they move two space away from you and if they have other special abilities like a 50 chance of something happening the app takes care of that for you now between rounds after all the heroes have gone and each hero like i said has actions where they can move and then two other actions you're going to end the phase and then the darkness phase happens and the computer will keep track of different things that might happen here it says resolve infection and terror these are things that will cause different effects to happen to you and each one does something a different way each hero can discard one of their fatigue which is a big deal and then it will tell you how the enemy will attack it tells you who they target and each enemy has movement range and attack they will target that person but if someone else is closer they'll go for that person instead and again it tells you what they do they're going to do four damage and here you will simply roll a die for your defense and the number of successes you use and again you can add fatigue and all that stuff will subtract from the damage that the enemy does to you you keep track of your damage if you take enough damage and by the way there's an interrupt button here in case you have some way you can interrupt the enemy's attack if you take enough damage that your hit points go down to zero then you're wounded you'll pick your character and you just say wound hero are you sure yes then they'll gain an injury an injury card is a card that you add that will do a negative benefit to you if you get injured again the same character and you can see they're kind of bloody down here and i wound them again you'll flip that injury card to a worse degree and then if you wound them again that takes them out of the game and you'll lose the mission i want to pause right here and say how much i like this part of the game i love the combat in this game i love this one i mean this is definitely a take on the system from the lord of the rings journeys of middle earth but i like not having to know what everything does this weapon has peers okay fine pierce just works automatically in the app and one of the things that this game does is and as you go between missions you're going to be able to upgrade your weapons you'll be able to add different parts to your weapons and they'll do something like it will say your weapon now has a 20 chance to stun the enemy i never have to remember that the app just says hey it worked and then the flipping the cards back and forth uh getting rid of the fatigue or just switching between weapons to weapons using special abilities that is a huge strategic part of the game that is my favorite part of this i think the combat here is really entertaining and not every mission is a hundred percent combat there are things like find your way through a lost area you know throw rope down pull people up jump from here to here do this open this gate look through the bookcase discover some clues um but it's mostly combat there's a lot of combat enemies constantly show up you'll play missions where the enemies just keep showing up and showing up until you do something or fight them off but the combat part i just find to be really fantastically done i really like it now you're going to finish a quest by succeeding or failing so in this particular case i failed the quest it tells me how long i took to play it and it tells me all the different items i've gotten and i got all kinds of different items some of these things are going to become cards some of these things are recipes but when you're done with this it's going to take you back to the city and so you're going to be going to this city between different rounds and it will follow this is the map of the game and so you'll follow this little indiana jones pathway and when you sometimes you'll hit a point it will give you a little story and give you just random items i still haven't found any rhyme or reason to these random events i never felt like there was danger on the roads themselves but when you get to the city itself it's going to take you through um a story to some degree and i i don't want to kind of we're going to kind of zoom through the story here because i don't want to show too much of the story but there is a story that's going on and you interact with various characters and they just pop up on the screen which really reminds me of like a video game here's the two new characters join your party blah blah blah and so you go through these things and i want to say there's a lot of reading here between rounds but i want to show you here you get some here's it shows you you get some those experience cards i showed you you get skills but let's talk about what you can do in town between turns so there's three places to go to so we'll start over here and this is where the craft hall and this is where you can craft things so we'll tell you of a recipe so there's different recipes i can get and i look down here and there's screamer bolts i can add these to this character's weapon i need various materials to do so i have them i have three metal four minerals for four curios and one and nemo's whatever so i can craft that and now the app just knows that i have it i would like to craft maybe this talon pommel but i don't have enough metal i don't have leather and i don't have enough anemos to do so so that's what you do here is you craft stuff here is like a store where you can buy things back and forth so i might say oh i might want to buy this spiked grip it costs 120 gold i have 13 or i might want to buy a cloak of sorrow which is an armor card i can add to someone i don't have enough money to do that but i can so a couple things here first of all you can buy these different various items that you need but i can also sell and i'm like oh i have 61 herbs i don't need 61 herbs so let's sell you know i don't know let's sell 40 of them so that's 160 now let's see what else can i sell i'll sell some of these curios so i'll sell you know 15 of these curios well now i have 233 gold well that's neat so now i can go back here and decide whether i want to buy something i'm going to buy this piece of armor it's 200 so now i can use that armor but you can also go here to the armory itself now what the armory does is you'll go through the different characters in the game and at this point in the game you'll have the four main characters and you're going to pick what weapons they use now you'll notice there's really no picking here except he found an extra weapon instead of using the river watch spear i can use the sun forged sphere and then if you have different halfs and tails to these weapons you'll be able to switch here too i don't happen to have any of these yet but you'll get a lot over the course of the game and so like i said you can effect these weapons and pick them and then when you're done you will eventually leave the city and it will show you the map here and you'll notice that i have two quests here these are both main quests although it is very possible that you will also have side quests show up when you do a quest you'll click prepare this one shows you that you must use this hero in this quest and then you can kind of add whatever heroes you want to to take this quest you continue you can pick the weapons that they have in this case they all have kind of the weapons that you're going to use there's extra items that you might be able to add to them to give special abilities but right now this is kind of what you have you can go in again and look at all the different characters but that's basically what you're going to do from round to round i'm not going to show you anything else at this point from the app but hopefully this gives you a good idea of how it works all right the rest of this here then is going to be my opinions on everything that we've talked about so this is a big game i've played this a lot i played it with the guys here in the studio but i've also played mostly i've played a ton of this solo i played that intro quest i think five times now but i played lots of different quests in the game off top my head i want to say i played nine to ten different quests maybe more than that it started boring together at the end there's a lot going on and so this game has gotten a lot of buzz around it both positive and negative and a lot of the buzz has comes from the app now we talk about this a lot when we are reviewing board games there's a lot of board games that use apps with them and some games use it more than others like for example chronicles of crime if you don't have the app for chronicles of crime you don't have a game well that is 100 the case here if you don't have the app for this you don't have the game you have to use that app that you do need physical stuff you can't just play on the app for sure because you need to roll dice and you need to keep track of where the enemies are that being said there were a couple times near the end of the campaign where i was getting weary like hour 14 or 15 into the campaign and i just pulled out a couple pieces of terrain and put the enemies on them and moved them around a little bit just so i knew where they would be and i didn't bother setting up this whole big 3d terrain thing and just use the app to interact with stuff and just said virtually i'm here and here this is one so let's talk about negatives and positives i want to start with the positives and and then we'll go on so the positives for me is it uses the app in combat and i already mentioned i love the combat in this game i really do i like flipping the cards back and forth i feel like the six different characters on from a combat level and in battle are really neat the magicians my favorite one i love getting upgrades for the weapons and sitting there going oh do i want to find more loot when i kill enemies with this weapon or do i want to have the weapon that that stuns the enemy or dooms the enemy and there are lots of little tokens and different things and it's not that complicated really at all combat and games can also be complicated here you roll a single die and then you use fatigue and stuff to add as many successes as you can the level of difficulty i found to be pretty straightforward and i'm playing on standard like i said i would never go above and beyond that but the combat itself and how it works with the app is a huge positive for me i also personally like that in between stuff where you go and buy and sell however this is a positive and a negative and i'll tell you why because going by and selling in the different items that you have and upgrading your weapons and building this and buying that it's really reminds me a lot of video games from baldur's gate to breath of the wild whatever it might be i really like that as one person as a group that is an exhausting weird thing we're like oh we should sell five curios i don't want to sell curios i want to keep them and this and that and it's just not something a group does that in-between stuff is really problematic if you have more than one player when you have one player you're fine you're going i'll do this do this i'll play this i'll sell this like you do in a video game together i didn't find that to work much at all on the positive this game is striking to look at the miniatures are really well done slight negative the miniatures are super spiky picking them up pulling them out of the the plastic container i was constantly hurting my fingers doing that you might tom your wimp but i found that and also there's not a ton of different miniatures but i again i think they're really well done i think the enemies have very different viewpoints and i don't know if the number of enemies is about a good thing there's not that many different enemies like six seven different enemies so i'm like oh i see the same enemies all the time but it helps in this game because combat is so strategic to know okay there's that enemy and that enemy sometimes takes only 50 damage so what should i do this enemy always runs away from us this enemy always comes at us so i i kind of see a mix in between there those are my positives i i again i like how it looks but the negatives are this first of all the terrain i already mentioned i didn't like that putting that terrain together i didn't like setting up and taking this game down all the time i found it to be exhausting it was a big chunk of each scenario and i was like oh i got to build another thing here over and over and over and over again and i didn't even think the terrain like the the boards themselves i don't think they look that great i'm okay with the puzzle pieces from the original descent this whole 3d thing seems like a wow factor like if you walked in a convention and you saw it you'd go i really want to play that but i just was kind of getting i was over it after a while i was like oh this is a lot of work secondly i i said this too i'm not a big fan of the characters their story arcs which are straight up tropes like oh i'm part of the thieves guild but i'm leaving it and they don't like me because of that oh i didn't think the writing here this is again in my opinion i didn't think the writing was very good i didn't like the characters at all the characters all sounded the same and what was really weird was the one character who has an accent like a scottish brogue or something when you click on their character they sometimes the characters shout things out like a video game you know you click on them that voice acting didn't match that brogue in the in the writing and that was just weird to me i never got invested in the characters and and honestly i should have there's not a lot of voice acting in this game i really think they should have put more in really made me invest in these characters when i played baldur's gate back in the day minkskin has his little ferret whatever it was called i cared about those characters i cared about the different characters in the game i just don't care about these characters at all i know one is the ugly elf archer and one is the thief and there's the magician and then there's the brawn with the helmet and i think maybe maybe brent i'm sorry bran has like one maybe the the most story line in there i just was not invested in the story and until i got to a pretty critical juncture there was a pretty big event that happens and when i got to this event i thought meh let's go it didn't strike me at all and i feel like it should have i will say at a certain point in the story i was like oh i am in taranath because it didn't feel like tearing off at all at the beginning but as time went by they do bring back different things that i remember from other teranov games but i'm just not sold on this story and i the app here is this thing right it's a big part of the game i don't the app if you're playing it now i played on a computer because at this point in time the computer is the only way i could play it i'm playing a .9 version of this app it's going to come out on ipad i'm sure it's better on ipad but everyone crowding around this app and looking at this app all the time it's kind of a big deal here in the studio i could put it up on the big tv and we all looked at that but not everyone can do that sort of thing but i think you're going to have to try to like stream cast it to a tv or something so people can see it but this really is kind of a video game with a bunch of terrain and some miniatures there's not a lot in the game there's about this many cards in the game a few tokens some spinners some dice some miniatures and then tons of terrain and then the app so we come to price i don't normally talk about price and games because people can afford different things and maybe it's not even a big deal here this game the cheapest i could find it on any website is a hundred and forty okay you can argue that there's a hundred forty dollars worth of thing here like i said i played 15 plus hours of this game there's a lot of game here but there's also a lot of dungeon crawlers that exist right now descent is no longer the only one there's a lot out there and i don't know that i want to play this over many of the other ones i don't care about the one versus all i tend to like one person being dungeon master but i don't care i like this app i like how it works but it first of all plays very solo e and then if i'm going to play this game solo i have to sit here and go will i play this over gloomhaven or many other different dungeon crawls that are out there is the system so cool and so neat that it's better than those and i don't think so if the app had amazing voice acting and all kinds of maybe even little movie cut screens or whatever but that app at this point time i look at that app and it feels like when you're when you look at the price like the app is an 80 investment i don't even pay 80 for a video game at this point in time and if i did it better be one that looks better than this so i don't know that the whole thing comes together in a must buy but i did enjoy lots parts of this game so for me the scent legends of the dark is definitely a game that i'm gonna play solo it's i i just don't that in between stuff is reading all that stuff there's a ton of reading read read read read read read it's a lot faster for me to read it than it is for us to read it all out loud there's so much and there's no voice acting so you have to read it all out loud more and more and more it just plays better as a solo game and also that buying and selling i can do much better so that works the combat is really cool and interesting the minis are good it has a neat feel to it but it doesn't feel like it stands out in a very crowded arena right now and i'm not an app hater i think that they can work in games but this one in particular didn't overly impress me either there were some things that are cool there are feats that heroes can get from you know if i shoot two different enemies with an arrow i can get feats and that gives you more recipes that's neat but again that kind of feeds into the this is best solo so it's fun but i don't know that i can recommend it strongly the price is very expensive the app isn't amazing i don't think the story i like the characters sort of i don't have any problem with i mean they're not you know you look at them you're like it's a different style artwork they are very distinct characters all that's good but i didn't get that from the story i don't at the end of the day they all turned into tropes anyway so i was just kind of man that part of it so i know this is a very mixed review but there's a lot going on in this at the end of the day this may be one you just have to try out for yourself to see hopefully this helped you anyway until next time i'm tom vassell and this is the scent legends of the dark on the dice tower dice tower judgment very interesting [Music] you

Channel: The Dice Tower

Views: 103,856

Rating: 4.8316112 out of 5

Keywords: board game, board, game, dice, card game, cards, catan, monopoly, tower, dice tower, vasel, review, tom vasel, vassel, settlers, gaming, GeekUsername: TomVasel, board game review, boardgame, uno, ticket to ride, apples to apples, educational games, educational, top 10, juegosdemesa, Brettspiele, ボードゲーム, brädspel, jeuxdesociété, משחקילוח, 보드게임, deskováhra, graplanszowa, bordspel, 棋盘游戏, gioco da tavolo, desková hra, gra planszowa, настольная игра, trò chơi trên bàn cờ, jogo de tabuleiro, لعبة اللوحة

Id: 7xcfBhGS3oA

Length: 37min 9sec (2229 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Ju1ss1]

This looks like a solo game. Can't see myself playing a game like this with other people around the table.
With that said, I also can't see any reason to play this over a proper RPG videogame. How is the fiddly terrain going to enhance the game over a proper videogame, which this tries to be?

[u/Darth_Rubi]

When Tom says "I love that I don't have to know what Cleave does on my weapon" I'm like NOOOO then why even play a board game? If I want invisible dice rolls and a dozen random background abilities that trigger just to spit out a damage value at the end, I could just play Diablo or Paths of Exile.

Even the whole concept of "well this allows you to have a weapon that ignores armor 20% of the time and the app does it all"... Like no, I play a board game because I want to pull the lever myself. And Descent 2.0 already had weapons with a "chance to do X" with the surge system, and at least that let me make decisions myself on whether to use surge to ignore armor, heal or whatever.

I also hate when you have a mix of places representing what your weapon does. So when I start playing, the card representing my sword is accurate. But once I've used the apps crafting mechanism to add a chance to crit to my weapon, the card is then no longer anything but a glorified proxy because to know what it does,I have to refer to both the card AND the app, which isn't very satisfying. When I upgrade a weapon in a board game,I really want to have it represented physically

[u/CheapPoison]

So, just a bad video game with a boardgame component? They finally crossed over that line and did what I feared would sooner or later happen with app driven games.

[u/Mortaneus]

Just buy and play Wildermyth on Steam. It's a fantastic game that does basically everything this game does, but better, for a lot cheaper, without storage and setup issues.

[u/James_H_M]

straight to the final thoughts and for someone like Tom to give this a pass over other dungeon crawlers shows how far FFG has fallen.

[u/blarknob]

I lost interest in this game when they revealed the art, I really don't like it.

[u/mbagalacomposer]

Pretty interesting in comparison to No Pun Included’s glowing pre-review on their podcast… I tend to side with Efka over Vassal when it comes to my taste in games, but the gulf here is pretty surprisingly wide.

[u/AdelinDumitru]

This sounds like something I will never, ever play. But you know what, I don't actually mind it - there are so many good games out there that having some games with an integrated app is an excellent way of completely skipping getting some of them. I don't think app-based games will make a big splash in the board gaming industry on the long term, because most people get into board games in order to stay away from technology. So a limited number of releases each year that I can completely glance over I am actually fine with.

[u/Epic_BubbleSA]

Honestly this seems like they tried to shove Descent/Imperial assault into a app game and it crumbled. Alot of the systems Tom found problems with such as terrain or shopping is perfectly fine in Imperial assault.

Alot of the designs point toward misunderstanding player feedback. Probably people complaining about all the keywords in descent/Imperial and they thought a solution was to just hide it inside an app.

I am sure the 3D terrain nonsense was from people complaining about the doors in imperial assault. Not understanding how simple and effective they were at breaking up terrain.

Likewise the idea of levels is handle smartly in Imperial assault with solid red and dotted lines but again people complained it cluttered the board and now you have this barren mess.