Rochester Gamers Community

Those keeping score at home might remember that Descent: Journeys in the Dark has been a game of the month in the past. Normally, we try to avoid repeating games too often or so close to when they were originally chosen, but this time I will be looking at the latest expansion for Descent, entitled The Altar of Despair.

Descent is a board game developed by Fantasy Flight Games that brings all the elements of a classic dungeon crawl to a board game. It is a combination of cooperative and competitive; as several players work together to defeat the dungeon scenario while one player acts as the overlord and tries to defeat the heroes.

Components

The expansion comes with some great stuff that you expect from a Fantasy Flight Games expansion (think lots of bits). There are 6 new heroes; complete with plastic figures and hero stat cards. It also comes with 5 new monster types (blood ape, troll, chaos beast, dark priest, and deep elf) along with the monster reference cards for the overlord to use. 49 new overlord cards, new skill cards, new item cards, and new treasure cards. There are also 8 new map pieces with a ‘corrupted’ theme. There are plenty of new markers/tokens as well; including invulnerability potions, fog effect tokens, and frost effect tokens. The Altar of Despair also introduces a new hero mechanic with new order tokens; the prolonged order. There are also tokens for good and evil altars; not to mention the crushing wall markers that should make any evil overlord happy. Let’s look at a couple of these new components a little closer.

One of the main additions is the corrupted map pieces. The corrupted terrain allows the overlord to gain threat every time a hero gets wounded or spends fatigue while they are on the corrupted terrain. Another nice add to the overlord arsenal are the dark glyphs. Dark glyphs can be purchased by the overlord to replace normal glyphs and have a negative effect each time a hero uses one. Crushing walls have also been added to the overlord arsenal as a nice visual trap to use on the unsuspecting heroes.

The heroes get some new things as well in this expansion. As stated above there are six new heroes to choose from. There are also new familiars for the heroes to use; including one that can heal wounds. I cannot forget the addition of the invulnerability potion; which allows the hero to gain a one time +10 armor bonus. There are also the normal item and treasure additions that the heroes can buy in town or find within the dungeon.

New Mechanics

Treachery – Treachery was actually introduced in The Well of Darkness expansion, but continues to be used in this expansion. Treachery is a nice way for the overlord to customize the overlord deck. Each scenario includes a certain amount of treachery for event, trap, and monster cards. The overlord gets to spend treachery to replace those types of cards in the normal overlord deck with the additional cards that come with the expansions. Any unspent treachery allows the overlord to draw additional cards at the cost of 1 card per 2 unused treachery points (up to a maximum of 8 cards). I have enjoyed being able to customize the overlord deck a bit and think this is a great addition. I would probably have the overlord customize the deck in advance though; since this can add a lot of setup time to an already long game.

Prolonged Actions – Prolonged actions are FFG’s way of bringing things like searching for traps or secret doors into a board game environment. A quest will dictate if a prolonged action will reveal something to the characters if successful. A prolonged action will look something like ‘make a prolonged Ranged (3) action to reveal the secret lever.” The number in the parenthesis are the number of successes needed to accomplish the task. Successes are cumulative from action to action and fatigue can be spent to increase the dice rolled like most other rolls. The few times I have used this mechanic have been ok and it there are some scenarios where it works in conjunction with stopping crushing walls. But for custom scenarios I would probably caution against using it too often, as it has the possibility of slowing the game down while heroes make multiple attempts to accrue the proper amount of successes.

Monsters

The new monsters included in this expansion are pretty nice. The master version Deep Elf is especially wicked; having the ability to cover a hero in a layer of thin frost that can destroy weapons and armor. I had one of these basically wipe out a heroes equipment; nasty. The Dark Priests are pretty nice as well and I prefer them over the original Sorcerers. The Blood Apes have a pretty wild Leap attack that can hit multiple targets. The Trolls are decent as well; I am still on the fence whether I like Trolls or Ogres better at this point. I have not used the Chaos Beast yet.

Quests

There are a total of 6 new quests included in the expansion. I have only played through a part of the first scenario included in the new expansion. It was a lot of fun (as the Overlord) to watch as the heroes tried to figure out why I was placing wound and threat tokens off to the side. The quest was a lot of fun for both me, as the overlord, and for the players trying to defeat it. I have heard a lot of complaints about the expansions being weighed heavily towards the overlord. At the moment I cannot confirm or deny that, but I know everyone had a blast and no one felt I was necessarily running through the heroes. One of the other nice things about Descent is that there is an online community that creates additional scenarios. This helps to increase the replayability of the game by offering new choices instead of running through the same scenarios included in the scenario book of the game. Even without the online scenarios the official quests in the game will take awhile to get through.

Overall Impressions

If it was not for the length of the overall game, Descent (and both expansions) would hit the table almost every Wednesday night I think. Everyone that has played it has thoroughly enjoyed it; one player even went as far as ordering the game and both expansions after playing it once. It is one of the games I have on my list to showcase some time on a themed game night for “board games that role-players would enjoy’ because of its dungeon crawl theme and rules and elements that Dungeons & Dragons players can directly relate to. Back to the time to play issue though, be prepared to spend a minimum of 4 hours, but up to 6+, to play this game through a single quest. This makes the game hard to get on the table and sometimes hard to finish an entire game. The time spent playing Descent is enjoyable though. As long as I have the time to play, I would not turn down a game of Descent.

I highly recommend giving Descent a try, especially if you like dungeon crawl type games.