Octopus Overlords

baelthazar wrote:The 4-player limitation pushes me away from Horned Rat, but I know I will want it eventually.

El Guapo wrote:ah gotcha. I tend to think of that more as a "minimum" than a "limit", but I suppose it is just a different type of limitation.

What do you guys wind up playing? There really aren't a lot of games that I know of that play optimally with three players.

coopasonic wrote:

coopasonic wrote: Could Galaxy trucker reasonably be dumbed down for a 5 year old? I like the concept but it looks like it could be pretty fiddly.

Anyone?

El Guapo wrote:Say, is this game predicated on a Cleopatra anal sex joke?

hentzau wrote:

El Guapo wrote:Say, is this game predicated on a Cleopatra anal sex joke?

I wondered the same thing...

baelthazar wrote:I played Descent for the first time. We didn't have the time to finish it... but it was glorious! I think THIS is the dungeon crawler I was looking for all my life (well, since Hero Quest, anyway).

baelthazar wrote:I played Descent for the first time. We didn't have the time to finish it... but it was glorious! I think THIS is the dungeon crawler I was looking for all my life (well, since Hero Quest, anyway).

Smoove_B wrote:

baelthazar wrote:I played Descent for the first time. We didn't have the time to finish it... but it was glorious! I think THIS is the dungeon crawler I was looking for all my life (well, since Hero Quest, anyway).

We are so backed-up with games right now, but my buddy and I are looking at Descent and drooling. I think it's official - I've spent more money on board games this year than PC or Console gaming. It's only a matter of time until this joins our library...

baelthazar wrote:

Smoove_B wrote:

baelthazar wrote:I played Descent for the first time. We didn't have the time to finish it... but it was glorious! I think THIS is the dungeon crawler I was looking for all my life (well, since Hero Quest, anyway).

We are so backed-up with games right now, but my buddy and I are looking at Descent and drooling. I think it's official - I've spent more money on board games this year than PC or Console gaming. It's only a matter of time until this joins our library...

Oh, I easily overspent on boardgames than other avenues.

Looks like we are going to play Descent again today. This time we will finish the game (I hope)! I'm considering RtL or one of the expansions, given how much fun we had. Any thoughts on what would be the first one to get?

Well of Darkness wrote:New Heroes

WoD includes six new heroes to add to the 20 from Descent. These six are featured on the covers of WoD and Descent. For those keeping score, there are four males and two females, with three melee specialized, one magic, and two ranged (the females). We also see the first dwarf in the game (previously there had been orcs, elves, minotaurs, and even a lizardman).

Of the new heroes, Nanok of the Blade has the strongest special ability: he can't wear armor, but his Armor rating is equal to 2 plus his Melee trait (starting at 2). Gold spent training up that trait gives him more armor than anyone except those lucky enough to get a gold or silver armor. Laurel of Bloodwood is also pretty good, as she can convert excess range on an attack into damage.

New Monsters

Three new monsters are added in WoD: kobolds, ferrox, and golems. Oddly, while Descent had an equal number of monsters using each attack, all of these new monsters use melee.

Kobolds are small and weak, but they have the Swarm ability, giving each one additional power dice for every monster adjacent to their target. The master kobolds also lower the threat costs of traps.

Ferrox are savage bloodsuckers. They inflict bleeding wounds, and the masters drain fatigue.

Golems are large, powerful creatures with high armor (5/6, putting them on par with the Descent's giants, and ahead of anything else). They're immune to many effects and special abilities.

New Cards

There are 110 cards in WoD. The cards are just slightly taller than the original Descent cards- not a huge deal, but it's noticeable. That's the only bad side of the cards. On the good, all the new cards have a little well symbol in the corner so you can separate them from the original cards. Also, the backgrounds of the cards have changed; instead of the tan of the originals, all melee skills and spawn cards are red, magic skills and traps are purple, and subterfuge and events are green. It helps differentiate cards at a glance.

Twelve of the cards replace cards from Descent, clarifying or changing the cards. Most of these changes are called out in the FAQ posted on Fantasy Flight Games' site, but replacements are nicer than pasting the new text onto the card. Everything else is a new addition to the game.

There are four new skills for each category. Generally these are pretty good, although the magic skills can be pretty worthless. Each magic skill is a pact with an element, allowing the hero to ignore some type of obstacle; the water pact lets the hero cross water, while the earth pact allows the hero to ignore rubble. These can be handy, but if there's no water on the map, or no lava (since that wasn't added until this expansion, that means all the original quests), the skill isn't much use. There are secondary effects, but gaining knockback or burn with a staff is going to be disappointing since the runes are almost always better than staffs.

Seven new items are in the shop. The one new melee weapon is a walking stick, weak compared to a sword or axe, but it gives the wielder the reach ability. The new ranged weapons don't offer anything of advantage over the originals. The new runes are intriguing, offering the powerful Blast or Stun abilities, previously only available through treasures. However, these require three and two surges to activate, so it can hard for a hero to use the power. The one new armor is the tunic. It has zero armor, but the wearer gets to roll a power die for each wound suffered, stopping a point of damage for each blank rolled. This applies against traps as well as attacks, but it's only a 1 in 6 chance of stopping each point.

A variety of treasures are added, with ranged weapons getting the most additions. The best item is not a weapon, but the Superior Healing rune. A gold treasure, it allows the user to spend one movement point to heal two wounds on himself or an adjacent character.

The largest portion of the cards go to the Overlord. Three cards, spawns for the ferrox and kobolds, are added straight to the Overlord deck. Everything else is a treachery card, allowing the Overlord to customize the deck (the treachery rules are explained below). These cards tend to be more powerful than the base cards. The spawns are either larger versions of base spawns (the Elite Beastman Warparty adds a second master beastman to the standard spawn group) or are powerful monsters that previously only appeared as part of the quest set up, such as manticores and naga. New event cards include Ambush, allowing the Overlord to activate monsters on the heroes' turn, Crushing Blow, which can destroy a hero's items, and Danger, which is discarded for a quick ten threat.

New Rules

The biggest addition to the game is Treachery. For each quest, the Overlord gains a certain amount of Event, Trap, and Monster threat. Each of the new Overlord cards has a treachery cost on it. The Overlord purchases cards with the treachery, adding these to the deck while removing a number of base cards equal to the number of treachery cards purchased. If the Overlord doesn't spend all of the treachery on cards, then he starts with an additional card in his hand for ever two unspent points. Treachery values for the quests out of Descent are included, and each new quest has the treachery in the description.

Treachery costs range from one to three, giving an idea of the card's power. However, I don't agree with some of the assessments of worth. The Lone Golem card cost 3 treachery and summons a golem (and not even a master). A powerful figure, yes, but for 1 treachery you can add Lone Manticore to your deck, allowing you to spawn a master manticore, a that attacks twice each round with pierce and poison.

WoD contains the FAQ and rule changes/clarifications from the FFG site. Pretty useful for a group that doesn't want to keep looking at the website to find out a rule works. There's even a diagram showing how the breath effect works around corners.

New Quests

There are nine new quests in WoD, doubling the total quests for Descent. On the whole, these look more difficult and more innovative than the Descent quests. Larger too, as each quest has at least five areas, some as much as eight.

The first quest is Buried Alive, which takes place in a collapsing mine. Each turn, the Overlord removes a section of the map, forcing the heroes to keep moving or die. This is the only quest I've run from WoD so far, and if felt harder than any of the ones from Descent. Treasures were harder to come by and the heroes constantly running out of fatigue, having no opportunities to rest. Other quests are spider or kobold themed, and one is an homage to the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, complete with boulder and gold idol. The final quest is the eponymous Well of Darkness, a quest so difficult the heroes receive four artifacts before it starts.

Altar of Despair Review wrote:New Heroes

AoD adds another six heroes to Descent. The portraits of the six have a desert theme, reminiscent of Arabian Nights. The newest Runebound expansion is The Sands of Al-Kalim, a name that suggests these heroes were first developed there.

Two characters are specialized in melee and magic, with one specialized in ranged weapons, and a jack of all trades. Only one character, Tahlia, is female, but she is both the first female specialized in melee (all three dice) and the first female worth four conquest tokens (the other melee character is Corbin, the second dwarf of the game).

The best ability goes to Kirga (a goblin from the look as he looks too different from the orcs of Descent). This ranged specialist prevents monsters from being spawned within five spaces, even if he doesn't have line of sight. With Kirga around, there's no more need to worry about a beastman warparty appearing around the corner.

The weakest of the six is Aurim, the jack of all trades. With only eight health and one die in each attack form, he's not very great in combat. His ability to change his potions into other potions is interesting, but only rarely useful.

New Monsters

Five new monsters join the Overlord's horde. Three are melee, one uses magic, and the last is "other."

The savage blood ape's ancestors wrestled with Conan. The current incarnations are powerful melee fighters that can leap over foes, attacking everyone in a line. The masters go berserk when wounded, using all five power dice in an attack.

Trolls are brutes almost on par with giants for strength and toughness. They have the new bash ability, which allows them to roll up to five power dice on an attack. A blank on any die means a miss, but on a hit they can spend surges to cause devastating damage.

The Deep Elves are swift assassins who will no doubt conjure images of drow. Their shadowcloak ability allows them to avoid any attack from a nonadjacent target. The masters have frost attacks which can make items brittle and break.

The Dark Priests are the new magic creature. Their special is the dark prayer, which generates threat for the Overlord at a rate of one per surge, instead of the usual one for two. They also add range and damage for each surge. Masters bear the black curse, making heroes less effective and giving a curse token to their killer.

Chaos Beasts are primordial tentacled creatures. Their morph ability lets them pick any three dice to roll for an attack- one has to be red, white, or blue, setting the type of attack, but it could use those three dice and make the attack melee, magic, or ranged as the Overlord wishes.

Spawn cards for the Dark Priests and the Blood Apes are added to the deck. Trolls and Deep Elves are on spawn cards that can be added by treachery. There are no spawn cards for the Chaos Beasts, so they'll only appear if the quest calls for them.

New Cards

This time around, there is only one replacement card. Leadership is rewritten to accommodate the new prolonged actions rule. At the same time, a fatigue cost is added, a step at balancing this powerful skill.

Of the new cards, only a handful are available in the shop. Only one is affordable by starting heroes; the Wizard's Robe, armor that provides no protection against melee attacks, but allows the wearer to equip an additional Other Item. The Curse Doll is an Other that can be discarded to remove effect tokens; a pretty useful item, as the week before we bought AoD, one hero spent several turns trapped in a web before the Overlord finished him off. Lastly, a Ring of Protection can be purchased for 250 gold. The +1 armor it provides isn't great compared to the copper treasures you could buy at that price, but at least you know what you're getting.

New treasures include the Mace of Kellos, mentioned in the Descent rules but cut from the game before release. I think heroes will be more interested in the Pack of Holding, which allows the hero to carry an unlimited number of items, and not lose gold on death. Or the Ring of Wishing, with possible wishes earning gold, a choice of silver treasures, or three conquest tokens. A new type of items are cursed treasures, items that are more powerful than normal, but cause the wielder to gain a curse token.

The dark side of treasures are the Dark Relics. A new trap card allows the Overlord to give a hero a Dark Relic instead of a treasure, and the relic must be equipped. The hero might be slowed, or be forced to wear glass armor and take extra damage from attacks, or another effect.

Another four skills are added to each category. Subterfuge takes another step toward the traditional D&D thief with the inclusion of pickpocket, earning the hero gold for every kill. One card in each category is devoted to helping with prolonged actions. Since there are no prolonged actions in pre-AoD quests, these might look worthless (like the elemental Pacts in Well of Darkness if their obstacle isn't in the quest), but the secondary abilities still make these cards useful. Ranger, the subterfuge skill, grants a damage bonus. The magic skill, Bardic Lore, gives all treasure drawn to the hero with the skill, who then distributes them equally; no more does the magic sword end up in the wizard's hands by random draw. Brawny, the melee skill, seems the weakest, but it allows the hero to break down doors, spending no movement and removing the door from the board. The best skill in the box looks to be Sharr the Brightwing, a familiar. Each turn, Sharr can heal a hero of two points of damage, or repair a dark glyph.

The Overlord gets 49 new cards in this expansion. Six of these are added to the base deck, which means it takes longer to cycle through the deck. The others are treachery cards (described below). Some are brand new, others duplicate cards from Descent or Well of Darkness- if you enjoy making heroes attack each other with Dark Charm, why not add a second one to the deck? I'm fond of Time Slips Away, which when played allows the Overlord to draw two more cards. Others might prefer Dance of the Monkey God- just like Curse of the Monkey God, but it affects all heroes.

New Rules

AoD has the same rules changes and FAQ as found in Well of Darkness, so even if you skipped that expansion, you can still make use of the errata. Of course, this information is also available online, but it's useful to have it in the book.

As with Well of Darkness, AoD uses the treachery system to allow the Overlord to customize the deck. The rules (and treachery values for the original Descent quests) are reprinted from Well of Darkness, so let me quote what I said in that review:

The biggest addition to the game is Treachery. For each quest, the Overlord gains a certain amount of Event, Trap, and Monster threat. Each of the new Overlord cards has a treachery cost on it. The Overlord purchases cards with the treachery, adding these to the deck while removing a number of base cards equal to the number of treachery cards purchased. If the Overlord doesn't spend all of the treachery on cards, then he starts with an additional card in his hand for ever two unspent points. Treachery values for the quests out of Descent are included, and each new quest has the treachery in the description.

Additionally, the Overlord can spend treachery points for dark glyphs, at a cost of 2 treachery per glyph. On one side these look like a regular transport glyph, but the reverse is colored depending on the type of treachery used to purchase it. A dark glyph may be laid down in place of a regular glyph. Red glyphs spawn monsters when used, purple allow free draws for the Overlord, and green are sundered, unusable and only worth one conquest token to the heroes.

Altars, for good and evil, are a new quest feature. When activated by heroes or monsters, these have some effect depending on the quest. For example, one quest features good altars as part of a temple's defenses; a hero can activate the altar and cause two points of damage to all monsters within five spaces, as well as giving burn tokens to those monsters.

Two new status effects have been added. Curse tokens, gained from using cursed items or through certain other effects, increase a character's conquest value. Frost tokens make a hero's items brittle and prone to breaking.

The most important new rule is prolonged actions. These cover situations where a hero is searching for a secret door or trying to solve a puzzle. Each prolonged action tests one of the traits. Successes can be accumulated over multiple turns. This addition allows an extra level of interaction in quests; before, a hero activated an event marker or didn't. Now there's a mechanic beyond combat.

New Quests

There are only six quests included in AoD, as opposed to the nine included in the original game and WoD. However, all these quests break out of the mold of "explore the dungeon and kill the boss monster." The first quest, "The Thing in the Pit", is a race to free prisoners before they can be sacrificed to the Thing. Even if the heroes defeat the Thing, if too many prisoners are sacrificed, they still lose.

Another quest involves villagers transformed into monsters. If heroes rush in and kill without thinking, they'll kill the villagers and lose conquest tokens. Even cautious heroes may run afoul the trolls in "Mists of Time", which can ambush and attack during a player's turn.

My favorite of the ones I've tried is "Hold the Line." There is no exploring in this quest. Instead, the heroes must try to defend a temple against a horde of monsters.

baelthazar wrote:Chaosraven,

It isn't too hard to pass on RtL, it looks to be OOP at the moment and rare to find (unless I want to hit the ebay market). Any suggestion on Altar of Despair or Well of Darkness (or even the Tomb of Ice-thing or whatever) for the first expansion? I like the idea of a campaign, but with all the other games I have, I don't really want to specialize in only Descent. But it would be nice to have an expansion that gives the Overlord some more abilities to customize his powers.

MythicalMino wrote:Smoove, where do you live (any way close to Coldwater, MI)? I have a copy of the base game of Descent that I think I may be willing to part with. I know the game gets lots of love, but I just have a difficult time getting into it. Good game from what I can see...but...nothing I can get my group or my family to play.

baelthazar wrote:I typically have only 2 heroes to play with, so we were discussing house rules for the Copper/Silver/Gold treasure buying in Town. It seemed like only letting them pick the top card was really under-powered and underwhelming, given that - with two characters - you have a good chance of getting a treasure that is completely useless. We decided to to the "draw three, pick one" rule for treasure and that worked alright, but did allow for "customization" and less gambling. Now, I did lose to the heroes, but it wasn't by much (if the hero had missed his last roll, I would have likely won). Had they been stuck with worthless treasure, they would have lost by a route.

Town
Main game concept, Journeys in the Dark
I - Rules

(see JITD, p. 17-18; FAQ, p. 1)

The town is a place that the heroes can retreat to in order to re-supply and train.
Dead heroes are also sent back to the town to be resurrected at the temple.
A hero in the town may choose to shop by spending three movement points.
All heroes in the town are considered adjacent to each other and cannot be targeted by overlord cards.

Shopping

The hero may visit the town's market. He can purchase one or more items from the town shop deck, he may sell any of his items for half of their value (rounded down to the nearest 25 coins), and he may purchase any of the following:

Item Cost in Coins
Healing Potion 50
Vitality Potion 50
Power Potion 50
Invulnerability Potion 50
Invisibility Potion 50
Draw 1 Copper Treasure * 250
Draw 1 Silver Treasure * 500
Draw 1 Gold Treasure * 750

* When purchasing treasures, the hero player draws the card at random from the appropriate deck. As changed in the FAQ, heroes can only buy treasure cards from the shop if they have previously opened at least one chest of that color this game.

Chaosraven wrote:

baelthazar wrote:Chaosraven,

It isn't too hard to pass on RtL, it looks to be OOP at the moment and rare to find (unless I want to hit the ebay market). Any suggestion on Altar of Despair or Well of Darkness (or even the Tomb of Ice-thing or whatever) for the first expansion? I like the idea of a campaign, but with all the other games I have, I don't really want to specialize in only Descent. But it would be nice to have an expansion that gives the Overlord some more abilities to customize his powers.

My suggestion is get either Altar or Well first. Getting your hands on Treachery is excellent for the Overlord to customize his Deck. Adding Tomb of Ice gains Feats for Heroes (one shot hidden ability cards). There's new Heroes and Monsters and Dungeons in all three.

Descent: Quest Compendium presents in one full-color 96-page hardbound volume sixteen of Descent's most cunning, deadly, and puzzling scenarios for your gaming table, brought to you by a team of acclaimed and award-winning game designers and authors.

The Compendium is something to pick up after you have exhausted the Dungeons from the 3 Expansions.

SpaceLord wrote:Played some Memoir '44. The game's getting better as we play. I already had the Terrain Pack, and picked up the Eastern Front pack. What is suggested for the next step? The Air Pack? Mediterranean Theater? I do want 'em all eventually...

SpaceLord wrote:Played some Memoir '44. The game's getting better as we play. I already had the Terrain Pack, and picked up the Eastern Front pack. What is suggested for the next step? The Air Pack? Mediterranean Theater? I do want 'em all eventually...

NickAragua wrote:Anyone play the 'Big Expansion' for this thing? I'm probably going to pick it up anyway 'cause it expands the game to a max of 5 players on top of all the other things it adds, but I'd like to find out people's thoughts anyway.