The Dream Library

I’ve been slacking off posting.  It’s so easy to just wrap myself up in what I’m doing and skip the writing part. I owe a few posts; maybe this week I’ll catch up.  But!  we’ll work backwards – newest first.

I believe I’ve mentioned somewhere that we picked up the World of Warcraft board game after Polycon and played it into the ground. It’s a good game, with good replayability, and I enjoyed the mechanics.

Hungry for more gaming in the key of ‘how am I going to fit all this on a table?’, I picked up ‘Descent’, also from Fantasy Flight.  We played the training quest on Sunday.  The game is a dungeon crawl in a style similar to Warhammer Quest. One player runs a predesigned dungeon as the ‘Overlord’, controlling all the creatures and traps.  The others play heroes, ready to crush the baddies.

Among the games interesting features:

• Scaling difficulty: The creatures and traps automatically scale in trouble to the number of players
• Enough widgets to keep the Overlord player interested; the Overlord gets points every turn to spend on traps, powers, and extra critter spawns, and gets cards to spice the game up.
• Time pressure: The heroes victory hangs upon their supply of ‘Conquest tokens’ – when they run out, the Overlord wins. Tokens are taken away from by character deaths and every time the Overlord reshuffles their cards, and they are replenished by killing named baddies and reaching waypoints, so no dawdling allowed.
• Map bits can be rearranged into any form convenient – so every quest can be different.  There’s an online community of questionable-quality maps out there.
• Many many starting characters and random starting _skills_ make for a highly variable party potential.

The combat mechanism smells mostly like itself.  The game has custom d6s that aren’t worth a _damn_ in any other game, but provide a clear visual of what you’re up to.

I enjoyed the game; I’ll be demoing it for some friends, and doubtlessly picking up some expansions. The one expansion I already picked up is designed for ‘campaign’ play – you pick your character and keep them through a series of minor and major quests, and advance while trying to knock down the Overlord’s Avatar. Good for a few months of fun, if you have the time and want beer-and-pretzels roleplay.

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