Television is rather a frightening business. But I get all the relaxation I want from my collection of model soldiers.
Peter Cushing

Saturday 20 June 2015

Going Deeper Underground

Last night we played....


Yes, Descent. Also known as Lazy Man's D&D. A good old fashioned Dungeon Bash with no planning or set-up required. 

For those that haven't played it, you create a dungeon for each quest from a series of modular tiles. One player is the Evil Overlord - think Sauron, Randall Flagg or Margret Thatcher - and the other players control heroes. Each hero has a class and career and spends XP to gain new abilities as well as new equipment. For your money you get a lot of stuff. I mean, a lot of stuff. And all very high quality. 



That's about less than a third of the stuff, by the way. 

There are around 25 quests in the base game and last night we played the first two. I was elected as Overlord - fairly predictably - and The Good Lady Er Indoors and a wandering RS teacher (lord, random encounter tables have really gone downhill) as the mighty heroes. 



Look, I'm going to cut to the chase of this little mini-review. Descent is great. It deserves a place on your table. In two hours we had more drama, laughter and stupidity that you normally get in a month's worth of RPG sessions. Including but not limited to:

-The goblin archers being so distracted by the Cleric's manly ass they were unable to shoot him

-The same cleric getting bitten in the same ass by a spider

-A dwarf being thrown across the dungeon by an ettin only to waddle back and smack the ettin into next week

-and, glory of glories - a TPK:


Of course, the joy of Descent: like Jaws in a Roger Moore Bond movie, they pick themselves up and dust themselves off ready for the next adventure. 

We'll be playing some more next week. If there's any interest I'll do a proper write up/review explaining how the game plays and so forth. 

4 comments:

  1. Oh, that looks nice.
    Two things;
    What's an "RS Teacher"? Richmond School is what the initials mean to me.
    "a TPK"? No idea what this could be.

    Also, how many pages of rules are there to learn before I would be able to play? I'm terrible at remembering rules. I've learned Blood Bowl cos that's easy, and I managed Warhammer Quest again because it's easy.

    I'd be interested in some more pictures at lease, but I'm going to go and search for this game online for some more info

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    1. A TPK is a total party kill. As it's a non-cooperative game, the feeling of being the Overlord is very much akin to being a DM that's actively trying to kill the players :)

      The rules are very simple - I'll run through them in the next post but one of the joys of it being a board game is that most rules are printed on cards right in front of you. All you need to remember is basically line of sight and the movement rules. Everything else always to hand.

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    2. Oh, and an RS teacher is 'religious studies'. But I can't really coast aspersions, as the Good Lady Er Indoors is as well.

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    3. Yep, I found a lot of information on the game online. I'd love to buy it (but then I'd love to buy a lot of boardgames) but I can't afford it. The only board game I have is Spartacus, and I still need the latest expansion for that.
      It was Religious Education when I was at school in the 90s. A subject I quite enjoyed, as it was mainly just history which I knew bits about due to the Arab-Israeli and India-Pakistan wars. Christianity didn't get a look in, just the other big four religions

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