Descent: Journeys in the Dark

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Descent: Journeys in the Dark is a 2-5 player high fantasy adventure board game published by Fantasy Flight Games in 2005. The game is not related to the video game Descent , but rather is based on an improved version of the mechanics of FFG's licensed Doom: The Board Game. In Descent, players take the roles of adventurers who delve into underground complexes in search of treasure (the so-called "dungeon crawl"). One player takes the role of the Overlord, who controls the enemies and plays cards to hinder the hero players. Descent differs from other games in the genre in that the Overlord player's goal is to win by exhausting the other players of victory points, rather than merely to facilitate play. The Overlord's resources are limited by the rules of the game, which require him to hoard and expend "threat" points, which are generated in response to the hero players' actions, in order to hamper the other players and to bring out additional monsters to defeat them.

Descent is one of a number of fantasy board games published by FFG, others include Runebound and licensed Warcraft III, World of Warcraft and several The Lord of the Rings games. Descent shares the same characters with Runebound and its expansion set. The first expansion, Descent: Well of Darkness, was released on October 26, 2006. A second expansion Descent: the Altar of Despair is due February 2007.

In October 2006, Board Games Online announced that they were working on an online PC version of Descent: Journeys in the Dark for their BattlePawn 3D boardgame engine. This PC version will contain full 3D graphics, music and sound. Descent is BattlePawn's launch title.

1 Gameplay
2 The Well of Darkness
3 The Altar of Despair
4 Related Games
5 External links

[edit] Gameplay

There are two sides, the hero side and the Overlord. The heroes are attempting to complete a quest (usually kill a boss monster at the end of a set of rooms). The Overlord attempts to stop the heroes by playing traps or spawning monsters who can then be used to attack the heroes.

Each quest features a different map (a configuration of tiles). The arrangement of tiles and placement of various traps, special events, and treasures gives Descent a great deal of flexibility in comparison to many other board games. However, the players must spend somewhat more time to set-up the game before it can be played.

The heroes are able to use a number of items which enhance their abilities such as magic swords, enchanted armor, healing potions, and much more. They also have a number of abilities which make them stronger and more effective than the majority of the monsters which the Overlord can summon. As the heroes find more treasure, they grow more powerful and this allows them to tackle more difficult quests.

The game features many different dice, while they are all six-sided, they contain a number of symbols (sometimes three on a single face). The different dice have different purposes (one die generally produces damage, another die generally produces range). The most powerful weapons in the game can result in the heroes rolling ten dice for a single attack, though normally heroes only roll three or four. Descent is more complex than many games and its rule book is 23 pages long.

The game tries to be balanced so that in each game the Overlord has a reasonable chance of beating the heroes. Some reviewers felt that in the initial game, the heroes rapidly surpassed the Overlord's ability to defeat them.

Game play is listed as between four to five hours to play a single quest. A total of nine quests were defined in the original game. Many more quests have been created and officially posted on the FFG website: The Official Fan-Created Quest List.

[edit] The Well of Darkness

The Well of Darkness was the first expansion released for the Descent game. While offering your normal expansion features - new tiles, new heroes, new monsters - the biggest change was the addition of more power for the Overlord. Apparently FFG designers responded to the complaints of frustrated Overlords and they added many more elements to the basic play of the Overlord. With the expansion, the Overlord player can modify his deck of cards (potential actions in the game) to include some number of more powerful traps, summoned monsters, and events.

Reviewers have generally praised the expansion for redressing the balance between the heroes and the Overlord player, though at the cost of increased complexity. The Overlord player must now spend additional time adding and subtracting cards from his deck of actions before play can begin. This can make starting the game even more time-consuming.

The Well of Darkness contains nine new fully-defined quests.

Like the first game, the expansion features heroes who are also found in the board game Runebound.

[edit] The Altar of Despair

The Altar of Despair is the second expansion for the Descent game, released in January 2007. It offers 6 new heroes, 5 new types of monsters (such as Dark Priests and tentacled Chaos Beasts), new traps (such as crushing walls), and new quests. New terrain consists of corrupted dungeon terrain. Some minor rules and changes are also made to accommodate a new action type (prolonged actions) used in the new quests.

[edit] Related Games

Descent was designed and produced by Kevin Wilson. Its parent game was Doom: The Boardgame, released in late 2004, from which Descent borrowed mechanics. In many ways the game mechanics of Descent are an expansion and improvement upon those of Doom: The Boardgame.

Hero Quest could be considered the grandfather of Descent, with characters assigned to the players, and equipment purchased before descending into a dungeon region to solve quests. Descent however, has done well to prevent the 'stalling' tactics players were capable of in Hero Quest - the deck the Overlord uses in Descent acts as a timer, so every action taken by the heroes comes with a price. Hero Quest, while similar in a number of ways, did not have a method to keep the players active.