I recently bought four extra sets of Descent dice, all the better to speed games up with, so I'm trying to actually get some use from them and play a lot of Descent this month. I did ok this weekend, playing two games of Descent in addition to the other gaming I did.

The first game was on Friday afternoon against Paul, who is one of my regular Magic opponents but whom I'd never played a boardgame with. He's not entirely unfamiliar with the gameform, though, and so soon enough I was ensconced in my usual Overlord (DM) role and he was taking two heroes into the dungeon.

The part of the game that gave Paul the most trouble was the splitting of the game into actions: thus, "Advance" = Move plus Attack, "Battle" = Attack twice, "Sprint" = Move twice, and "Ready" = Move or Attack + special action. His natural inclination was to have attacks cost movement points, and so we spent a fair bit of the early game with him not quite understanding the rules - but otherwise taking down my Beastmen and Skeletons.

The primary newbie error in Descent is to not press on and get through as many rooms as possible - to stay behind and clean out all the monsters. Unfortunately for the adventurers, that just allows the Overlord to spawn new monsters and delay the heroes whilst building up ever-increasing threat token and nasty cards to play later.

So, it was no surprise to see that Paul lingered a little too long in the first room. It also wasn't helping that my Beastmen were dealing out a tremendous amount of damage, and Paul would miss every third attack.

However, it was once he reached the second room that things really started getting bad for him.



It was the Ogre, you see. It was the biggest threat on the table and Paul's rolling was dreadful: each attack was doing only one or two points of damage to it, if that!

Meanwhile, his rogue off-sider was being killed again and again by my beastmen and sorcerers. It just wasn't good for the adventurers!

His warrior died, and he had to respawn back in the village. In that time, the ogre and the beastmen managed to surround his forces again - and, with my deck exhausted and only two conquest tokens remaining, the result was, sadly, inevitable.



Paul did enjoy the game, despite his heroes suffering a horrible fate, and I hope to play another game with him soon. For now, Narthak's dungeon has been too much for the last two groups that have entered it. Will it be too much for the next group?

Nice review Merric...