Descent – Introducing the Tuesday Group
I recently acquired Descent: Journeys in the Dark to add to my Ameritrash collection of Fantasy Flight games. I've been interested in picking this up for the past couple of years, basically ever since I picked Magic back up and started getting more interested in board games. The game is gigantic, and extremely daunting, even if you've been playing heavy board games like I have. Ultimately, I had some extra birthday cash floating around, and there was a 20% off holiday sale at Chimera Hobby so it became a pretty easy decision. Given that I obtained it just before New Year's with the Keough, I thought I might even get to try it out before dropping it on the Tuesday Group.
You're probably wondering who the Tuesday Group is, and if you're not I don't care. The Tuesday Group consists of Luke, Greg, and Adam as the regulars with guest appearances by Troy and Ryan from time to time. We usually hover around four players, which is perfect for Descent. This gaming group started with Magic at my place, but when Lily came along I dropped hosting duties because it was just too overwhelming to have everyone over every week. Now we meet up at Luke's house, which is nice for me, except when I haul a game with box as big as Descent's.
We're all avid board gaming fans, but I think the Tuesday Night group is much more dedicated to Ameritrash than Euro-gaming. You'll see a lot of Fantasy Flight on these nights, though we've messed with Dominion from time to time. Battlestar is one of the most popular entries into the gaming sessions, so I figured Descent would be a hit as well.
This night, Luke, Adam, and Greg were all present. They finished singing and mumbling to Sing Star on the PS3 while I pulled out the game and got it setup. Since I like to get to business, I had already built the sections of the dungeon and just snapped them together. Unfortunately, I forgot how many little bits there are in the game and I spend a good 15 minutes getting them organized. I was finally ready to go, and we started figuring out the basics of the game.
The three hero players are all familiar with D&D, so picking up the mechanics of the game was not too big a deal. The major thing we had to consider was how equipping worked, and having to declare your action at the beginning of the turn. If you can get these concepts down, then there should be very few mistakes that would cause headaches for both sides down the road.
Adam picked up Steelhorns, a big bruiser minotaur. Luke ended up with Landrec the Wise, a fragile and slow wizard with a nasty special ability that gives him two surges on every attack roll. And Greg pulled Ispher, giving the group the full spectrum of character types with a rogue.
They made their way into the first room, had a few hiccups along the way, namely when Landrec was in the line of fire and would be able to avoid getting killed with the expenditure of a fatigue point, but eventually overcame the monsters in the room. I skipped spawning spiders into the corners to give them a breather, and they started moving along quickly as the grasped the mechanics of the game.
The next room was fairly easy for them. They setup a wall blocking the larger monsters from getting to the weaker characters, and quickly dispatched the ogre while dealing with sorcerers that had spawned in behind them. The also picked up some wicked equipment and moved into the next room where they quickly dispatched all of the monsters. I was going to have problems because they were rolling around 14 damage every turn and generally had around four points of piercing.
Lo and behold, the heroes entered the giant's chamber, avoided the trapped chest with a lucky roll, missed on an attack when I charmed one of them, and proceeded to slaughter poor Narthak as stood stupidly in his little corner never even lifting his axe. They were able to stun the manticores and giant with the Flute of Repose which is a major beating. I was crushed and demoralized...
But they were hooked.
They all enjoyed the game quite a bit, and I suggested we try the advanced campaign with The Road to Legend which they all were eager to do. The really nice thing is that we can break that up into bite sized chunks. Work through a dungeon in about 2 hours, and that leaves another hour or so to play other games.
Sounds like the perfect setup, and a nice way to replace the loss of regular D&D sessions.
