Dungeon Saga First Impressions

Dungeon Saga First Impressions

Overview -

Dungeon Saga is a new dungeon crawling board game brought to us by Mantic via a kickstarter campaign in August 2014, the first copies were mailed out to backers in Mid to late October 2015 which was roughly on schedule give or take a month or two.  The kickstarter was funded in 4 minutes and hit over a million vs is 50k goal. 

Some fans have named dungeon Saga as the spiritual successor to hero quest and Warhammer quest by games workshop.  Mantic who are the masters of ripping apart old GW franchises (that they don’t seem to care about anymore) and are also known for their special new version of Bloodbowl (Dreadbowl) and Necromunda (deadzone).

Components -

Out of the Box the kickstarter comes in 2 sections, there is a box filled with random bags of miniatures and books/tiles then a larger box with the base core game in it.  To start with the core game then, at first it just looks like a normal box however when you reveal what’s under the sleeve you find this incredible big box that looks just like a book, complete with magnetic closing, it's absolutely beautiful. 

Opening the box you find the usual manuals sitting on top of some dividers that hold bags of minis for playing the game, under them are several sheets of cardboard containing the various components for the game.

The design of the box is perfect, I really cant gush anymore over this box, I'm more than happy with it, the card is nice and solid, it looks the part and holds all the bits while at the same time looking amazingly cool.  All my other game boxes are jealous, there’s a new box sheriff in town and he's here to stay.  The markers in the game are good quality, nice thick card with decent artwork on it, nothing mind blowing but good enough to do the job well. 

The character cards are ok, clear with good at work on them, if I had any criticism though they are a little on the thin side.  This is an element they seem to have stolen from cool mini who also do that, its not a good thing guys, stop using rubbish thin card for character sheets!

The mini's themselves, well they are very detailed, I didn’t have a single one that was broken either, a couple of bends here and there but they warmed up and bent back into shape just fine in minutes.  A few of the skeletons look a tad dated like they had literally been pulled directly from 80's hero quest, but for the most part I am impressed with the mini detail on offer in this game.

There are several rulebooks including a getting started mini booklet.  These all seem to be clear rules wise and I’ve not had to ask about any rules on Board game Geek or Reddit yet.  The art in the books is nice and does the job also since it's consistent across the range.

Now we get onto the rest of the kickstarter, which is not quite as good as the core box.  To begin with I only had 1 missing item from my kickstarter which I consider, given how many were getting shipped out as a fair success, I have emailed the team at mantic and we will see how they react to the missing component.

The rest of the stuff in the box is divided into 3 expansions, the goblin one with its green minis (Warlord of Galahir), the demon one with its red minis (The Infernal Crypts) and the core set expansion with its white undead minis.  All these minis are just as high quality as the ones in the core set, all packaged loosely in bags yet even despite this, none of them were broken and only 1 out of all of them had a bent weapon.  Finally there was a small selection of the bonus kickstarter heroes included as well.

Each of these expansions had a corresponding pack of tokens and rulebook that matched the quality of the main set however none of them came with a box, they are just loose with gigantic plastic bags included to put them in, given how much I utterly love the core set box which was a massive disappointment. 

I assume they told us somewhere in the small print about this, maybe its the price you pay for getting all of it cheap but I'm still gutted, honestly I might even buy them again when they retail just for the boxes. The joy of having them all in a line on the shelf is nearly too much to not do that.

The last items are a small booklet that seems to be sort of a compendium of extra quests and campaign items plus the big players companion book and cards that go with it.  Now this essentially changes the main game from a basic explore the dungeon and kill the enemies game like Warhammer quest/Heroquest into something else.  Something much more like a watered down version of 5th edition D&D than Warhammer quest basic dungeon crawler one off fire and forget adventures. 

If you are new to the systems and want some context on what D&D is I suggest looking it up on google or checking here.  Warhammer Quest info can be found here on its Wiki page.  HeroQuest here also.

The main rulebook for this is, like most other components nicely made.   It has good artwork and the rules in it are fairly clear.  However it is right in the middle of a controversy right now online in the DS community because it seems it was released without going to QA or a proof reader after it's initial checking.

The controversy surrounds 3 little letters, XXX.  No that's not super strength moonshine or Adult Material,  If you have read anything about dungeon siege online you may see a lot of people complaining about these letters, that’s because ANYWHERE in the rulebook (yes that’s multiple places) that you would have usually seen a reference to another page, i.e. "check the rules for large creatures on page 30" it will instead say "check the rules for large creatures on page xxx” This happens for every instance in the book, how it went to print like this is an absolute mystery.

Now I've not read the whole thing in detail searching for more errors, I know there is one with the Sylph fluff that it basically doesn’t exist and has been replaced with a copy paste of the salamander fluff.  Initially I thought the Ranger class was completely missing from the book as it doesn’t have a section but its actually under the warrior class.  Now what a warrior has to do with a ranger, I don't know.  Personally I think they are nothing alike but that’s where it is,  crazy but at least its in there.  Sadly that does mean ranger fans that you share a levelling tree with warriors, I really didn’t like this at all.

Still, these flaws aside, it is a very nice book with some good rules in it, nothing ground breaking that anyone who has ever played a dungeon crawler has not seen before but decent for an expansion to the main game for people wanting to give it a little oomph.

 Gameplay/how it plays -

I'll had about 5 games so far with both the main game rules and with the expansion 'campaign' rules, however I don’t quite consider this enough to write a full rules write-up, so this will come in a few days when I’ve had more games.  In the meantime however I will say this (and yes I'm leading with the bad).

The main game out of the box for the players can be VERY hard, like seriously difficult if the DM/Necromancer wants it to be.  If you walk into this game with a Necromancer/dungeon master who wants to play competitively and kill you, then even on the starter missions, you are going to die. 

This is because even though the player characters are quite powerful compared to the enemy, the win condition for the game, is for the Necromancer to purely kill 1 character out of 4, that’s it, just 1.

Now to me that needs house ruling straight away because you know what, killing 1 guy is easy if you want to.  The human wizard and elf ranger are super squishy to a point where if you spawn creatures correctly and get archers in the right place and then focus fire them down, they WILL die very fast. 

In the first 2 games I had, I was able to score a technical win on both games as Necromancer just by taking out 1 of the squishy heroes, even with grouping together for protection.  Think you can avoid that, try allowing the Necromancer access to their interrupt cards that give monsters free actions that don’t affect their main action in the necromancers main phase, this can mean nasty enemies getting free shots on your squishy guys right when you don't expect it. 

What I did was just to play on with house rule number 1.   That being as long as 1 group member completes the quest, the player team wins.  With additional house rule 1.5, if you are the Necromancer, don’t play to win, play to have fun and in Wheaton style, don't be a dick.

This leads onto house rule number 2, doors.  There are 2 kinds of doors in Dungeon saga, magical doors and normal locked doors.  Normal doors can be physically smashed open or picked open (with campaign characters) to get them open, magical doors however can only seemingly be opened by a wizard of which you only have 1.  Which did I mention is made of paper.

A wizard who even if you use house rule 1 and allow the group to continue after his death, they would then hit the wall of magical doors, they couldn’t get past.  As such house rule 2 is that if the wizard dies, the group can still open magical doors with force (or an assumed magic scroll of door opening, since you can actually buy these in the campaign expansion rules).

Having come from a background of playing D&D as well as many other crawlers, I think stopping the players in their tracks out of the blue is always a bad thing and will stall/kill these kind of games.  My 3rd house rule surrounds XP, now i've not quite nailed this one down yet, but experience gain in the game is completely underwhelming. 

When Painted even the doors look outstanding

When you kill something you get an experience point, if you get 5 then you can trade them all in for 1 dice, you can use this dice to add it to any of your rolls.  Yep that’s it, 1 extra dice.  No level up and new ability or item or anything just an extra dice.  As such I have changed this to be 5xp = 1 Glory and Glory is the currency used in the campaign to get level ups.  You usually gain 1 Glory per mission completion and it takes an increasing amount of glory to level up.

I still need to balance this XP but thats half the fun of a nice bit of Dungeon Mastering.

Let's have some good now shall we, get all that doom and gloom out of the way because those house rules aside, it is a solid game.  I consider Zombicide one of the best co-op board games ever made and that game has LOADS of house rules imposed on it, as such I don’t consider them game breaking. 

Character control is fairly simple which is nice, you move then you take an action.  Actions are things like fighting, attacking a door, casting a spell, shooting a bow etc.  I did find it a bit odd you cant shoot/attack then move, but you just have to allow that into your tactics for the turn, moving each character in a specific order that needs to be thought about beforehand so you aren’t say blocking Line of sight to your casters/ranged guys.  So in a way this is a good tactical feature.

Leaning to play is a 10 min job, 5 if you have ever played D&D or a dungeon crawler before especially with the nice quick start guide.  The simple nature to take game makes it quick to pick up and play, without being too simple to make it boring.  The slowest part of the entire game usually being the setup of the board and characters and even that isn't bad if the board is broken up with doors so usually appears as you play (opening a door reveals what is behind it, SURPRISE! its a troll).

I really like the combat system they used, I've not actually seen it in a dungeon crawler game before, but it is the same system they use for combat in the Spartacus blood and sand board game.  You roll your dice for attack, apply modifiers (-1 for being injured or outnumbered etc.) then lay them out in a row.

The defender does the same and higher numbers beat lower numbers as you would expect resulting in a certain number of successes or failures.  This then turn into wounds for the players or other effects for the monsters that are on a large chart the necromancer gets (a skeleton cant be killed by 1 wound for example, it takes 2 to smash then and 3 at once to outright kill them).

The games smashed skeleton summoning mechanic is quite interesting, there are bones piles scattered around that could at any point in the necromancers turn become a monster, even more annoying is if you pass one by then it turns into a nasty ranged skeleton and shoots your squishy guys in the back later if you leave it alone too much. 

I think to a certain extent the game needed a way to smash those bones so you can safely pass them by and not get attacked in the back when you least expect it.  On the plus side at least they can’t attack the turn they appear (unless of course the necromancer uses an interrupt free action on them in the player turn).

The missions seem fun, plenty of well laid out dungeons have been created and its easy to create your own should you want to Dungeon Master your own campaigns.  This flashes me back to the days of the create your own dungeon expansion for Heroquest, drawing out my own planned adventures and unleashing them on adventurers.

Full review of expansions and campaign setting plus more detail of the main game and balance coming soon.