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.

Game of Thrones LCG 2nd Edtion Review

Game of Thrones LCG Second Edition Core Review

Overview -

Game of Thrones the LCG is a card game brought to us by Fantasy Flight Games.  Now in its second edition, many players are picking it up for the first time with a nice blank slate of not needing to buy a bucket load of expansions. GoT LCG can be played 2 players in duel mode (called Joust) or multiplayer in a free for all battle royale (called Melee).  Players battle till they get to 15 power and the first to achieve this is declared the winner.

Components -

Living up-to the usual high standards of fantasy flight, GoT 2nd ed doesn’t disappoint.  There are essentially 3 components to the game, the cards you use to play, the cardboard tokens to use to mark and keep track of things and the rulebooks.  The cards are all very nicely printed, quality card with excellent graphics on them, the cards use the images envisioned from the books themselves not the TV series.  This means you wont see Sean Bean, Peter Dinklidge or Emilia Clarke here for example.  Instead are some very well drawn pieces of artwork depicting characters you will likely not recognise what so ever just by the pictures.

The tokens are from the usual high-grade card that Fantasy Flight uses for all their games and are very much the same as the tokens you might see in X-wing, conquest or a multitude of other FF board games.  Thankfully as the game isn’t overly complicated there aren’t too many of these, there are tokens to act as gold, first player tokens and a few others, all are designed well with excellent graphics on them.

Finally the rulebook, as with Warhammer Conquest another new ish game from Fantasy Flight there are 2 rulebooks on offer here.  You get a quick start guide to help you with he basic rules and a full rulebook that reads more like a glossary of terms/dictionary than a rulebook for those more detailed rule moments.  Both of these books have artwork as good as the box and cards and are printed to a high standard as you would expect.  They are very clear in their rules descriptions to a point where the game is very easy to pick up and play in a short time.

Gameplay/how it plays -

Firstly I'll cover the deck building aspect of the game, as it kind of needs its own section. Each player has a pre made set of cards divided by house in the core set, you have the option if you like to mix your house with a different house as well.  This I assume to act as a sort of ally for your chosen throne chasers mirroring the alliances seen in the show/book.  

Now the core set only comes with 1 set of each card and that can make it quite hard to make a complete deck of the 60 cards the game recommends for play.  It's not essential to have more than 1 core, there are rules in the book for making pre made decks with just 1 core set, but 2 core sets are usually recommended if you want a better gameplay experience.  2 core's by most is meant to be the sweet spot.

Each army follows a banner, either teaming them with another faction or showing they stand alone

The way it usually goes based on general consensus is this, though it isn't set in stone (some have reported multiplayer with 1 core can be quite fun if not a bit limiting) -

Casual games - 1 Core set

Friendly but competitive or multiplayer games - 2 Core sets

Tournament play fully hardcore battles with full option varied multiplayer - 3 core sets

Core set box in all its glory

Once you have your deck built (and probably sleeved since it will need shuffling and taking care of!).  You also need to setup a plot deck, this is a mini deck of sorts with a selection of 7 plot cards from the large pool of plot cards available.  Plot cards are sort of mini boost cards for your army that only work on that turn, they will have a value to say how much gold you have that round, what your initiative bid is and how many cards you can end the turn with.  On top of that they usually have some sort of buffing effect like extra gold or kill an enemy etc.

A Plot card

There is a small pre game phase where each player draws 7 cards and plays cards equal or less than 8 gold in value, the game then starts.  Both players play a plot card in secret then reveal them, the one with the highest initiative has the option of first turn.  They both then get the gold listed on their plot card and are able to in turn play cards/heroes into play until they run out of gold or decide to stop playing cards.  After each player has 'marshalled' their forces the game moves onto the challenges phase.

The challenge phase is I guess the real meat of the game, its the fight phase and is done with the option of 3 different types of challenges:

Military challenge: The goal being to kill an opponent’s characters.

Intrigue challenge: The goal being to discard cards from an opponent’s hand.

Power challenge: The goal being to steal power from an opponent’s faction card to yours.

Though the goals are different, the way they work is essentially identical.  Every character card has a challenge value on their card and a set of symbols that match up to the 3 challenge symbols.  Not every character will have every symbol but usually each character has at least 1.  

Say you have Jaime Lannister who has a combat value of 5, this applies to him for the Military challenge phase and also the Intrigue phase, but not the power one as he has no icon for that type of battle.  At the beginning of my turn I pick one of the 3 challenge types (or one of 2 since I have picked to use Jamie) and declare a challenge of that type, 'kneeling' Jamie in the process (which just meants to turn it sideways and it is no longer able to take action in the game until it is put upright again). 

Now Jaime has an ability that says when he takes part in a Military challenge he doesn’t tap to attack so if I used this option he would still be standing after the challenge, however the Intrigue option would leave him knelt.  The defending player then picks a character they own that is still standing and has one of the same icons of the challenge declared then kneels it also, it is now classed as defending. 

At this point the strengths of each participant are compared and the highest is the winner (ties are won by the attacker).  The attacking player will now take the glory and gain the ability for winning the challenge, in this case either killing an opponent's character or making them discard a card if they had gone with an Intrigue challenge.

It's worth mentioning that the defender doesn’t have to defend if they don’t want to, they can just let the attack pass unanswered, however if they do, the attacking player always gains a free power token as well as the win effect.  Equally the attacker doesn’t have to attack, they may want to save their character to defend later on (Jamie is good for both as you can attack with Military and then defend with Intrigue + Military).

Jon Snow apparently

When the attacker has either passed or declared his 3 Challenges, it moves to the second player to do the same.  After all that is over the game moves to the Dominance phase, all that happens here is the side that has the most power of standing characters + gold left in their bank wins dominance and 1 power for their troubles.  You then stand every character and return any unspent gold to the bank and the round starts again.

This is the basic premise of the game, there are also equipment cards to attach to your characters, Location cards that can buff your army and event cards that you can instantly play at any time to buff your army or hurt your opponent.  The Joust and melee versions are pretty much the same, only difference being the number of players and a bonus ability card everyone gets know as a title card.  

Title cards really just give everyone a buff for that round.  On top of that its the usual free for all multiplayer political chaos you might see in a game of magic the gathering EDH with grudges and alliances forming left right and centre (this isn't a bad thing).

Conclusion -

This is a decent game, its good fun, has nice components and is enjoyable to play.  The gameplay flows well and doesn’t feel too unbalanced though can be very swingy, an early lead often results in a win that's hard to get back from.  Some houses feel very much counters to others, giving it a slight scissors paper stone element to it. 

The game of course is just core so far with no expansions and that means there isn’t a huge amount of variety per house, however there are a whopping 8 houses to play as and combo together to bump that variety up.  Over the next few months we assume expansions packs will come thick and fast adding even more fun and interesting combinations to each house.

I've had several games now and not yet got bored with the game, I get the feeling I could play quite a few more as well, trying all the different house combinations and deck building options before I do loose my interest with game of thrones LCG.  At that point an expansion will likely have come out anyway and rekindle that interest.

In addition to this like most FFG games, they offer prize support to your FLGS to run yearly tournaments and leagues so if you are a bit more hardcore that is an option also.

2015 Winter Tournament pack goodies from FFG

There isn’t anything I really dislike about GoT LCG, the over powered cards in each deck are balanced against each other, though it can be a bit of an arms race to be the first one to get your best guy out.  Having the different challenges enable you to form specific strategies, starving your opponent of characters or cards being the main one. 

The power phase feels a bit out of place at first vs the other 2 which control your opponent but the power phase purely steals power and doesn’t affect board state.  Late game it can be better as a sort of draining killing blow where personally I found the other 2 much better early on.

Having never played first edition I cant compare it to that but I do have to say I'm grateful to FFG for releasing a second edition of this game to give me the chance to have played it, something I would have never ever done it wasn’t for 2nd edition being released.

Bet you can guess who this is if you ever watched the show

Useful Community Links -

Rulebook

Subreddit

Deck builder and forums

Thrones DB