Turning my friends into nerds; The first part of our ongoing Descent campaign.

So this post is the follow up of the Descent: Journey into the something post I made in the past. It's basically a summary of me and my friend's experience with the game over 

This is the first encounter of the game, so i set up the tiles, put on the pieces down on the table in a way everybody can reach them, and sound the horn to call in the troops...

To the round table! an epic journey of dorky proportions await!

Of course, people gather around the table, and i tell them to pick the character they will use for this play session and for every other until this campaign is finished (part of the rules). So after a couple minutes everyone picks their character, understands their role on the team, and has no idea of what they're supposed to do. I'd say we're off to a great start.

If you're wondering there are 8 possible characters to choose from the box. The ones we will use for this play through will be:

• Avric Albright - The Healer
• Syndrael - The Warrior
• Widow Tarha - The Mage
• Jain Fairwood - The Scout

Here's an accurate image of what they look like

Ok not really, but it's a pretty funny picture right?

Here's a picture of  OVERLORD PILGOR DAN OF ZAYTAN... THE THIRD 

BLARG

So the team has a good mix of characters, one of every role to be exact, which won't make the overlord's diabolical plans any easier. Since I'm the overlord, I'm completely OK with the challenge of competing on my own against 4 different people. I'm never a sore loser in board games, if anything I'd rather lose a close game than completely stomp an easy one. 

After explaining the rules and placing all the pieces down we start the game. The first mission is to basically save a farm that was sacked by an army of goblins. The players were given the task of capturing some wheat and storing them while I, the overlord, has to steal the wheat by commanding my groups of goblins. In the end, I went pretty easy on them and they were successful in their goal. Don't get me wrong, they did a great job of working together and chopping down my minions but if i went to hard on them they probably wouldn't find this game any fun. 

Onto the second part of the encounter which is to rescue someone important that was kidnapped by a fat goblin who is also one of the overlord's lieutenants. It was pretty clear the heroes playing were grasping the game easily because of how well they were playing. They completely destroyed every plan and minion I had in store for them before I even tried to actually sabotage them. I got pretty unlucky and was unable to interrogate the captive before they arrived and kicked my butt easily. I lost, but like I said before, I'm ok with losing, as long as everyone had fun :)

Here's our reaction to the heroes winning this encounter

OMG YAY

Wow you guys are like, sooo good at this game *snicker*  

In the end the heroes get a slight gold bonus to use in the shop the next time we play but everyone gets an experience point. As the game progresses the heroes and overlord get stronger with new abilities,items, and spells. Next time I wont go as easy but I'll make sure I'm no passive wannabe supreme evil ruler. 

Heroes: 1 Overlord: 0 

Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition)

Descent is a really awesome Dungeons and Dragons-like-board game. It has a similar look with miniatures,  tiles, and a built in story for a 20 hour long campaign. Me and my group of friends are going to play through the campaign over a couple of weekly sessions and I'm planning to include an overview of ever play session in my blog posts. I'm doing this because I haven't found much information or overviews on this great game yet and I figured that there's also people like me who want to a more in-depth look at the game.

The game caught my interest because of all the stuff it comes, tiles to make your dungeons, miniatures for your monsters and characters, cards, tokens, and more. The only negative is it lacks bags or some way to organize everything. I ended up using freezer bags for the tiles and miniatures and Ziploc bags for the smaller pieces. This game is pretty heavy so bend those knees, not your back when your picking it up.

Practice proper lifting with this game. 

I'll talk about Descent lightly in this post and explain more of the technical rules as our campaign goes on. unlike most games, the players work together to defeat the bad guy, called the Overlord, which is played by one lucky person. The players complete a number of quests to gain strength to ultimately defeat the Overlord and win the game, if they fail, the Overlord player wins.

For our campaign, I play as the Overlord. My brother, sister, sister-in-law, and girlfriend ( same people from my Smallworld post) are playing as the heroes for our run through. I took the role as the Overlord because I'm just more familiar with the game than the rest of the players and i find joy in crushing peoples plans with surprise spike traps and enraged monsters.What I really like about these games is how every player has their certain role of the group. For example, someone tries to protect the group from damage, so the more fragile "glass cannon" kind of players can deal lots of damage while in a safe position. In other words, the group of heroes must work together as a team be completely effective.

My job as the overlord player is to be as much as a prick as possible by playing traps, attacking the players with my monster minions, and getting in the way of their objectives.

Chance of table flipping: Inevitable%