Playing Co-Op Descent.

Just a quick update to show some pictures of a few games of Descent using the co-op expansion Forgotten Souls. How well does it hold up as a co-op game? Lets have a look.

First game I took a Beastmaster fighter (giving me a Wolf familiar) and Alan took a Necromancer (giving him a Skeleton). The changes to the rules attempt to balance player numbers by reducing the number of monsters and increasing the number of turns available to players as you have two markers (Fate and Doom) that move along a track towards each other as an additional game timer.

We thought that taking classes that gave us each a familiar so that we would effectively have four characters, which helped with the first Encounter where we would suffer fatigue if We were not adjacent to another hero figure.

The base size of the monsters killed dictates how quickly the players gain shop items and you get a small amount of  experience points to spend so that you can customise your characters a little

the game has an interesting balance between allowing players to just beat face and complete missions as each Encounter has a timer but some are designed that if you just kill the monsters you will fail the mission meaning you can't just focus on killing.

Eventually our luck ran out as the rules state that the Encounters are discarded when the conditions are met but this created an odd situation where we were constantly suffering a lack of time to complete the tasks as as soon as we completed an encounter we would trigger a Fate card (these are very bad!) and have to move Fate down the track after we just moved it back to the top by completing the mission.

Take two. This time I took a Berserker for damage but Alan swapped out to take the best healer we could make to try to avoid getting knocked on our arse!

At this pint we were doing ok as the Shop items we had collected gave me extra armour and stamina but we were soon to realise just how hard the Act II monsters were.

On our second run we got all the way to the final Encounter but a series of unlucky Monster activation cards (it uses a deck to determine the monsters actions but it is different every turn so it is hard to predict what they will do) meant that we were so low on health we were going to get knocked down every turn and thus we were undone!

It was fun for me to be able to be a Hero for once and the system is simple enough but random enough to keep you on your toes. Unfortunately as with most story based games you will need to invest in more of the co-op expansions if you want to keep the stories a surprise. But if you just fancy an extra way to Dungeon delve without having to go through a campaign it is fun and I found it more interesting than the D&D Ravenloft style games.