Descent: From the Overlord's Journal

I have played Descent a couple times with my dad, and the game is a bunch of fun. I got the game as a gift last year, and I have loved it since. I played both times as the Dungeon Master, and it’s great because being a DM of a D&D game has been my dream for a while. The game plays a lot like the paper and pencil game of D&D, but has been simplified to go faster and be less complex.

The game is very hard for both the players and the DM, or in this game, the Overlord. The game is easier for the Overlord with less players, and gets much harder with more. With only two players, however, it is very easy to fill a room with monsters and the players just won’t have enough turns to kill them before the next wave comes. The one thing that the players have going for it is that even the named bosses can be defeated little more than a hit or two, and it can be a quite depressing to watch your ogres and manticores get shot down so quickly after using all your power to spawn them.

Because of the ability to spawn monsters and traps, the game is never the same, but maps will be very similar if they've been played before. As the heroes advance, they can go deeper into dungeons and later into new maps. The monsters get tougher and more frequent in the later maps, but the first one is easier and meant to be a tutorial map so you can to learn the ropes. We played the first map twice, and it was quite a journey both times.

The first game took many, many hours and we did not get very far at all. My dad and sister were quickly shot down in the second room, overrun by spiders and hell hounds. I came into the second game a little over confident. Since my sister had decided not to join us this time, and after the crushing defeat last game, I felt invincible. The first two rooms went by just as before, and I showed no signs of slowing down. Defeat seemed moments away! Then, when my dad encountered a very nasty ogre, he grabbed the key it guarded and ran, then closed the door and never looked back. I allowed him to plow through many of my monsters and put up minor resistance. He got a false sense of security and fell right into my trap. He marched into the last room and was over powered instantly, with more monsters coming every turn. His mage did get a nasty attack off on my giant, though, putting him out of commission for a while.

I was able to kill his mage character a couple of times, with help of my traps and creatures, which was good because every time a character dies, the player loses conquest tokens. If he runs out of tokens, he loses. I continued spawning many monsters, but the game get sour for my dad when I charmed his fighter and made him kill his own mage. He had received some very powerful weapons in the last room, and I planned to use them against him. Next time, I charmed his mage and made him attack himself but he missed. Dad was sure that the game was unfair, and that he had no chance. Had I been in his shoes I would have agreed, but I knew more than he did. I had made a few fatal mistakes, including spawning monsters in places where they were blocked in by rocks and I was out of good cards. The end was near for me, and only I knew it. Dad quickly blasted through my last remaining creatures and finally my giant. I was done, but Dad will move on, to go deeper in the dungeon with a new quest.