FFGs best app based board game yet! Enemies drop loot, you can harvest crafting materials, save your game between rounds, visit a town where you can craft items, have town triggered events, and more. Each mission had specific points of interest and and interactions that were unique depending on which characters you brought with you. I'm also really impressed with the quest variety. They've really outdone themselves. 33 hours in, and still having a blast.

Super excited to continue my adventure, and I hope to see this board game/app supported for a long time to come!

There are so many things that I love about this game so far, but I am going to start with where I think the devs fell short:

* Voice Acting! It is some what there, it is there for Journeys to Middle Earth had it. This one cost almost twice as much, it should have voice acting!
* Art, seriously, who did a lot of this art? I like some of it, but most I don't.
* Story that is on rails.
* That "Continue" button! What were you thinking?!? It looks like a loading screen and then you notice a continue button... UI guy, do better.

Now, for what I love.

* I don't have to build tons of random encounter decks and keep track of all of it.
* The app just keeps track of a lot of the more complex things so I don't have to remember to add bonus x.
* Line of Sight tool!
* Quick rules reference! I honestly want a simple app now for all of their rules.
* My wife looked at me and proudly said that she was glad I made this purchase! Okay, she didn't go that far, but she did say that she thought it was better than Imperial Assault and Journeys to Middle Earth

And last, my fears:

That this game will lose support and die after I have invested heavily into it (See the Star Wars RPG with its missing books, or Imperial Assault or L5R or Netrunner or Warhammer 40K Conquest for more information).

Really fun game. Highly recommended to both Fantasy Flight app-driven board game fans and newcomers.
It's Mansions of Madness meets Descent!

Pros

-Addictive and Fun combat with some good decisions to make on your turn.
-Interactive 3D environment. Everything that has 3D model can be interacted with, with multiple options on how to interact with it.
-crafting weapons and items is both fun and easy to do.
-really good miniatures. The best looking miniatures FF has produced to date.


Negatives:

-The character art is questionable. I got used to it, and after playing it for awhile, I actually like it; but at first glance, it may turn away potential players.
-No voice acting.

This the absolute best dungeon crawler board game I've ever played, period.

The app is incredible and adds so much to the game while removing much of the fiddling that most games of this type suffer from. The gampleay is tight and moves along quickly and cleanly. There were very few times I needed to look up anything and the app answered most questions quickly and clearly without needing the rule book. The app drives the action and story while providing a great visual backdrop to the table and helps with the immersion into the world, especially in between missions. There are main quests, side quests and companion quests as well as crafting and more which is all handled by the app. This removes the need for cards and tokens with which many games seek to bury players.

This is better than Goomhaven for many reasons. The setup and teardown is much more favourable meaning you spend more time playing. You are allowed to fail forward rather than replay the same mission because you ran out of cards. The gameplay mechanics (flipping cards strategically, rolling dice, etc.) have the right amount of depth and allow each character to show their characteristics and personality without becoming unnecessarily complex. That does not mean the game is simple or shallow, rather, it has been well designed to allow a deep experience without having to spend hours planning the most optimal choices. The terrain included in the box looks great and assembles easily while adding an excellent visual element to the game. I love that you are not always stuck in battle but are given time to explore the environment. Want to climb that tree or search that bookshelf? You can!

Looking forward to the expansions and further content. This one is a must buy!

This game has a lot of potential. Although the price may be scary, i don't regret its purchase.
It needs some little tweaks but i'm sure it'll be updated with time.
Really looking forward to this board game's progression and support.
Shared opinion with my friends, we believe quests for non-starting characters should be optional as most of us were attached to their starting character and wished to progress with them without having the need to switch.
Finally, we really are looking forward the possibly to create our own adventures and stories using the game features and art. With its expansions, this could really be the golden nugget to creators and the game's success!

Played with 4 of us. One of us (new to RPG tabletop content) stated: "This is my new favorite game!" It was 11 pm and she was willing to play a second 3+ hour round. Too bad the rest of us were not. I think this was one of the finest endorsements to a new game yet.

Great boardgame! Totally recommended, it's a different experience integreted with digital content. Makes the setup super easy and takes story telling to another level!

best dungeon crawler I've played

After having played this game for a considerable amount of time as a group of four, I finally feel like I am able to provide a proper criticism and review of this game.

To begin with, let me provide you with a bit of context about how we play. There are four of us, and our group is experienced with other co-operative games such as Gloomhaven. We play with the (board) game set up on a coffee table, while we sit on a couch facing a TV where the Descent app is used. We disabled the in-game music, and have our own playing, while we pass around a bluetooth mouse so we can each take our characters appropriate actions.

How you have this game set up is fairly critical. If we were playing at a table and had to pass a tablet or phone around, I firmly believe we would not enjoy this game.

In regards to the cost, I was able to snag the entire game for 178 CAD at my local game store during a sale they were having. This is fairly expensive for a board game, however I always use the following equation to determine if a game is worth the cost:

2 dollars * hours played * number of players. In our case, we have already received $280 dollars of entertainment from the game, and we are honestly not even halfway done. If you compare the cost to an average AAA video game, your dollar-per-hour-for-entertainment ratio is like much worse.

Some people have mentioned the game being "too hard" or "too easy". In regards to the game being easy, there are multiple difficulty options available. Our group has played every mission on the "Heroic" setting, and we have never had an issue with it being "too easy". More often than not, we are barely scraping by the skin of our teeth, and have failed a mission or two. We often joke with each other about the reviews we read before purchasing the game that claimed the game was "easy", as it was obvious they were playing on the base difficulty.

Another mention about Descent is that failure isn't the end - the story will evolve and change based on your successes and failures, and any loot you may have missed can eventually be purchased from the store for in game gold that you will acquire through missions.

As for the game being "too hard", I would imagine that the people complaining either are upset they are getting stomped on the hardest difficulty setting (and should set it down to their skill level), or are not playing a strategic board game, well... strategically.

During a mission your character/group may be prompted to make decisions. At first, we thought these were completely arbitrary, however we quickly learned that the decisions your group and character makes will actually have a direct affect on both the current, and future missions. For example, you may start a mission with two enemy guards defending an area, and you may be given the choice to knock them unconscious (sparing their life), or killing them. An over-zealous player may be quick to kill them, but in this case, sparing the lives of the two guards will allow you to talk your way out of fighting a group of enemies towards the end of the mission. Likewise, other scenarios may cause additional enemies to swarm you based on your decisions.

Some people believe the game may be boring due to the simplistic nature of combat, however I would disagree. You are given two actions and a movement during each players turn, and during those actions you can move/interact/combat/special. Each character also will have two weapons (which can be replaced, or enhanced), and those weapon cards will provide special abilities and damage types. On easier difficulties, you could just smash your way through a group of enemies without any thought, but on advanced difficulties, more strategy is involved.

Each enemy has a damage weakness type. Skeletons may take more damage from blunt damage, while dragonoids may be resistant to fire damage. As the difficulty of the missions increase, your need to play to these weaknesses becomes more critical, as you need to make every bit of damage count. For example, a player in our group decided against swapping his weapons because he realized that no other characters were able to do piercing damage which would have left a huge hole in our offensive abilities. Another player has focused on being able to weaken enemies, and make them more susceptible to our damage types so the group could do more damage. The need for strategy is there, but the game will not teach or instruct you as to how you should play - this is up to your playgroup to figure out on their own.

Overall, the game is incredibly fun. I do believe that most of the negative reviews simply have not played long enough to judge it thoroughly, as the first tutorial mission took our group 2.5 hours to complete by itself, and you don't unlock the entire roster of characters until about 3-4 missions in. As most of these negative reviews have under 5 hours played, it's quite apparent to me that they haven't even finished the tutorial before making their judgements.

The other possibility is that these reviews are from the original Descent players, as there is a large group of board game players who are adamantly against any type of "app" or "video game" implementation of board games. If you do a bit of research, you'll find a large group of people who negatively criticized and reviewed the game before it was even published. This nearly caused us to not purchase the game, but I am so happy that I decided to ignore them and see for myself, as this has been one of the most fun co-op board games I have played.

I hope this review will help guide prospective purchasers into giving it a try for themselves, and I can't wait to watch the game continue to grow over time.

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