POSTED BY dean-haworth on August 22, 2011Should You Buy: Descent: Journeys in the Dark?
I was hanging around on the internet at the weekend and I was asked the question “Should I buy Descent?”. On the face of it this seems like a simple question. While Descent is a game that can divide opinion, I hold it in high regard. It’s big, really big, (seriously, the box is huge. We can’t play it at my house because my table is too small, and it’s not that small really) it takes a long time to play and some people would say it takes even longer to set up.
So, if you like your dungeon crawlers big, semi-cooperative and with a plethora of expansion options you should obviously hop on a bus to your nearest games store and hand over sixty of your hard earned pounds. Yes?…No… well, not quite yet anyway.
You see, Fantasy Flight have recently announced the Descent 2nd Edition. From the limited information gleaned from FFG so far the 2nd Edition will be smaller simpler and quicker to play. The FFG website states a nice 1-2 hour play time compared to 3-5 hours of the original. They also seem to be addressing the issue of player downtime, which is a criticism I had of the original, especially when playing the Overlord.
So you should leave Descent on the shelf and wait until the new year for the 2nd Edition? Well…no. It depends.
£60 is a lot of money for any game, especially one which will take up a lot of room and will soon get an upgrade. If money/space is no option however, or if you have a group willing to split the cost, I’d say go for it. It may be the last chance you get to pick up Descent in its full large-scale coffin-sized box glory before it’s streamlined and simplified. For everyone else I’d say wait. At least until we get a bit more information about how the game will change. There are many question still unanswered. What will the promised campaign look like? How do the new Defence Dice work? And most importantly, will I finally be able to play it on my table?
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