F@#$ Kingdom Death Monster

Kingdom Death Monster

Summary

Kingdom Death Monster (KDM not to be confused with KMFDM who are also terrifying) is a fantasy horror themed, fully cooperative campaign board game.   The heart of the game is tactical combat, which awards various resources which you can then spend.

Ranking

I guess this is as good as time as any to once again reiterate my views on Board Game Geek's game ranking list.  KDM is #34 and after several sessions, I'm reminded that BGG's list is a flawed review aggregater like Rotten Tomatoes.

A top 100 ranking on BGG means that (in general) enough people found something to like about it in the 18 months or so immediately after it's release.

Positive reviews never expire, so games which were ground breaking at the time linger near the top of the list despite probably being played out.  I recently watched The Dice Tower's panel on Top 5 over-rated games, and half the panel included Puerto Rico, currently ranked #16.   And I think that's because BGG's  rankings don't depreciate.  Puerto Rico was wonderful upon it's release, but it's played out now.  I have no desire to ever play PR again.

What does KDM's ranking mean?  That it does have some things that appeal to people.

 

What it has going for it

So right now, board game's FotM is legacy.  Game materials meant to be marked up with stickers and a sharpie.  Provide enough content within the game to give players a satisfying experience with only one run through of the campaign.

KDM is a step up (possibly down?) from that; it's a campaign.  A similar series of missions in a story, but you don't destroy game components or mark up the board like a single play through.

I find that appealing, because if you FUBAR up a poorly designed legacy game, you either quit playing or buy some kind of refresh kit.  KDM you can just relaunch the campagin.

It also has a nice fantasy horror theme going on.  Vivid descriptions of what the pool of 'survivor' characters face, in multiple areas; you really don't know where the next disturbing image will come from.

And the tactical combat part of the game has more going on than the typical example of the genre.  Which I describe as "move here, shoot that guy and roll dice".

Basic Game Play Run through

The basic plot is you're an amnesiac settlement thrown into a nightmare world and must relearn everything to survive.  Every year in celebration of your continued existence, you stalk and kill a trophy monster, harvesting special resources from it sou you can improve your hunt party.

A turn cycle has 3 phases:  Hunt, Showdown, Settlement.

Hunt:  the lead up to the combat phase.  A series of events drawn from a deck, about evenly divided among good results and bad results.   In our campaign, the good results seem only mildly good while the bad results aren't catastrophic but usually are a pretty serious set back.  The length of this phase varies, but is directly related to how tough you want the showdown to be.

Showdown:  fighting the monster.  I'll cover combat mechanics in a bit.

Settlement:  Some more events, one random and sometimes one scripted.  Build your economy, unlock new knowledge, make your guys better!   Basically, the fun parts of 4X computer games but on a smaller scale.

So yeah, that's it.  A string of events leading up to the fight, fight a monster to get stuff, use that stuff to make your guys better to fight the next monster.  Repeat.

Combat

The showdown phase has some neat things going on, both with the character's build and with the monster's actions.

The Build

(from BGG's image library link) 

So those squares that may line up from card to card may mean something.  Get red/blue/green squares linked on the tableau with the right gear, and you unlock a power.    So that's pretty cool, and players should definitely work towards that!   Our campaign hasn't found too many worthwhile green box powers, but we're also maybe half way through it.  There definitely may be more coming, which means possibly we're scrambling to get the old gear we previously thought of as useless. 

The Fighting

The boss monster has two decks which govern his play:  Monster actions and Monster hit locations.

The monster action deck doubles as his hit points, you wound the monster and what he does becomes more predictable.  This adds quite a bit of variance to what the monster does; tougher monsters get more and nastier cards.

The hit location deck is another thing players manage.  Multiple hits draw multiple cards and the player may resolve them in any order.  This is important, because the monster may interrupt follow up hits by breaking your weapon or running away.

Those two decks make it interesting.  Especially the hit locations, it's something else to try and optimize while playing.

The Problems

The Truck Tire Problem

I describe some games like this Tommy Boy scene.  

You're driving along driving along driving along TRUCK TIRE.   

Truck tire games abruptly escalate the challenge intensity without a corresponding increase in your ability to meet them.

You fight a monster, you fight a monster BOSS FIGHT TPK!

I find this frustrating; the normal fights are routine, only an occasional set back.  Then the boss fight where literally one round in, everyone knows we're going to lose.

The Resource Drop problem

Gear items need specific parts you can only acquire from a single monster type.  To complete an armor set, the party will need to fight the same monster multiple times.

Ok great in theory, until you need two Lion Pelts and only draw one so you need to fight the White Lion for the 8th time.

There needs to be some mechanism where the 'common' drops become easier to get the more times you fight the same monster.

The events vs fight problem

KDM is a deadly game.  Last time we played several characters levelled up and got some neat abilities.  I asked everyone, why are you getting excited about that?  Your dude's just going to die.

And it's events that are the biggest killer.  A random card just kills the best guy, or a random card kills 3 guys. 

I don't mind that casualties are high.  I mind that casualties are from meteor strikes the party has literally no control over.

Is the price tag the elephant in the room?

Kingdom Death Monster costs around $400, or 4 times a really expensive games or 10 times a mass marketed offering from Rio Grande Games.  You're not buying game play.

1. Lots and lots and lots of plastic miniature models.
2. Seriously, there's enough mini's to create a decently sized Warhammer army.
3. Maybe I'll find another picture to seriously demonstrate how many figures the game comes with.
4. The rule book is a work of art.  Case bound, glossy paper and full of fantastic art.  It's a well put together book that would probably retail for about 75$ all by itself.

So my friends bought this game, not me.  My actual cost is 0.  Having said that, I don't value the mini's or the book that much.  My game experience wouldn't dramatically change if we were using card board figures and plastic stands.

Final Verdict

This game remains worth playing.  I want to know how the campaign ends.  I seriously don't know if I'd want to do another campaign any time soon.

It's a good but not great game that hit a zeitgeist for a subset of board gamers which launched it into BGG's top 50. 

F&^% First Martians. No really.

I bought this game that I was pretty excited about - First Martians

It re-implements the mechanics in Robinson Crusoe (2012) , but this time with astronauts that have recently arrived on Mars.  Robinson Crusoe is a cooperative game where you are stranded on a remote island and have to build up from nothing to accomplish some task before time runs out (like build a signal fire, or elude the cannibals).  It had a little tech tree, and a fantastic mechanic where you had to deal with events that happened or it might have future consequences (like you see signs of a tiger - do you either spend the time to hunt it down and kill it now?  or risk that it MAY show up later...hunting you).  That game was a little clunky in several ways, but thematically it was fantastic.  Very tough though.  You can play it with as many as four people, but honestly it works best solo or two player.  Additional players don't add anything but another mind to puzzle out the best move.  You each technically play a character, but not really.  You assign the resources and actions in the most optimal way possible.  So if you're playing with a group, cooperation has to be at 100%, or you lose.  There's no "you do this, I'll do that, and we'll see who was right."  I usually play by myself, and sometimes with my son, Paul.  He made his own scenario once which we played, and it was actually great.

I love Robinson Crusoe.  More of that is really appealing to me.  My kid likes Robinson Crusoe.  My kid LOVES the ides of colonizing Mars.  As I said, when I heard about First Martians, I was pretty excited.  I'm the bull's eye of the target audience for this one.

I was warned this was a drudge to learn, and they were not kidding.  The second iteration of these rules should be better, more elegant - they even switched to an app instead of a deck so they could give you just the events they wanted, in a logical orders, and manage the "future consequences" seamlessly behind the scenes.  That improves the story telling, but the game is not better.  It's more clunky.  It's more fiddly.  More contrived.  I watched a 50 minute video designed to teach you to play.  I watched it again.  I read the rules.  Then I tried to play the game with Paul (with some success, we won!).  Then I watched the video a third time.  Then I read the FAQ.  I've now spent more than four hours learning the game, I've played it three times, and I'm only marginally confidently that I've got it down.

And that's not even the biggest problem with the game - in Robinson Crusoe, you are building something.  You're fighting back the island and all its challenges, but each turn you have more than you did that turn before.  You're improving your situation.  Maybe you have a pit trap dug to help with food.  Maybe you mapped out part of the island to help with your effort to explore.  The challenge of the game is to accomplish your task in the limited time frame.  In First Martians it's the opposite.  Everything's peachy when you start, but as you try to accomplish your goal, everything is crumbling around you.  And it seems counter to the theme.  For example in the first scenario you're supposed to be making the HUB more like a home, but by the end you're lucky to fall across the finish line amid the cascading malfunctions.  You're just holding things together against all these clocks long enough meet the scenario criteria.  It's dispiriting.  Depressing even.  And hard.  Really hard.  Harder than Robinson Crusoe, which is a game that has a reputation for being on the brutal side.

In short, too much complexity without enough payoff for a difficult game that's theme can be kind of a downer.  Still, I'm too invested to give it up.  I'm gonna try again tonight.  I'm 1 for 3 on the intro scenario, and that's on the "easy" setting.  There are several more one off scenarios and a couple campaigns that I want to try.  I'll keep you posted.

F%$@ Gloomhaven Nightshroud aka Moon Guy aka Notinda Face

Retired character, so here we go with another character breakdown/review.  This review assumes you know how to play Gloomhaven.  YMMV

Broad Strokes: 

Don't take my moon

The moon guy is versatile.   He's not a great tank, but he can take a hit.  He's not the best support, but he'll throw lots of curses into the bad guys deck.  And he just flat out kills monsters, given the right magic.

There looks like two main paths you can go by with this guy; try to make him invisible as often as possible or try and make moon magic as often as possible.  I went with the latter, because it looked like I could make moon more reliably.

There's two movement cards that make moon; well there more than that, but the ones you will use to make moon most often are Smoke Step (L1) and Prepare for the Kill (L2).  The attack section on both these cards are adequate, but you're not really trading off a lot by using these to move and make your moon.

There are reliable ways to make yourself invisible, but the trade off's I deemed too severe.

Examples:

L5 card, Black Arrow's bottom half is turn yourself invisible, then spend a moon and perform attack 3, range 3.  Which can totally stack with some other invisibility style cards; but you don't move, there's usually better uses for your moon, and the top card half is attack 4, range 4, muddle and curse your target.

L8 card, Lurking Rain.  Top half is attack 5, add poison, muddle and wound if you're invisible.  Bottom half move 3, turn invisible.  Which is great, and I almost took that instead of the L9 card.  But the other L8 card, Gloom Darts is simply amazing.  Attack 3, Range 4, poison and curse your target.  Spend a moon and target 3 bad guys instead.

Don't take my moon

So why is making moon better?   These cards

L1 Spirit of the Night:  Attack 3, or spend a moon and kill a normal unit instead.  NOT A THROWAWAY
L1 Empoweing Void:   Move 2, spend a moon and all attacks you make this round are doubled.  NOT A THROWAWAY
L6 Swallowed by Fear:  Attack 2, or spend a moon and any other magic to kill and elite.  NOT A THROWAWAY (see the theme yet?)
L8 Gloom darts: covered above, but also NOT A THROWAWAY
L9 Angel of Death:  Top half Attack 4, or spend a moon and kill all normal units.  This is a throwaway.  Bottom half, Move 5 jump, spend a moon and kill an adjacent normal unit.  This half is not a throwaway.

There's other ways to spend moon, but those are the must haves in the deck.

Tactics: 

Don't take my moon

Use your execute powers as soon as and as often as you can.  Then make moar moon so you can use them again. 

You're the assassin, you're the guy who maneuvers to get to the high shielded guy so your team doesn't have spend 6 attacks chopping him down.

And while you're waiting for that to cycle back through, you zap all the monsters with curses.

Your gear choices probably won't be optimized to go toe to toe with 5 baddies so watch your aggro.  It's not as critical as it is for true squishees, but no shield and no armor equals no damage mitigation.

Perks:

Ok here's the bad news.  The Nightshroud probably has the worst perks in the game.  There's not a single +2 damage card available and your make moon and turn invisible cards are very likely to be buried in a stack of muddles and +1's

In a big way this doesn't matter, because your two best attacks don't even flip a card.

My Gear:  

Don't take my moon

Boots of Striding, or Dashing if possible.  Besides perks, if there's a single weakness to this character it is that he is totally move impaired.  Enhanced movement boots are an absolute must buy. 

Stamina potions, Major and Minor if they're both available.  I regularly used these as soon as I could to get my executes and my preferred moon generators back in my hand.  Must buy.

Cloak of Invisibility:  After making it my first purchase, I'm calling this a maybe right now.  I think the pouch robe would be just as effective.

Minor Mana Potion:  I bought this initially mostly because it was cheap and I had the pouch slot available.  I ended up using it more often to generate mana for my team mates than for me.

Scroll of Power (? name is probably wrong):  You use this on your allies attack and he gets +1 to all attacks made with that action.  I replaced the mana potion with this.

Poison Knife and Wounding Sword (I know these names are wrong):  In theory these were great, add a wound or a poison to a melee attack.  In practice not so much.  I was either killing guys outright or attacking at range.  I looked and looked and looked, and couldn't find any weapons I liked better.  I did consider taking the retaliation shield at one point though.

Hawk Helm:  Add +1 to all your ranged attacks this round.  I really liked this one too, because of Gloom Darts.  Probably not worth taking prior to that.

Moon Earring:  This, or the other upgraded refresh item pouches are probably a must buy too.  So you can get your boots back.  Seriously though:  Boots and knife and sword and helm refreshed with one pouch item.

Gear I'd consider instead:  

Don't take my moon

Any kind of armor or shield.  Invisibility was occasionally brilliant but that's not really how my moon guy ran.

The cursed helm:  Name is also 100% wrong.  This is the helm where you can bring back all your throwaway items by putting a curse in your deck.  I'd try to run an invisibility character with the Harry Potter cloak with this card.

On his retirement mission we unlocked the wand of make moon.  Thanks game!  

Card Upgrades:

I upgraded 3 cards total.  Smoke Step movement, +1 to +2.  Prepare for the Kill movement twice, +2 to +4.  And finally, Dancing Shadows movement +3 to +4 (on attack card half).  Dancing shadows was only upgraded because I had 45 retirement gold left and nothing else to spend it on.

Final words:
 

I'd really like to see someone take a swing at an invisibility build.   There's several cards that give you enhanced damage, or status effects if you're invisible.  But the make moon build was very effective.

Don't take my moon

F@#$% Gloomhaven - character review the Spell Weaver

a couple of words on Gloomhaven to start.

It's a fun game and there are several how to play articles/videos all over Boardgame Geek and Youtube, so I won't be discussing rules in depth here and some game terms that might not make sense are included (oh who am I kidding, Mike you know what I'm talking about)

It's tactical skirmish heavily influenced by video game MMORPGs and 4th ed D&D.

Ok Full Stop

wasn't D&D 4th ed so bad that WotC released 5th ed quicker than an average MS Windows version?  Yes.  But that is 100% because D&D was meant to be table top role playing and Gloomhaven was designed to be tactical skirmish.  You're expectations are different.  DnD4e's combat system routinely got in the way of the role playing while Gloomhaven's entire point was a series of missions unlocked by successfully completing previous missions with their tactical skirmish rules.

Anyways, Gloomhaven is fun because the game play uses both tactical and strategic elements; the choices you make tactically have strategic implications.  In game terms, selecting your cards early in the characters 'hand cycle' limits what you can do later on.  It is inevitable that you will paint yourself into a corner and get stuck with a useless, useless turn.  But then you'll get better at the game :)

Gloomhaven also has well developed campaign mechanics.  Your party unlocks new missions, your guys get better, and once you start getting sick of playing the same guy for months on end you'll likely be close to 'retirement' so you can start a new guy.

So that was several paragraphs not about my character and just my thoughts on the game at large.

Your Face went on a journey.

Your Face was a random archetype selection and named because of a multi year running joke, mostly funny to only me, but every once in a while, I make a clever pun and everyone laughs at Your Face.

Conceptually, Spell Weavers are the MMO version of a blaster.  An AoE glass cannon mage.  Low hit points, low card count.   You can easily put yourself in bad positions and then the game will smack you around.  Spell Weavers simply don't have the endurance to freelance a combat; they absolutely need the team.

Now it probably turns out, that I was the best choice to play a pure blaster character.  My favorite archetype in City of Heroes was the blaster.  Everything I learned about playing a blaster was learned the hard way, so the lessons stuck.

Your Face survives by managing her aggro.  Don't put Your Face in a position to get punched, unless a) there's no other choice or b) you're sure Your Face can take a hit.  Practically speaking, this means you routinely want to go late in the round, so the rest of your party gets the monsters good and pissed at them.

Going late segues into the next tip!  Know what you do well!  Spell Weavers have a ton of moderate damage AoE spells.   Don't fall in love with them!  Because in most encounters, Your Face won't defeat a monster starting at full health with one attack.  The ideal turn, is to go late, wait for your group to smack around everyone in the room, and then step in and finish 3 off.

A Spell Weavers deck is also ridiculously different than everyone else's that you might be playing a different game.  Everyone has super 'once a game' options on cards.  In general, you got to plan those carefully.  Because using a 'once a game' power in round 1 means that ALL  later turns will not only not have access to that card, but also go quicker, sapping your characters endurance and utility.  Not so for Spell Weavers.  Their signature card is Reviving Ether

It's the top half.  All your once a game cards return to your hand.   This is crazy powerful!  This almost always happens several rounds into the game; while your party is running out of gas you hit a button that damn near resets your game to round 1.  This card dictates how you play.  

1) You don't have to save it for the most optimal time, but you absolutely need to get your money's worth playing it.  4 cards back at a minimum

2) You really shouldn't take too many short rests.  This card is too important to discard randomly on a short rest, and you don't have the spare health to re-draw,

Early, Middle and Late level play

 Early on, Spell Weavers are one dimensional.  You do have some cards that let you tank the bad guys for a round, or heal some friends for a round.  But they're most definitely a cut below your attacks.  Either your attacks are the aforementioned AoE's or they're single target that earn you experience so you can level.  Oh yeah, it's quite easy to earn XP with a spell weaver.  Your two best AoE attacks  earn XP based on how many doobers you target and your single targets can be buffed with any color of magic; doing that earns 1 XP.   You usually get around 15 XP via cards.

Somewhere around level 4, you can start sculpting your deck based on what you think the scenario needs.  You can insert really good heals, decent defense buffs, or continue with the AoE blaster build.  I had two general build philosophies:  Build for a short mission or build for endurance.  Also, a Spell Weaver is a fantastic chest procurer.  Ride The Wind (nick named Jesse Owens from the Blazing Saddles line).  You move EIGHT with jumping.  So no traps or monsters can stop you! 

Going to the movies this weekend be like...

3 rooms or less I considered a short mission.  Build your deck to make Ragnarok level alpha strikes.  All the cards you need to achieve this are of the 'once a game' types, so you don't have any staying power.

4-5 rooms I built for endurance.  Get the single target bolts and the heals, those recycle back into the deck so you have some staying power.  Nothing sucks worse then be being idle for the last 3 turns of a mission because you got knocked out from lack of cards.

End game, I was disappointed with.   Ok, the Inferno card is super powerful and by the time you get it you can generate an alpha strike that shoots every mother f@#$er in the room

And last night, it was fun!  I got to use it in a two room dungeon.  Each room had 12 critters in it, and I dropped everyone in those rooms to half hit points with a single attack.   You know what was not fun?  Realizing that I could quickly get the necessary cards back into my hand and blast the entire room again.  Well fun for me maybe, but not so much for everyone else at the table.  I am 100% sure that Your Face could deal enough damage to kill everyone in that dungeon, demoting everyone else playing the game to providing me with a meat shield.  Truthfully, I would have preferred to see an uber damage buff at L9 than the nuke the room card.  But hey, I have 2-4 missions until retirement so what do I care?

Bucking the Conventional Wisdom

Every guide I read says the Crackling Air is a must have.  CA is a damage buff on your next 4 attacks; normally +1 damage, but if you prime it with wind magic +2 damage.   +2 damage is nothing to sneer at.  But my experience was that CA really drops your Spell Weaver's endurance.  If you don't exhaust immediately, you can't get it back with your Crackling Ether card or because it is in play.  A Spell Weaver remains quite effective even without this card.

Gloomhaven's designer raved about the summon the Spell Weaver has, but I never used it.  From what I saw of pets, they were only good to suck an attack or two.  Which could be useful, but I never thought it was worth a card slot.

Gear Choices

Must buys

1. minor damage potion (+1 damage on all attacks this round)
2. Harry Potter cloak (invisible for a round)
3. beer goggles (advantaged on all attacks this round)
4. armor piercing bow (ignore all shielding on attacks this round)
5. Viagra stamina potion (return 2 cards from discard to your hand)

The game recommends you buy the damage potion and the cloak to start.  And that's not bad, but we're playing 5 player which means that there might not be a stamina potion left for you to buy.  Every class can use the stamina potion.  The bow is situational, but when you need it, you really need it.

Useful not necessary

1. the pendants or items that re-arm previously used items
2. boots that make you move faster
3. boots that ignore obstacles, terrain or monsters
4. items that generate magic 

Avoid

any melee weapon, any single target attack buff, any armour, any healing item.

Perk Choices

The first ones to get are either the deck clean up (remove four +0 cards OR replace a -1 with a +1), or the status affects (stun, curse, wound).  and if you get the status effects first, clean up your deck next.  and vice versa.

The next ones to get are the +2 magic generators.

Finally get the quick magic generators.

Finally, the last ones you should take are two +1 damage cards.  And you only should only get those when every other option is exhausted.

To Sum up

Your Face needs retiring.  It was a fun campaign, but I am pretty sick of Your Face.  Would I play this class gain?

Probably not.  By the time we would cycle through enough characters that I'd want to replay this class, we'd likely have had enough of Gloomhaven.  This problem is not unique to Your Face, every class will have this problem.

Now would I recommend this class to someone else?  You betcha.  It runs different than all the other archetypes and it was a challenging and rewarding experience.

F%$# Tactical Skirmish Games

This post started out in my head as a review of Star Wars: Imperial Assault.  Which I don't like, not one bit.  But that really is not fair.  Because my problem with the game is that it's tactical skirmish, a game genre that I don't like at all.

So first, I'm going to rank it against some other tactical skirmish games I've played, compare how IA holds up against them then discuss what I don't like about them.

Finally, some thoughts on Imperial Assault.


Skirmish games if you squint

Car Wars 

No really Car Wars is Tactically Skirmishy.   You move your vehicle around the board declaring shots at opponents.

This hurts me to say it, because most of high school was spent playing Car Wars, but Car Wars is awful.  If no one has cars built, that's literally 4 hours gone before you even start playing.  If everyone designed cars pre-game it is still glacially paced and too much hinges on a few die rolls.  Imperial Assault is way better than Car Wars

D&D.

D&D has its roots in tactical combat, so step off.  Gygax and Arneson added a story telling element to it, and a genre was born.

I really enjoyed D&D for the most part when I played it, it just got stale.  I can still probably play it, but I wouldn't want to do it weekly.   In fact the conditions under which I would play are so restrictive that there's no way I could find a regular group.

D&D is better than Imperial Assault.  You design your guy, who has way more options than IA's and the campaign implementation for RPG's is better than IA.

Actual Skirmish games

"Convention Games" - I'm going to lump every Napoleonic, WWII, SciFi, Cowboy, and Pirate themed I've played game into this category, because I simply don't remember the names.

Within the last 15 years, when better board gaming options became more prevalent, I have had fun playing a miniature skirmish game exactly once.  It was Desperado, and the only reason it was fun was the session was only half full.

So in theory, these games at a convention are great because you get to see the pageantry and scale models without having to buy, paint and build them yourself.  In practice the session always books twice as many people as the game can adequately handle and it devolves into a slow paced incoherent mess.

A problem with quite a few of them, is they're designed for 'tactical' historical accuracy and not balance.  And also they ignore strategic facts.  There's an old war gamer joke, "Never tell a war gamer the Germans lost World War 2".     Most of these games do not adequately model air power, artillery or logistics.  So never play the Russians.

I digress.  The problem with all of these games together is the pacing vs decisions problem I discussed like 5 years ago.  Tactical Skirmish games take entirely too long to play for 'move here shoot this guy, repeat"

Imperial Assault is better than this thundering herd.

Descent

Descent was a modern revisit on these old miniature games.  Instead of a table with rulers it added D&D style squares.  I really got sick of Descent quickly for two major reasons.

1)  Monster Spawn.  I understand why this is a design mechanic (it keeps the defender in the game if the attacker has a ridiculously good round and kills everything), but as a player clearing out a room only to have it routinely re-spawn was deeply unsatisfying.

2) One vs. Many.  The game picks an overlord who battles adventurers.  This polarizes the table into the absolute worst killer GM vs. Party table top RPG sessions I've ever played.

To be fair, a lot has to do with the personalities at the table in the first place.  But I don't like the vibe.

Imperial Assault is better than Descent.  It's got better campaign mechanics for both sides.  Which is to say, it's got campaign mechanics instead of a series of increasingly difficult scenarios.

Imperial Assault

Imperial Assault has really similar mechanics to Descent.  I'm sure there's differences (I haven't played Descent since well before I started this blog).  But the core mechanics of Monster Spawn, One Vs. Many, and the move and roll dice to attack are close enough to one another, that I call it the same game.

It's got better campaign mechanics, which is the hook for the game.  Campaigns are fun!  Unfortunately, there's to much engineer in me and I can't get past other gaming platforms/genres do campaigns way better.

It's currently ranked 16th on Board Game Geek, and I think that number is very soft.

I think it's that high because of the Star Wars brand.  In my mind I can easily see a cowboy vs. Mexican bandit theme with the exact same mechanics called Magnificent Seven Assault! and that game would flop...because Western.

Ok, exaggeration here.  Descent doesn't have the Star Wars brand and it's still top 100.

the Final Word

If you enjoy tactical skirmish games then this game is for you.  It's better than virtually all it's predecessors, the Star Wars theme is neat, and there was actually thought into how to make this a campaign.