Strangely enough, in all my years as a gaming geek, I’ve never done an actual table-top dungeon romp before. I’ve played pencil-and-paper role-playing games in the past, but due to my snooty attitude towards Dungeons & Dragons, I’ve always stayed away from it and preferred less hack-and-slash oriented games like RuneQuest, Shadowrun and Robotech (okay, maybe this last one is a bad example.) I’ve cleared dungeons in MMOs like World of Warcraft before, but that’s not quite the same thing. So when Sean offered the opportunity to participate in a session of Descent, I agreed despite some misgivings over how long it would be expected to require.

The bad news is that our session actually lasted longer than I expected, about five and a half hours in all. The good news is I had a blast the entire time and would gladly do it again! It’s all a bit embarrassing really because even more so than BattleLore, much of the appeal of Descent lies in being able to play with all the awesome miniatures and other props. As one of the players in our session, Chee Wee (sorry if I got the spelling of your name wrong) commented, there’s an open-mouthed kid in the candystore feeling when you see all that cool stuff laid out on the table.

Of course, Descent is nothing like a real role-playing game. There’s no real character development system apart from buying skill and item cards and I suspect that the actual D&D gaming group who regularly shows up at CarcaSean would be horrified at how blithely we barrel past the storytelling portions of the quest. Instead, it’s just a straightforward tactical combat game and its mechanics aren’t even terribly deep. As my wife mentioned, the best course of action at any point in the game, at least for the heroes, is always fairly obvious so it’s never going to be cerebral exercise on the level of Agricola or Power Grid.

Still, sometimes a relatively brainless hack-and-slash game is just what you need to unwind with. There’s no denying that every throw of the dice was followed by either squeals of delight or howls of despair. Sean, who acted as our dungeon Overlord, did a great job by constantly threatening to interrupt our moves with various cards, ratcheting up the tension even most were bluffs. There was much oohing and aahing around the table whenever someone opened a door and Sean populated the newly explored area with monster miniatures. If the gauge of a game’s fun are the expressions and reactions of the players while they play it, there’s little doubt that Descent wins top marks.

The heroes ended up losing our game though it was very, very close. Later I discovered that we played many rules wrongly, the two most important of which was that all of the heroes draw treasure cards whenever someone opens a chest and that master versions of monsters yield coins to the player who strikes the killing blow against them. With these two rules in effect, the heroes would have had a great deal more resources and would surely have won easily. The important thing however is that great fun was had by all and both my wife and myself are very grateful to Sean for hosting the session. Once again, I’m happy to play this again, but the PC gamer in me can’t help but wonder how many more monsters we would have killed and how much more ground we would have covered if we had spent the same amount of time in a World of Warcraft dungeon.

Finally, to end this post, my wife and I also played a couple of games that were new to us the day before this extended session. I found Notre Dame to be a rather straightforward Euro-game that I’d like to play more of. It’s not terribly complex and lacks a bit in player interaction, but it looks like a decent game to go for when we’re in the mood for lighter fare. Wings of War however felt rather too childish to both of us. This is a game that I’d like to break out when, for example, my wife’s nieces visit us again early next year, but I don’t think this is something we’d want to play for our own sakes.