I’ve been playing Descent: Journeys in the Dark for a week and let me tell you: it’s great!

Descent is a dungeon crawl in the form of a board game, I’ve always had an urge to try a session of D&D, but haven’t ever got a group to join or to form. With Descent my dungeon delving thirst has been quenched.

I’ve been rolling power and combat dies like there’s no tomorrow!

Of course more experienced gamers may say that Descent doesn’t really do all that D&D does, and it’s true, but for me Descent does it.

The only downside to Descent? Well being sort of an RPG makes it long, and with no save game feature or the ability to pause a session, you either finish a dungeon or keep it neatly in a corner awaiting your next gaming session and praying the cat won’t jump onto the table and gives all the figures a critical hit.

That’s where Road to Legend the 3rd Descent expansion due March comes in. You can check out a lot of cool features on the design notes page, but one of them really sticks out to me: they’re dividing the game play to allow 1 hour chunks of game to be played. Though I’ve learned to take these time measures and multiply them by a 1.5 or 2 factor (or more when the group you’re playing is learning the rules to the game), having smaller amounts of quest to play and being able to stop playing and resuming play later without leaving a board setup is great.

The overlord having an avatar to represent him in the game makes it more personal and adventuring out of a dungeon for once seems like a breath of fresh air (yeah, that pun was totally intended).

I’ll be waiting for this expansion while grinding all the other quests I was still unable to win.