Descent: Journeys in the Dark - Tips & Strategies

After you have played a level it’s fairly easy to remember where the traps on the map are (especially in the first area of the first level). Our house rule is that the Overlord can move the trap to any square he/she chooses in the same area so that the heroes can’t just side step where they know the trap will be. The Overlord does need to be honest and not just say it’s where the weakest hero just stepped.

Boardtodeath review
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQlQkZg6sL8

Descent: Journey in the Dark Review – part 1 – with Jim Reed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhHNQCkchTE

If you examine the dice, you’ll find the green dice add mostly damage and the yellow dice add mostly range. Unless your hero is getting bonus damage from some other source, you’ll generally want to start with a weapon that has a green die. This will often make the difference between killing early monsters in one hit or two, and speed is critical.

If playing a hero with evenly-split trait dice, a melee weapon is a good bet–they have the highest damage, and are the cheapest, both of which will be important if your hero has an inherently weak attack. Even heroes with 1 melee die and 2 in another trait should sometimes consider starting with an Axe, since it’s cheaper and stronger than any ranged or magic weapon, and your starting weapon is likely to be replaced with a treasure from a chest pretty soon anyway.

The Bow in the town shop is basically a trap. Even if you have the errata’d version with Pierce 1, buying it is still almost never a good idea.

And never start with 2 weapons (unless one of them is purely for the off-hand bonus). You can only use one at a time, and the tactical versatility you get by having two types of weapons isn’t worth nearly as much as the 2-3 potions you could have bought instead.

The game claims to support parties of anywhere from 2 to 4 heroes, and has rules for adjusting monsters’ stats and the amount of threat tokens the overlord collects based on the number.

These adjustments do not compensate for the difference. Larger parties can make more attacks, have more freedom to optimize their equipment by trading treasure draws, and can cover lines-of-sight more effectively to curb spawning. The difference is dramatic.

Expect a significantly easier time the more heroes you bring (or a harder time, if you’re the overlord). Most players I’ve seen recommend parties of 3 or 4 heroes for the base game quests, and 4 heroes for expansions. If you don’t have enough players, you can always have someone control two heroes.

You are often presented with the choice of making two attacks (with a battle action, or a ready action with attack + guard order) or making a single aimed attack (ready action with aim order + attack).

When presented with this choice, aiming is basically never a good idea. It’s a holdover from the Doom board game, where you had to worry about ammo. In Descent, an extra attack is dramatically better in virtually all cases (even when fighting stealthy monsters in the Tomb of Ice expansion). And in the very rare case where you find aiming is better…that’s usually a sign that you shouldn’t waste your actions attacking in the first place.

(This advice doesn’t necessarily apply to the advanced campaign expansions.)

The rules allow each hero to discard one of their random skills during set-up and draw a replacement skill of the same type. The skill cards in Descent vary a lot in their usefulness, so it is almost always worth redrawing one of your starting skills to try to get a better one.

Typically, you’ll want to discard whichever skill is least useful to you, but you also need to pay attention to the skill types, because some types are more likely to be useful to certain heroes. Each skill deck contains some skills that only work with a particular attack type (Subterfuge being the worst offender), so if you’re a melee-focused hero and you draw a Subterfuge skill that is actually somewhat useful to you, you may want to hold onto it and redraw a Fighting skill rather than risk drawing a skill that only works with ranged attacks.

You should always, as a pack of heroes, move and position your heroes to cover as much FOV as possible. No disable OL ability to spawn more monsters.

I did an extensive rebalancing of Descent, with stronger monsters, improved player scaling, numerous new treasures, skills, feats, and overlord cards, and all-new quests. It can be downloaded here:
http://www.mindflare.com/enduringevil/