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Tips & Strategies (22)

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7
Intermediate Reviewer
Professional Grader
Tomahawk
55 of 55 gamers found this helpful
“When you are the Overlord..”

This is probably my favorite game right now. I have had the chance to play a few campaigns as the heroes and the overlord. Both are very enjoyable, I thought it would be fun to write a couple of strategies one from the perspective of Overlord, another from the Hero’s.

As overlord remember your job is to win just as much as the heroes. Some have fallen into the trap that your role is more of a Dungeon Master, just to make it challenging enough for the Heroes so they want to keep playing. One of the beautiful things about Descent(2ed)is as Overlord you can win too. The heroes should be aware of this before you start playing, if they are not clear on it they may feel mislead about the object of the game.

It is beneficial to read everything. As OL it’s your strongest weapon. If you are playing against a group of people it’s 2,3, or 4 minds vs. yours so take every advantage you can.

This means: know the conditions for winning the quest for both you and the heroes. Sometimes you’re playing against the clock and you just have to hold off the heroes until time runs out on them. Sometimes you have a specific target you should focus on. Throw everything at that one target don’t focus on the heroes.

Know the heroes, what are their strengths and weaknesses. Exploit them, if you have a trap card that effects someone’s Might make sure you play it on the hero with the best chance of failing. If you can make them use up their fatigue, do so, remember at full fatigue a hero then takes damage anytime more fatigue is used.

Read your cards, know how they effect the hero’s party. Which ones will help you the most to accomplish your goal in the quest you are playing. Purchase accordingly.

Know your monsters. If possible I like to make sure I have a balance between melee and ranged attacks. I also find that more monsters can be more destructive than a couple of big monsters. More monster’s = more opportunities to attack and more fronts the heroes have to pay attention to. A large monster the heroes can gain up on.

Take out the weakest link. By knocking out a hero, you have the advantage of drawing a card. The heroes then have to choose to spend resources to revive the fallen comrade or stand-up. That leaves a weak hero that can be knocked down again.

Lastly, there are just some encounters that are easier for the heroes to win. Don’t get beat up about it, a moral victory may be to limit the heroes from getting treasure, then they will have less to spend during the buying phase.

Overall I hope you enjoy this game, my appreciation for Descent (2ed) grows every time I play it win or lose.

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7
Intermediate Reviewer
Professional Grader
Tomahawk
55 of 55 gamers found this helpful
“When you are the heroes.”

This is probably my favorite game right now. I have had the chance to play a few campaigns as the heroes and the overlord. Both are very enjoyable, I thought it would be fun to write a couple of strategies one from the perspective of Overlord, another from the Hero’s.

1.Know the conditions for winning. I know this has been stated in other tips and strategies but it must be stated here because it is so important. This game is more than just hack and slash, last man standing, it’s about missions that must be accomplished. Doing so will make your team stronger, and give you an advantage in other quests.

2. Learn how to work together. Each hero has it’s strengths and weaknesses learn how to utilize the strengths and compensate for the weaknesses. If you have someone that has a lot of HP have them on the front-lines to absorb punishing blows. If you have someone that has lot of movement have them search or race to the objective while the rest hold the enemy at bay. When buying think of how to make the group stronger. This goes for items as well as abilities.

3. Use your collective brain. If you are playing with multiple people. It’s 2,3, or 4 minds to one. Use that to your advantage. The overlord has a lot to keep track of, as heroes shoulder the burden by communicating with one another.

4. Grab treasure, grab treasure, grab treasure. This increases the amount to money you can spend during the buying phase, and can give you useful items (potions) during the quest. Don’t sacrifice a quest for the treasure but if the quest is already lost, get as much treasure as you can to help in the next encounter, or to sell later.

5.For the most part keep the team close. That way you can have multiple attacks on one foe, or you are in range to heal. Know the abilities of the monsters you are fighting. Takeout the nastiest first. For instance, if one of them can heal other monsters, take that one out first so that’s not an option. If one can stun you, take it out before other lesser effects.

6.Have a good balance of melee and ranged attacks. Use all of your movement, remember you can attack during your movement allowing you to continue your movement. Force the overlord to use one of their actions on movement or play a card when they might not want to.

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5
BoardGaming.com Beta 2.0 Tester
Went to Gen Con 2012
Amateur Reviewer
54 of 54 gamers found this helpful
“Use Big Monsters to Block Heroes”

If you get the chance to set up a monster in a 2-wide hallway use a big monster (Ettin, Dragon, ect.) to block the Heroes movement. This way you can use your other monsters to complete the quest objectives while the Heroes face your road block.

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6
Gamer - Level 3
I Am What I Am
54 of 54 gamers found this helpful
“Limited amount of deliberation time”

To keep the pace in the game, we tend to limit the amount of time the heroes have to deliberate on their next move. Especially when playing with four or five players, if not all heroes are on the same page on what to do next, discussions tend to keep on going. Therefore, we sometimes keep track of time by using a stopwatch or special hourglass to minimize this time to about one minute (choose what you suits your party). For us, this is a house rule that improves our Descent experience, keeping it full of pace instead of making it become a sluggish dungeon crawler.

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5
BoardGaming.com Beta 2.0 Tester
Went to Gen Con 2012
Amateur Reviewer
55 of 56 gamers found this helpful
“Save Gold for end of Act I”

At the end of Act 1 the Heroes gain access to the entire Act I shop. So dont waste gold on items that you are not sure you will need and wait until you can purchase ANY of the Act I gear. In this manner your group will be up the challenge in Act II.

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6
Sweden
I play blue
The Silver Heart
53 of 54 gamers found this helpful
“D.I.Y.”

FFG, the creators of this fine game, has made a free quest editor available on their website. You need to be a member on their site to use it and it only works with Google Chrome (Last I checked at least. It might since then have started to work with other browsers) but it’s a good way to find and/or make more content. Primarily single-shot quests but I suppose it would be possible to make a whole campaign too.

They call it The Quest Vault and you can find it here: http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_minisite.asp?eidm=176&enmi=Descent: Journeys in the Dark Second Edition

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1
54 of 56 gamers found this helpful
“Fools-Rush-In”

This is a game of patience. Tip: To mitigate bad dice rolls my suggestion is not to run immediately into the fray! Take your time, plan things out, and then go for the end goal of each adventure as you play through the games campaign. Be mindful of tricky-tricks and always beef up your gear. On a more personal note I prefer to play this game with 3 people, with one of course being the nasty overlord. (I think this gives a good balance to the playability and it takes away from any AP downtime from having more players) Good luck and good fun!

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7
Sentinels of the Multiverse fan
Military Service
54 of 56 gamers found this helpful
“Turn Order”

I’m using the turn order rule from Imperial Assault where 1 hero completes an action and the a monster group gets an action, also using the rule where you can only use 2 stamina tokens for extra movement.

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5
53 of 55 gamers found this helpful
“Overlords: Plan ahead”

The Overlord doesn’t have much they can customise each game, so make sure you’ve read through the objectives before hand. You can then pick your open Monster groups and trim down the overlord deck based on the objective.

And remember knocking out the heroes is not always the best method of winning the game.

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4
I play orange
Check Out My Favorites
53 of 55 gamers found this helpful
“Before you lose as Hero team”

If losing begins to look inevitable, search, search, search. As a group spend an entire turn to complete all of the search tokens before you lose. As stated in another tip, searching can be almost as important as winning. If you feel a loss coming, search for some shinies and come back stonger for the next quest. This is only when playing campaign mode, one shots go all out for the win.

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2
Explorer - Level 1
53 of 55 gamers found this helpful
“A Penny Saved...”

When playing a campaign in Descent, hero players will surely be tempted to buy as many items as possible during each Campaign phase. Sometimes it is better to save your gold for something more useful next time that you didn’t happen to draw this time. Also, be sure that every hero has some kind of upgrade before a hero gets his second upgrade. Spread the wealth!

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8
Canada
El Dorado
Professional Advisor
Senior
53 of 55 gamers found this helpful
“Playing with kids”

If you are playing with kids chances are that you will be the Keeper.

For the keeper :
1) do not choose your monster but instead go randomly (with a dice) for each class of monsters that you can have according to the scenario

2)you are forced to move your monster towards the heroes…no immobile blocking

3) No need for victory.. you are playing with kids, if they stop playing this game because you are too hard on them you will end up playing alone…and you cannot play this game alone. Just make it challengful enough for them.

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8
Canada
El Dorado
Professional Advisor
Senior
53 of 55 gamers found this helpful
“Let them paint their character”

My daughter loves games, especially the ones with scenarios (story) and characters that she can rely to and that she make progress. When a game have miniatures she choose one and it becomes her character.

I know that these game are expensive but its nothing compared to the time we share together painting the miniatures. They are not perfect but it is hers….and soon enough I’m sure that they will be better than mines 🙂

Spend good hobby time with your family has no price

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7
Intermediate Reviewer
Professional Grader
Tomahawk
54 of 57 gamers found this helpful
“How to keep things moving?”

One of the tough things about Descent(2ed) is the amount of time it takes to play. Usually because the party is discussing (arguing) about what to do next. One thing we have done to keep things moving is to set a timer after we have set up the encounter for 5-10 min. for the heroes to discuss their plan of attack without the OL being able to hear or see what they are doing. We then give the OL about 5 min. since they only have to argue with themselves. Having snacks helps, have them in a different room if possible so people can load up and socialize while the other group is studying the board.

This seems to help people’s turns to go a lot faster because they have a plan already in place. During the game session the OL will call for 3 min breaks to reload on snacks but also for the heroes to regroup. We use a timer for this as well. Pretty slick!

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6
Gamer - Level 3
I Am What I Am
53 of 57 gamers found this helpful
“Hero card sleeves”

With expensive games like Descent, I always sleeve the playing cards. It took me a while to find sleeves fitting the hero cards. A company called Swan Panasia produces sleeves (for a game called Talisman) that measure 103mm X 128mm. They are a perfect fit for the hero cards. The only drawback is that the sleeves are quite thin. Having said that, they come by a 100 in a pack and I haven’t had one break on me yet. You can also use these sleeves for Star Wars Imperial Assault (by FFG). The hero cards in that game are of the same size.

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10
Critic - Level 5
Professional Advisor
Expert Reviewer
Marquis / Marchioness
41 of 44 gamers found this helpful
“Use Conversion Kit to Increase Hero/Monster Options - Even if You DON'T Own 1st Edition”

Descent 2nd Edition comes with a good deal of miniatures and options to choose from. For those looking for even more of a selection, give the Conversion Kit a try – even if you don’t own the first edition, or its miniatures.

The cards in the Conversion Kit include all of the information you need to use 48 heroes, 3 familiars, and 50 monsters. While there are no miniatures included, you can substitute anything you want to stand-in for the miniatures (minis from 2nd Ed, misc. minis from other games, cubes, glass beads, M&Ms, pieces of paper…). While not as visually appealing, it’s a cheap way to get more out of your 2nd Edition purchase, plus, it’ll let you decide if you’ll like the older heroes/monsters enough to pick up a copy of 1st edition, or individual miniatures.

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5
Reporter Intern
I play yellow
54 of 59 gamers found this helpful
“Expanded Search action.”

Descent 2.0 has a ton of interesting items for heroes to purchase at the shop (especially when expansion items are added in). After playing several games as the heroes, I noticed that even when acquiring as many search tokens as possible and obtaining end of encounter gold bonuses, it is incredibly difficult to amass enough gold to purchase more than a few items.

So, when I started my first campaign as the OL, I implemented a house rule creating a special search action.

Once, during each hero turn, one hero may, as an action, search on any tile. They do not need to be adjacent to a search token, and when they search, they do not draw a search card. Instead, they roll a single blue die and receive gold equal to Gx5, where G is the number rolled on the blue die (ie: if the hero rolls the side showing the number 5, the heroes receive 25 gold). If an X is rolled, the search has failed and they receive nothing. This takes an action, but this action may not be affected in any way, either positively or negatively (no die rerolling, no OL cards, etc).

This allows the heroes to sacrifice an action in order to acquire more gold. Basing the amount of gold on the die roll adds an element of luck, and limiting the search action to once per hero turn keeps them from all standing around spending their turns constantly searching for gold.

I created this action because I want the heroes to be able to get those shop items into play (regardless of what side I am on), and as the OL, it’s always nice to have heroes “waste” an action on something that doesn’t move them closer to winning an encounter.

If you don’t like the idea of using a die, you could instead pull the top card of the search deck, award the heroes the amount of gold on the item card (without showing them what the item is), and then shuffle the card back into the deck or place it on the bottom. If you want to increase the potential gain for the heroes, simply use Gx10 instead of Gx5.

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6
Tactician
Professional Advisor
Tinkerer
Senior
52 of 58 gamers found this helpful
“Be sure to Search during Campaigns”

In campaign mode, in addition to giving you useful items, search cards also give you extra gold to spend between quests.

That extra gold transforms into permanent items that you can use for the remainder of the campaign, and can potentially be worth more than the reward you get for actually winning the quest. Furthermore, if the starting gold recommended in the “epic play” rules is any indication, the game is balanced on the assumption that the heroes will collect nearly all of the search tokens.

Don’t forget to search!

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6
Poland
BoardGaming.com Beta 2.0 Tester
53 of 62 gamers found this helpful
“painting”

if you are using Army Painter paints (or any other to be honest :)) , shades and primers remember this:

1) black army painter 120ml lasts only for monsters to prime. not enough for heroes, but you should use white on heroes (in my opinion)

2) plenty of paints you have in basic set, mix paints together, do not use shading, use just basic colors. easier and faster to paint.

3) you need to have 1 package of green stuff, grass etc. to make bases and fill in gaps in monster figures

4) after the painting use QUICK SHADE. it will do the job!

5) use varnish spray for your minis for them not to be glossy! when it shines – it looks really bad.

play with painting. if you think they are beautiful – they are! do not listen to people saying “ah, you could have done it better” unless you see their job, and its really better 🙂 there are a lot of haters just pointing fingers.

enjoy your work! and have fun!

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3
53 of 62 gamers found this helpful
“Monsters”

I think we should go for the goal of the dungeon and not worry about all the monsters. Do what you came to do and get out

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