Crawled through any good dungeons lately?

When I was in college (a time frame now measured in decades ago) I remember running and playing in some very good D&D campaigns. I created worlds with a long background history, politics, weather, and stories that players could really get into. But you know what? It takes a lot of work to set up a good campaign! Now that work and family and a life outside the basement has pretty much killed off any chance of regular D&D sessions, what is a person to do? Why, boil down the campaign to its barest essentials: explore dungeon, kill monsters, and get treasure of course!

Enter Descent: Journeys in the Dark a dungeon crawl board game by Fantasy Flight Games. Our group played this game last week and a fun time was had by all. Even though it is a board game, there are role playing elements. You begin by selecting a character "prototype", choosing skills, and buying equipment. Once you are ready the exploring begins. One person, called the overlord, acts as a game master of sorts by laying out the dungeon as shown in an adventure/scenario book and the remaining players try and avoid death at the hands of the overlord. Along the way you get money and treasure in the form of magical items, etc. Treasure can be sold and all the money can be used to by more skills and equipment.

I think the game has all the elements needed for busy gamers to get their role playing fix from a dungeon crawl. You get to create a character and improve as the game goes on. The only disappointing aspect is that characters get a decent start in the game and there aren't specific rules for keeping characters from game to game. You might want to think of these characters as mid-level rather than new adventurers afraid of every Kobold. Enterprising players on the Internet have created house rules for running campaigns using "starter" characters and improving and keeping them from game to game.

Before Descent, my favorite dungeon crawl game was Warhammer Quest by Games Workshop. Warhammer Quest is long out of print and is superior to Descent in character improvement and in the fact that all players could play in cooperation without the need for a game master. Wahammer Quest is somewhat hindered in that higher level monsters all come from the Wahammer universe and so proper models only come from Games Workshop; and, being that the game is so old even those models (like Chaos Dwarves) are long out of print.

Descent comes with a lot of monster miniatures of all power levels and, being a current product, has excellent potential for future expansions. Try it!