Marathon dungeoneering

Played in my longest boardgame session yet last Saturday: 11am to midnight during the last Mega meetup. And yet, during the 13 hour marathon I only finished one game. Descent took 10 hours to complete (with a short break to buy lunch back to eat while play resumed), and Indonesia played through the end of second era before the security guard evicted us from the function room.

Descent is an RPG-like dungeoneering game where a team of players each control one character trying to accomplish a mission in a dungeon, playing versus a player who is the overlord controlling the minions and traps in the dungeon. This particular meetup saw 4 (!) games of Descent being played, and our table was the one that took the longest. Possibly because our table was the only ones where the heros prevailed and reached the end of the dungeon, whereas all other tables saw the overlord swatting away the heroes, some with great speed. It was also long due to the fact that the scenario we played was one of the longer epics apparently, and our overlord was a rookie overlord learning the ropes occasionally needing to stop, think, and ask another veteran overlord.

The overlord’s greenness may have helped us won the game, but he was definitely a very unlucky overlord. His dice rolls often failed him at crucial moments. At the verge of killing our best character, he rolled a failed attack in a multi-dice roll. His undying creatures allow him to roll a dice to resurrect them, but his success ratio was I believe less than 15% (based on the dice probability, it should be 33%), including the final boss who was supposed to resurrect at a 5/9 probability but didn’t resurrect at all. The epitome of his bad luck: he conjured a dark charm to take control of one of our characters, to deal the surprise killing blow to our wounded team member. But his inexperience and bad timing ended up with him realizing that the character he took over turned out to be one who was unarmed: he just passed his weapon to my character and hadn’t received the weapon I was supposed to pass back in return as part of our artefact exchange! He pressed on, making a barehand attack (rolling the minimal one dice), only to have the roll ending up as a missed attack (a 1-in-6 chance).

Of course he was very unlucky from the start when our heroes, when drawing random ability, got very good matches. Our main attacker got the ability to attack multiple times and causing damage to the surrounding. My ranger got the best combination of multiple attacks and armour-piercing. Another character happened to have a familiar which nullified most of his curses, and yet another happened to have the ability to minimise the amount of threat the overlord can inflict each turn.

Now perhaps for some more challenging descent into real nasty dungeons …