Much of this will sound familiar if you’ve played either Mansions of Madness 2nd Edition or Journeys in Middle Earth.

There are substantial surprises encountered in the campaign that have jolted my brain, things that wouldn’t have landed or functioned quite the same way if provided in a scenario book or through card draw. You can interact with all of those glorious 3D pieces such as boiling cauldrons and disordered bookshelves as they each offer their own rewards and exposition. New corridors and rooms appear, but occasionally existing tiles or objects shift. Most of this is not particularly groundbreaking on an individual level, but it does emphasize that the technology is being used in service of the game as opposed to the other way around.Įxploration and discovery are handled expertly. You can actually learn this behavior and prepare for it. A zealot may start chanting for instance, signaling a powerful spell which will be unleashed in the following round. This is also seen in how quite commonly foes telegraph powerful abilities through text. I saw this in a recent scenario where the enemies focused on a specific hero who was carrying an item of narrative significance. The inhuman processing also buys greater complexity of behavior. You don’t have to build a deck or follow a flow-chart. Their wounds are also monitored and adjusted via poking the screen.ĪI behavior is something occurring in the background. Enemies can be afflicted with statuses such as slowed or exposed and it doesn’t require a chit or card. There are no tokens littering the board and cluttering up the visual space. Legends of the Dark advances the genre by reducing maintenance and busy-work while escalating wonder.

This design is really progressive in many ways. There is quite a bit to discuss with this game, much which extends and lives outside the required application, but that is of course the focus of discourse because our phones and tablets serve as such a strong source of both excitement and pathology. This is still Descent in spirit, but it’s a far leap in a certain direction – I’ll call it forward – as it’s taken our analog comfort food and modified the experience to exist with interdependence on that piece of technology in your pocket. Some view Legends of the Dark as a harbinger of doom.

Descent legends of the dark brynn