Descent: Journeys into the Dark Quick Guide

Descent: Journeys into the Dark is a dungeon-crawl game in the vein of the popular Heroquest board game. Using the same system as Doom: the Boardgame, players in Descent work together as a team to overcome the Overlord, their opponent played by another player. With 3 expansions already, the Descent line of products is a fast expanding successful board game for Fantasy Flight Games.

Following is a quick guide on the various Descent: Journeys into the Dark base games and expansions available within Canada and the US.

Descent: Journeys into the Dark
The base game for Descent comes with all the major pieces required to set-up the modular dungeon, randomize the pre-made characters and provide the Overlord with cards to run all 10 pre-made adventures. Multiple new adventures are also available at Fantasy Flight Games website for download as well.

The base game can run from between 2-4 hours, depending on adventure and number of players and due to the modular board, can easily last a gaming group for hours on-end. This is a very well balanced starting game. However, one area that the game lacks is the ability to run a proper campaign – a factor dealt with through it’s latest expansion, the Road to Legend.

The Expansions

Descent: the Well of Darkness
The Well of Darkness is the first expansion for Descent and is a large expansion as most Fantasy Flight Game expansions. It thoroughly adds to the game, from new heroes, new skills, monsters, items and terrain and all other aspects.

The most interesting change is the amendments to the quests. Each quest now has a point system for three different categories: Event, Trap, and Monster. Before the game, the overlord spends these points to buy Well of Darkness cards for the corresponding categories and replace them in the original Overlord deck. This provides a whole new change to the game and allows for ‘tweaking’ of the deck. It does however increase set-up time for the Overlord.

Overall, this is probably the most popular expansion outside of Road to Legend by providing the Overlord more interesting options as well as introducing new heroes, skills and monsters to the game.

Descent: the Altar of Despair
The Altar of Despair is the second expansion for Descent and expands every aspect of the original game with some new rules. There are now more quests, heroes, skills, monsters, treasures and overlord cards including expanding on the Treachery cards first introduced in Well of Darkness.

New aspects of the game introduced here include a Invulnerability potion, Dark Relics and Cursed Items, new ‘corrupted’ dungeon tiles and new fog and corrupted obstacles. Additionally, as part of the scenarios Altars and crushing walls were introduced.

The new mechanic introduced is for Prolonged actions. Basically, the rules for taking Ready actions are changed. Now, on a regular turn a hero who Readies takes two "half actions"

The Altar of Despair is a great expansion but does provide a much more challenging proposition for heroes compared to the base game. Combined together with the Well of Darkness, it makes Descent into a game that might require some additional tweaking to make quests competitive.

> Descent: Road to Legend
Road to Legend is the ‘campaign’ expansion that has been long-awaited by fans of Descent: Journeys into the Dark. By allowing players to bring their heroes from one quest to the next, a real sense of a ‘campaign’ can be created and thus makes this expansion probably the most popular for a group of dedicated board gamers.

An entirely new outdoor map is provided, over 200 cards explaining new quests, dungeons, locations and the necessary information for running a full campaign are included as well as new dice, a new rulebook and storage for characters between quests.

Major changes include actual characters for the Overlord to take-on, the ability for players to move between cities and dungeons and a progressive ‘campaign’ that will eventually have the players face the Overlord in-person.

Overall, Descent: Road to Legend plays extremely well, decreasing play-time for each dungeon to one to two hours at most while extending the overall game replay-ability by months. One word of caution – there is a number of opinions that to get the most out of Road to Legend, the Well of Darkness expansion which helps to truly balance the game out should be purchased first.


Delicious     Stumble it!         Slashdot It!