Board Game: Escape the Dark Castle

We were going to do a one-shot last night, but then we didn't, so it was board games ahoy! 

The Game: Escape the Dark Castle
The Publisher: Themeborne
Time: 30 minutes or less, like a pizza
Players: Me, Amanda, Michelle, Gus

Game Play: Escape the Dark Castle is a cooperative game in which you're all prisoners (wrongly incarcerated, not that that really matters in context) trying to...do the thing what the title is. The titular Dark Castle is randomly created every game by dealing 15 of 53 cards, and then one of five boss cards. If anyone dies on the way out, you all lose, because apparently these prisoners are fuckin' ride or die.

The Castle before the storm

Every turn, a player turns over one of those cards and reads out what's on the other side. A lot of them have monsters to fight, some have opportunities to get items or rest or healing. 

Note those black dice up there. Those are "chapter dice," while you roll a single "character die." All of the dice have the same symbols - a fist for Might, an eye for Cunning, and a cat's asshole (*) for Wisdom (still not sure about that last one, maybe I'm just not Wise enough). Monsters, then, have a preset number of dice, often plus "roll one die for each player," meaning a given monster might have Fist-Fist-Eye-Eye-Eye-Asshole. Then when you attack, anything that matches one of the monster's dice removes it, and if the monster is still alive it damages the people fighting. The character dice are all different; they'll have a better chance of rolling whatever that particular person is best at. Pretty simple. 

The hapless prisoners

You also have item cards, which do various things - weapons make fighting more versatile, food gives you health, potions do all kinds of shit. You get items after every fight, and you need to use 'em or lose 'em, because a given player can only carry two. 

At the end, you face a boss, who probably has some kind of special wrinkle (I say "probably" because we only faced one and he mopped the floor with us). 

The terror of the underworld, or "Chip" to his friends

Opinions: Well, first of all, this game really needed an editor. The back of the box refers to it as a "fatnasy adventure game", one of the cards talks about the "peel" of a bell, and so on. But if we're gonna have errors, I'd rather they be spelling errors than tortured sentences that make the rules hard to figure out. 

As for the game player, I actually quite like it. The rulebook talks a lot about how it's simple to pick up and play, and I think it is. Said rulebook also says that it'll kick your ass, and that's also true - you really can't just bumblefuck your way through because everyone has to survive, so you have to approach combat, resource distribution, and so on with a careful eye on who's hurting as well as who has the best chance to defeat a given monster. 

I look forward to giving it another go at some point; it'd be interesting to see how a different mix of castle cards changes the experience. 

Keep? Yep.