Can you travel with that game

By Indalecio, in Descent: Journeys in the Dark

I have two playgroups, one local and the other one located 250km from me. Now I'm the one organizing/feeding these groups with games, Descent in particular, and I own everything released to date, including the LT packs.

When I need to meet up with my local group I only have 200m to do but even that is a pain. I basically throw all of my boxes (which are completely full) in a big IKEA plastic bag and carry the whole thing to the destination. As I progress with my painting I lose more and more space to give room and protection to my minis, so even that is a problem.

Now with the second playgroup I do the same thing except I have to carry other stuff with me as well, and I travel by train and bus, for that I use a large suitcase that can either stand up or lie horizintally, which means the same for the boxes and their contents. I tend to wrap my minis with clothes to limit friction but I think they still move around judging by the tiny bits of grass and sand coming off their bases.

I'm wondering about how I could do this better. There is a limit to how much stuff I can carry with me and I start to believe the ultimate solution would just be to hold Descent sessions at my place. But that's also very restrictive. Has anybody made the attempt to travel wth all of that stuff? What was your solution? Obviously driving would have solved some issues but I cannot do that.

Given the amount of minis I kind of ditched the idea of getting a storage solution for the minis only with foam and small plastic boxes, which you can get from the usual tools shop. I found one with 24 boxes (12 on each side), each box being large enough to put a shadow dragon inside, but I'd need two of them minimum to fit everything so that's two hands. Plus I don't think Mirklace and Queen Ariad would fit in there. Jesus Mirklace is huuuge.

Would be a shame to stop playing the game because I get Immobilized status from it? :) I can set aside the cards we don't use but I prefer not to be too selective about the minis since we can virtually play any quest with any lieutenant.

You could leave the minis home (for the long game trips) and print some tokens instead (there are some on BGG).

At least leave all the monster minis, take only the heroes. The gameply will be the same, just the board will look

hmm more modestly.

As long as you're just doing one adventure per session, simply move the "Choose next quest" step to the end of each play session, and have the Overlord pick his monster groups then (or if you're playing Overlord, whenever). Then you only need bring the monsters for that quest, plus at most 4 hero pieces and the Overlord agent. You can also leave spare plot decks, out of act shop decks and unused tiles at home too.

If you're playing more than one adventure it gets trickier - though depending on the campaign you might have an idea what is coming next. If you're the Overlord it'll be easier as you'll better know what monsters to bring (you can leave Zombies at home 90% of the time), but worst comes to worst and you don't have the exact figure you want for the quest because something unexpected happens (travel card forces you to play a Rumour quest which the heroes then take), just use something else as a proxy - it doesn't matter hugely if they're wrong on occasion.

Yeah, I think your best bet is to get a hold of the monster tokens, then plan out which figures you'll likely need and which ones are unlikely to be used (and just use the tokens if you actually do need them). It's a bit of a pain because you'll have to do a lot of sorting and prep-work, but it might be worth the easier travel.

It may also be beneficial to spend some time printing out the quest maps instead of relying on tiles.

There are a couple ways you could go about doing this:

  1. If you're looking for quality, I'd recommend recreating the quests on the Quest Vault (making sure you don't publish them) and taking screenshots at the higher zoom level, then do a little photo cropping and print them out. Many will probably require multiple pages taped / placed together.
  2. If you're looking for easy, scan the maps from the quest guides and print them out with a higher zoom level, but then you'll have some of the placement tokens printed there, which may be annoying.

I'd really love to see FFG offer Print & Play packs of their quest maps for something like this. No rules, just the maps from the various quests that represent how the tiles would look put together and nothing else (no doors, tokens, starting placements, etc.)