After watching Team covenants demo video I started making short list of things this game does different. Campaign mode of course, skirmish mode is totally new kind of animal.

1. No overlord deck. In place of that you get resources to buy new squads, it also replaces reinforcement mechanics.

2. New results on defense die - - one that lets you cancel all crits and one that lets you dodge attack entirely, but only white defense die (dodge type) has that one

3. You can only spend 2 strain (stamina for initiated) for movement each turn

4 New skill mechanics - only 3 skills compared to 4 from descent, and checks are done rolling normal attack die, if you get at least one surge you pass

5. New rest and healing. If you do rest action you remove amount of strain equal to your endurance value, if you had less strain compared to that value, you remove the diference as health, so now you can recover health with rest action.

6. Scaling to group size is done now by giving overlord more creatures, but by giving player characters more activations (still not sure on that, but seems that way from smugler char sheet in main FFG page)

7. players and overlord move one character or group at the time so less downtime.

Comment if you see any mistakes I made or find new info

Now combine forces with shnar to form Voltron!

Ninjas, ninjas everythere .....

You forgot LOS is now checked by 2 non-overlapping lines drawn from 1 corner of the attacker to 2 different corners on the defender.

It also looks as if movement and placement for larger creatures has been adjusted. In the video there was one larger creature, which had it's frontside (clearly indicated by the way the miniature was sculpted) towards the opposing forces at all time. And when it moved it did not expand at the end of it's movement, to gain an extra square.

Another thing that sounded different from Descent is that every character seems to have a personal mission where it can possibly gain a personalized item. Very Mass Effect-ish.

There was also talk of sidemissions, where you would help for example Han Solo. If successful it seems you could gain him as an ally in your campaign.

Furthermore the whole hidden information thing (only Overlord gets to see the rules of the level your playing) sounds a lot like Mansions of Madness but without the tedious setup... I wonder about replayability though. Maybe that's what the skirmish mode is for .

The things that intrigue me the most;

1)Mansions of Madness-style monster deployment. From what I could see in GenCon videos, the scenario guide still shows some initial placement of "monsters" for the Imperial player, but you're able to reinforce your units throughout the session with the equivalent of spending threat tokens.

I like this, over Descent's system, as it provides a disincentive for the heroes to "lame it out" and clear out all the search tokens in a match where they can get ahead of the Overlord's minions. It reminds me of a Shadow Rune campaign we played where the Berserker was able to keep Immobilizing the final boss each turn and running away while the Prophet could pound on it from afar with a ranged attack. It took a while, but the heroes ultimately won. It was pretty cheap and frankly we all felt like the ending was "gamed-out" rather than enjoyed as an organic experience.

In this game, and Mansions, if the Heroes are taking 5-6 extra turns to do something like that, the Overlord player could spawn in something nasty to get in their way.

Reinforcing this way keeps the game's pace moving along, without all the gamey elements of mathing out the clearing the search tokens each turn, that kind of thing. You're back into enjoying the flavour of the mission, not just looking at it as tokens that need to be moved to and collected.

2)Heroes and Classes. It looks like each hero is also locked into a specific class. To me, one of the best and worst things about Descent is the hero/class mix. On the one hand, being able to take any Scout hero and have them be any Scout class is great for variability and replayability, it also makes it a little rough for new players to decide what to do. If you started with Core and your group evolved with the releases, it wouldn't matter, but if I'm bringing a new player to the table with everything out so far, it's going to be tough for them to make a choice for picking a Hero (there are ~40 out right now?) and a class for that Hero (~5 per archetype).

I think I recall the demo tables saying that there were 6 heroes in the Core box? Perfect! Now a new player can just look at the hero cards and say "Oh! I want to be the angry Wookiee" or "I'll be that leader guy" and you can get this quick sense of how they'll play out in-game, so you can just grab the appropriate hero's deck and jump into the campaign.

This brings me to the next interesting piece;

3)Hero Epic Quests?! So it sounds like Imperial Assault refines what I felt was a little flat about the Rumour missions in Descent Campaigns. Sure, you had these neat sidequests that could buff the Overlord and the Heroes, depending on who wins them, but they just felt like padding, and took away from the main narrative of the campaigns. The weakness of using this in Descent is that I feel that our Heroes are these tropey high fantasy men and women that I'm not all that attached to, and the Rumours are just "you heard there was this neat thing over here, so you go there, fight some mooks and now you have it."

For Imperial Assault, it's like "Han Solo needs some 'volunteers' to help bail him out of a jam. You helped him out, now he owes you one, so he'll come out of nowhere to save your butts in a later mission." This leads into another neat thing I'll address in the next point.

Going further with side quests, it seems that each hero has access to a sidequest that is designed to round them out and give them a unique personal item to make them super-effective in the campaign. I'll assume failure gives the Imperials some kind of bonus instead, or maybe you just have to progress a certain way to have a shot at the "Epic Mission" for each Hero? In any case, I like that the Exile Hero doesn't get a lightsaber at all, and you have to earn it through trials and tribulations. I'll assume the lightsaber is amazing, and I'm glad it is included this way in the game, as this rare treat, rather than something you just start with.

4)Special Characters for the Heroes! I like the Overlord Lieutenants in Descent, and it's cool to see the Heroes getting their own as well. I hope their use is very infrequent in the campaigns though. It should be about "your" heroes, not just being tag-alongs for Luke and Han's Excellent Adventures.

I'm looking forward to seeing how they roll off all of the classic characters from the movies into these Hero and Villain packs as time goes on. No doubt we're getting Han, Chewie, Leia, Lando, Boba Fett, IG-88 (the FFG employee running Team Covenant's demo game mentioned Iggy Pop specifically), Palpatine, etc as the game goes on.

One more thing I noticed. Cards from search deck no longer has credits value, and you can't pass them to another player.

One more thing I noticed. Cards from search deck no longer has credits value, and you can't pass them to another player.

You mean a wookie can't drink a potion to heal any arbitrary player in the area??

That always made sense...

I wonder about replayability though. Maybe that's what the skirmish mode is for .

My guess is that's what the inevitable line of expansions are for.

6 diferent characters, each with totaly diferent set of abilities, branching campaign (there are 30 missions scenarion book, campaign takes around 12 as they said in demo video) side missions.... I call that high replay value, and of course each expansion will add even more

And as Steve Horvath said in an interview with Team Covenant, each Ally and Villain pack comes with a new side quest that can be plugged into earlier campaigns and these can change how the campaign progresse, giving older campaigns more replayability. Granted, I doubt the side quests change things drastically, bit if adds a new ally or new item to the subsequent mission, that really could shake things up.

My replayability concerns were more about the Mansions of Madness style missions in the campaign. If the Imperial Overlord has more knowledge than the other players about when a trap or extra reinforcements trigger, that advantage is nullified when you play that mission a second time. This would definitely alter the balance between the two opposing forces when replaying.

In Mansions of Madness they sort of address this with the randomizing and altering of the story beats. In Descent all the players just know all the rules of that level. I was just wondering if they would try something to enhance replayability.

My experience with playing Descent is that it's hard to even finish one campaign with a group of four, so I'm not too concerned with this issue. More curiosity I guess.

also, the game unfolds more like an rpg, I believe. The Imperial player is the only one privy to the mission details. Forgive me if anyone already said this.