Hello!

Whilst browsing images of Descent on BGG, I came across this one:

http://images.boardgamegeek.com/images/pic179236_md.jpg

I've always laid down all the tiles of a map before the game starts, and as heroes open doors I just simply place what's in the room. However, the above image seems to indicate that perhaps I should be only setting up the first room's tiles, and not laying down any tiles of other rooms until the heroes actually open doors leading to those rooms.

After looking in the rules, I'm not sure still which is correct. The actual maps show a difference in shading between the starting room and additional rooms, which leads me to believe they SHOULD only "see" the layout of the starting room until they open additional doors. However, (and I'm at work so I can't quote the rules directly), I *thought* the rules stated to place all the tiles down but only reveal monsters / items / etc once a door is opened to that area.

Can anyone confirm either way? Much appreciated! Thanks!

It's up to your preference!

The rules say to assemble the map as shown in the quest guide, and the startup example for the first quest shows that the overlord has built the entire dungeon.

Logic says that anyone can be privy to what's in store for them, because everyone is allowed to know what the quests are and what is in the questbook. (although in my group the heroes prefer to be surprised at least the 1st time)

So, since we already know what's there anyway, it doesn't really matter.

Apparently in Descent's predecessor, Doom, the rules specified you should only set up the tiles for areas as they were revealed, but many players discovered this significantly slowed the game down. So in Descent, they instruct you to put down all the map tiles at game set-up, and keep only the contents of unrevealed areas secret, and they justify this by saying in the quest intro that the heroes get a map of the dungeon.

It doesn't make a real big difference to gameplay which you do--heroes can't get much useful information just from the dungeon outline, and people often play the same quest multiple times, which results in much greater information leakage.

That is how I build/reveal dungeons. Place all the tiles for the entire dungeon. Setup starting area. Then reveal other areas as doors are opened to them.

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"However, (and I'm at work so I can't quote the rules directly), I *thought* the rules stated to place all the tiles down but only reveal monsters / items / etc once a door is opened to that area."

The flavour behind this is that the heroes start with a map to the dungeon so they know what it looks like but not its contents.

Though I don't see a problem with house-ruling it so that the tiles are only placed as the area is revealed (Sorry guys, I forgot the map) though this would (as pointed out previously) slow down the revealing of a new area even more.