I’ve read the rules and am monitoring eBay. I intend to buy a copy of 1st edition when my budget allows, because it looks really good.

My question is this: I frequently see comments that 1st edition games (without The Road to Legend expansion) run 4+ hours, even as many as 8 hours. Is that pretty accurate? I know it’s generally longer than 2nd edition’s games.

I haven’t seen any first edition quests period, but I am wondering how a game lasts 6 hours. Are the dungeons huge? Are they built like a labyrinth? Or is the gameplay slower?

Thanks!

I played 1E and never upgraded to 2E (until recently) specifically because I liked the longer dungeons of 1E, compared to 2E shorter experiences.

1E Road to Legend does shorten them, breaking up dungeons into multiple bite size levels so there are better logical stopping points, but adds some in between book-keeping that may just add more time.

But to answer the meat of the question, yes, non Road to Legend or Sea of Blood, 4+ hrs games were not uncommon, depending on the experience of your play group. The dungeons themselves were larger, broken into sections with multiple rooms that had to be cleared in certain order to progress due to things like rune key locked doors and such.

I would typically play OL, and the players at first would be slow, but after they had some dungeons under their belts, they knew how to keep things moving, there were less pauses for rule look-ups, explanations, they had pre-planned "plays" between each other they would execute and such and things would move quicker.

I really love Descent 1E...it's still my favourite boardgame of all time. I brought 2E for the shorter play-times and it gets a bit more action, but it achieves that in part by stripping out all the narrative elements (fresh story text each time you open a new room etc) that made 1E such a rich evocative experience for me.

I'm not sure about kris40k, but I typically played Descent with 2 players...one of us being the Overlord and the other running two heroes.

With 1E our games were typically 2.5-3 hours. I can imagine with higher player counts it would easily jump to 4 hours.

It's not a casual game, but it is a rewarding one.

Of any flagship game from a major studio, Descent 1st Edition has THE most poorly written Rules I've ever read and tried to apply. D1E is Overlord vs. Players only and, as such, the game can get pretty competitive. Prepare yourself for even more endless bickering about unhandled exceptions, what the "intent" of something is, and inconsistently applicable LoS rules - especially if you're playing the Road to Legend / Sea of Blood* campaign expansions, which have so many mechanical holes I don't even know where to start. The FAQs kind of sort of help and I hear tales that the most recent one was a solid attempt to fix the entire game, but sobriety of view is suggested here. I would make this blanket announcement to your players at the start of the game: "Whenever there is a rule issue, I will make the call. Everyone will be OK with that, trusting in good faith of my commitment to consistency and objectivity."

This may sound like a harsh indictment of a beloved classic, but I invested probably 1000 hours into D1E and believe me when I say this: as badly written as D2E rules were, they are 500% better than D1E's rules.

And yes, a standard game of non-campaign D1E will take 6+ hours to fully complete.

- Jee

* Sea of Blood is a striking example of man-kind's reach exceeding its grasp. It was amazing and revolutionary, with some truly ground-breaking design for its time. The whole "You own a Ship and can upgrade it and fight other Ships" that drove the campaign was truly inspired, with some of the best macro-ideas I've ever seen. But holy H. Christ, did the mechanical implementation fail spectacularly. For every 10 minutes of play, there was 20 minutes of arguing and exegesis. I sincerely hope FFG brings Sea of Blood back in some way that doesn't suck; the ideas and production value present in that expansion deserved better than they got.

Thank you for the input everybody! I’m itching to buy it now.

@Inspector Jee Thanks for the heads up. The base game rules sure do look monstrous.

10 hours ago, Inspector Jee said:

* Sea of Blood is a striking example of man-kind's reach exceeding its grasp. It was amazing and revolutionary, with some truly ground-breaking design for its time. The whole "You own a Ship and can upgrade it and fight other Ships" that drove the campaign was truly inspired, with some of the best macro-ideas I've ever seen. But holy H. Christ, did the mechanical implementation fail spectacularly. For every 10 minutes of play, there was 20 minutes of arguing and exegesis. I sincerely hope FFG brings Sea of Blood back in some way that doesn't suck; the ideas and production value present in that expansion deserved better than they got.

I will agree that if you are playing truly, by-the-book and no holding back competitive, Sea of Blood is totally broken. But there were some truly great ideas there that you can work with with some hefty house-ruling.

BGG has some really good discussions about house-rule fixes for 1E campaigns and such that help if you like the core of the game and just want to polish up or round off the broken edges.

I just snapped up a surprisingly cheap (sub $100) copy of the base game that the seller said was complete, so here we go.

Super stoked! While investigating sleeves, I’m pleased to see it doesn’t use the mini american cards. While those take up little space, they can be hard to read.

While I’m here, another question: How do expansions integrate? I understand that the concept of open groups does not exist, but I assume heroes and shop items mix just fine, right?

13 hours ago, Lightningclaw said:

I just snapped up a surprisingly cheap (sub $100) copy of the base game that the seller said was complete, so here we go.

Super stoked! While investigating sleeves, I’m pleased to see it doesn’t use the mini american cards. While those take up little space, they can be hard to read.

While I’m here, another question: How do expansions integrate? I understand that the concept of open groups does not exist, but I assume heroes and shop items mix just fine, right?

Monster groupings don't exist unless you're playing Road to Legend, and even then they kinda only exist for the purposes of upgrading them. In D1E aside from the Quest Text, the Overlord Cards are how you spawn dudes so you're really just limited to which ones you draw. Heroes and shop items all mix yes. As a general rule you can mix everything.

- Jee

There are some replacement cards for certain items (and skill cards) in expansions that replace the originals. If you are playing a Road to Legend or Sea of Blood game, you use different cards for the monsters, and will be instructed to remove certain skills and items from the decks that are not in use in those types of campaigns. There are also cards and dungeons in RtL and SoB that have symbols on them to represent that you need a specific expansion to include those as an option, so you can remove them if you do not have those available.