My oldest daughter (13) loves Descent, but her younger siblings (9 & 10), despite starting the game enthusiastically, poop out after an hour. They have no problem with our "quest" games HeroQuest, DungeonQuest or DragonQuest. But the minutiae of Descent seems to wear them down, so I'd like to simplify things by finding out if there are any details that can be taken out without derailing the game altogether.

Sometimes we take out facets of game play to make it simpler and faster for them; i.e. we don't use hero order tokens very often, and we'll take out all but 2 or 3 spawn cards; we don't even pay much attention to conquest tokens, because they don't really care about winning or losing.

So I'm wondering if anyone has ever made any house rules or house omissions to make the game easier and faster for younger players.

If you want it to play in an hour or less? Drop all spawning (or limit it to one card per Area MAX.) Go easy on trap cards too, focus on playing Power cards (they'll be sufficiently scary without actually slowing things down too much.) You've already "forgotten" about Order tokens, which will help.

I'd also drop Feats, if you're using them. Sure they help the heroes, but they're also more game components for them to read, and at ages 9 and 10, asking them to read 5 or 6 cards is not an insignificant addition to the game.

In general, Descent is a really complex game, I'm not sure how much else you could leave out without needing to rewrite the rules. I can understand why some kids at that age might have difficulty keeping up interest, though.

There are a lot of game mechanics that can be dropped entirely without causing any mechanical problems - they'll have repercussions for balance, and may reduce the tactical depth, but the former doesn't seem to be a big issue for you and the latter is basically the goal.

All of the following could probably be dropped, at least temporarily:

• Monsters' special abilities
• Spawning
• Overlord Cards in general
• Feats
• Orders
• Skills
• Fatigue
• Surges on attack rolls (or just always count them as damage)
• Declaring actions in advance (basically give everyone Grey Ker's ability)

The game may be kind of boring after all that stuff's gone, and I certainly wouldn't recommend that level of simplification to adults, but it's one possibility if you think that would make the game better for your kids. Also, I'm not at all sure what that will do to balance - you might want to remove a few of the monsters from the quest to be on the safe side (that will also reduce play time).

Remember, you can always add mechanics back in one at a time as you get more practice at the game.

Oh, and you'll probably want to skip skip quest #2 ("The Brothers Durnog") if you're doing this. Especially the part about removing fatigue.

Thanks for the good ideas. The kids really catch on to more than I would have given them credit for. In fact, a lot of times they're the one that remind me of the details. It's not that it's too much for them to grasp, I think it just feels like work after a while. So I'm trying to come up with Descent-lite because my 13 y.o. keeps get out voted on game night, and this way the younger will like it more.

I feel cutting out the spawn and order tokens balance each other. I have to leave skills in, because they really like them, so I'll keep monster abilities in for balance. I'm trying to think of a way to threat tokens but still allow the OL to play a handful of cards each day that seems to slow us down a lot, chit-overload, I think. Maybe draw an OL card for every chest that's opened and every glyph that's activated. Limiting fatigue was a good idea, maybe only use them for special abilities.

I'm going to implement same of these, and when we get a good program together for others with young'uns.

Playing overlord cards without cost (even a reduced number of them) may be rather swingy; the cards aren't even close to equal. If you just want to eliminate the actual physical threat tokens, you could pay for cards only by discarding other cards from your hand. Basically say that any threat that isn't spent instantly is lost. It doesn't reduce the math, but it does eliminate the chits. You may want to increase the overlord's hand size so he can use it as a reservoir if you use that idea.