Sometimes my Sunday afternoon group has as many as 10 players in it. Sometimes we play Talisman, other times split into two groups. But I'm wondering if Descent can be made to work for a group that size.

Has anybody here has every had a Descent game with more than four adventurers?.... how did you do it, and how did it work out?

Thanks!

Stretching the game to more than 4 heroes is hard. Stretching the game to 9 heroes is completely ridiculous. The time spent planning out what everyone is going to do on the current turn alone would probably sink the game, regardless of any actual gameplay issues that you did or didn't solve.

As for the actual gameplay issues, they are numerous: action disparities, LOS coverage, treasure optimization...with that many heroes, they often won't even fit within the entire starting area, even if you ignored the "must be adjacent to the glyph" rule. The official scaling rules aren't remotely balanced even within the range they supposedly support.

I made a mod called The Enduring Evil that scales much better, but I still wouldn't ever try to run it with 9 heroes. It can do 5 heroes (6 players) reasonably well. I haven't tried 6 heroes.

what do you think about 2 parties of 4 competing against each other? Might have to design special dungeons for it, but would it work better that way?

Lorenelif said:

There would at least be a competition between the two hero groups that way. The OL wouldn't have any reasonable chance of winning, though. LoS would be covered basically everywhere, so no spawning, and initial monsters would be gone before they had a chance to act, barring Ambush. The OL could whittle away with traps but likely wouldn't make enough of a dent to claim victory himself.

There's probably one or more "PvP" variants on Board Game Geek . I haven't read any of them or thought about how to design one, so I can't say whether they'd be any good. At best, I imagine they'd still be pretty slow, with that many separate turns per round.

Sounds like there'd be no way without more map tiles to build bigger rooms and corridors...

There was one dungeon from the Realms 2010 convention that pitted two hero parties against opposing Overlords using a few interesting house rules. I don't remember too many details from discussion, but it was basically two players, each an Overlord controlling a group of heroes to combat the other in a race for some shiney macguffin in the center.

A similar idea could be employed easily enough with more than two players. Have two competing "teams" each composed of an Overlord and X heroes (where 2X + 2 is how many players in total you have at the table.) You wouldn't be able to use any of the published quests, of course. You'd need something homemade, perhaps symmetrical with entrances for each team on opposite sides. If you look up PvP mods like Antistone suggested you can probably find some suitable examples of such maps to work with.