I started out with a rather positive impression of Bardsung: The Kickstarter had delivered two months early, which is very rare in this industry, and on unboxing my basic "hero pledge" I had the impression that I had received a lot of gaming material and miniatures in two boxes for just around a hundred bucks including shipping. So I set out to discover how the game is.

Bardsung is a typical dungeon crawler, which can easily be played as a one-off, although it isn't really advertised as such. You can also play it as a campaign, but that basically still means playing a dungeon crawl session, possibly making some decisions at the end, and then resetting the board and playing the next dungeon crawl session. Every dungeon consists of rooms and corridors in strict alternation: Rooms are always only connected to corridors, and corridors to rooms. The dungeon is created randomly while exploring, by drawing room or corridor cards when passing through a door. Every room or corridor card also tells you whether to draw a battle or challenge aspect card, which describes what is happening in the room. And cards can be marked with runes, which you can cross-reference with the scenario you are playing to find out what monster or terrain elements they correspond to.

Heroes typically have 2 actions per round, which must be used for different things. They could move and use an ability to attack, or use 2 different abilities. Attacks are handled by rolling 1d20 and adding a stat modifier to it, just like in D&D. And like in that game, you sometimes have "advantage" or "disadvantage", which means you roll 2 dice and take the higher or lower one. If your attack roll plus modifiers equals or exceeds the target number of the monster, you land a hit. Somewhat confusingly you then roll an attack damage die, for example a d6, but the result you roll is *not* the damage you deal. Instead you compare the value to the monster's toughness, and if it equals or exceeds that, you have landed a critical hit. Every ability tells you the result of a regular and critical hit, with some abilities having results on a miss as well. But regular monsters only have 2 health, so a typical damage-dealing attack might do 1 health damage for a regular hit, and 2 for a critical. "Complex" monsters aren't dead on receiving two damage, but flip over to their other side, with different stats, where you will need to deal another 2 damage to kill them. Not all abilities are only about damage, you can also have results that move the enemy, or inflict him with some status.

The sequence in which heroes and monsters act are decided randomly each round by shuffling all the initiative cards involved. You need to learn the skill of shuffling without looking, because the cards have different color backgrounds, and some monsters are double-sided. There are also abilities that modify the initiative order. When it is the monster's turn to act, they follow a simple AI. Different monsters can have different AI cards, but there is no randomness involved and no "AI deck". Boss monsters have more than one initiative card, so they act several times in a turn and do different things. Monsters never roll dice; when a monster attacks a hero, it is up to the hero to make a defense roll, failing which he will take a wound.

Each dungeon crawl is a reasonably short affair, thus the short playing time listed for this game. Once the heroes find the exit staircase, they can use the gold and xp found in the dungeon to improve their characters, before they go back in for the next dungeon crawl. Heroes can spend gold on upkeep or to buy treasures. They can use xp to upgrade stats or existing abilities, or they can buy new abilities. Interestingly heroes can buy abilities of other classes for an increased cost; unfortunately every ability card only exists once, so I would be careful before buying the ability of another player's hero. Gear in Bardsung is relatively unexciting: You always keep your starting gear, but you can upgrade it once by flipping it over, and add additional bonuses with gems or runestones.

Overall the dungeon crawl and combat is relatively simple, once you got the hang of it. The rulebook is structured in the form of one combat tutorial and one exploration tutorial, so after you followed both you have a good first idea. Unfortunately this structure makes it a bit hard to look up rules afterwards; there is a table of contents but no index.

I am now at the point where I know how to play, but haven't started the campaign yet. But I do have some first impressions on gameplay and game content. Up to now, this is a mixed bag. For example I do like the inclusion of GameTrayz to hold the cards, tokens, and miniatures; however, there are only 2 trays for tokens, and a lot more tokens of many different types for that to be adequate. The trays used for player boards aren't overly well designed either, and have no room for attached cards, or sleeves. On the dungeon tiles the developers decided to "keep them pretty" by not showing too clearly where the borders between the different zones are, which then necessitated the addition of a tile reference sheet showing how many zones there are supposed to be. The game board is 3' x 3', which takes up the whole width of a typical 3' x 5' table, so you need to either stack the player boards on a section of the game board foreseen for something else, or put them to the side of the board, which is less practical. Overall I think the game could have been more elegantly designed to improve the usability of the components.

As I said, I can't judge the quality of the campaign story yet. But the general gameplay up to now appears relatively simple, with not a huge amount of tactical options or tactical puzzles to solve. It also is inherently random, with not a huge amount of dice mitigation, and swings in difficulty depending on lucky or unlucky streaks of the dice. There are some interesting innovative gameplay elements, like the "echo token" creating wandering monsters in the already explored parts of the dungeon, and doors that are by default open and can be closed to protect the group from monsters left behind.

While I am still happy enough with the game for the 100 bucks I paid for it on Kickstarter, it has to be pointed out that there was a huge inflation in board game prices since 2020, and the MSRP of Bardsung on the Steamforged Games website is now $199.95, shipping and stretch goals not included. I wouldn't necessarily recommend Bardsung at this price point. It is an okay dungeon crawler, but in my opinion not an exceptional game.

Labels: Board Games

- posted by Tobold @ 12:38 PM Permanent Link