Demeo

I have been playing the PC edition of Demeo. Demeo started its life as a very well regarded virtual reality game, and recently released the "PC edition" which can be played with mouse and keyboard. Steam sells the game only as a bundle, so I could play the VR version too, if I had a headset. But given the fact that there are a few PC games (e.g. the Far Cry series) which already give me motion sickness on a regular screen, I don't think VR is for me. Fortunately the mouse and keyboard controls of the PC edition of Demeo work quite well.

Demeo simulates a "dungeon crawler" type board game. There are up to 4 characters, which you can control solo, or with friends in multiplayer. The game is turn-based, and on each turn each character can do 2 actions, for example move and attack. Each character also has a handful of cards, but only one of them is reusable every turn. So if your mage uses his fireball card, he'll have to wait until he finds another one of them before he can do that again. You can get new cards by either filling up a card meter through your actions, or by looting chests. You can also find gold, and buy cards between the dungeon levels.

An "adventure" of Demeo consists of three randomly generated dungeon levels. You have to find the key to the next level in the first two of them, and then kill the boss mob in the final level to win. But mostly you fight a large number of respawning monsters, trying to build up a strong hand of cards. The rewards for winning an adventure are cosmetic, there is no character progression between adventures. Which is useful if you want to play multiplayer, everybody is always the same strength. There are currently three different adventures, with different monsters. But each adventure has a lot of replayability, due to the randomly generated dungeon levels. I like it!

Now I recently received a Kickstarter board game called Bardsung, which I already mentioned here. Bardsung is a game in which a group of adventurers explore a randomly generated dungeon. It is turn-based, each character has 2 actions per turn, and the abilities of the characters are on cards. In short, Bardsung is very similar in many aspects to Demeo. But Bardsung is a lot more fiddly: You need to handle every aspect of the game yourself, the random dungeon generation, wounds and statuses, controlling the monsters, and so on. Demeo is a lot more fluid, because the computer handles all that stuff for you. At least for solo play, Demeo is a lot more fun than Bardsung.