Oddly enough, it’s Phil Foglio, who did the (pretty nice) 90’s edition shown above. He’s a professional, sure, but I would argue past his prime and based on the new cover, completely out of touch.
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I think the 1993 cover is by Phil Morrissey.
Most of Phil Foglio’s recent work has been on Girl Genius.
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Shoot, yeah you’re right! Wow that’s one of those things I’ve been wrong about a long time. Here I was thinking SJG was pulling a throwback.
…kinda makes even less sense pulling Foglio in. I dunno, maybe they know their crowd.
[EDIT] I’m being pretty hard on ol’ Phil here. I’ve enjoyed his work in the past too, but admittedly haven’t really seen much since the 90s.
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Yeah, I was gonna say, Foglio has a pretty distinctive style and that 90s cover does not look like it. As for why they’d bring him in - probably just have a good working relationship with him? As he’s done art for some of their other stuff.
I just don’t like Wiz-War, personally. It’s chaotic, random, and most importantly, is a game about avoiding your opponents and grabbing treasure instead of a wild spell-slinging conflict. You can injure your opponents, but it’s pretty orthogonal to winning unless you manage to take out their last HP and you probably won’t. To me it’s very similar to the way Dungeonquest pretends to be a dungeon crawl and then just strictly penalizes you for ever interacting with monsters. An ideal Dungeonquest run is just grabbing some piles of gold and booking it for the exit. If that’s what floats your boat, great, but I don’t think that’s what the implicit promise of the game theming is, and it’s absolutely not what I want from a dungeon crawl.
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Back in… 4th? edition, I got a very bad taste in my mouth with Wiz War and rules lawyering.
I’m not a fan of the new Foglio art and I doubt the production values coming out of SJG will be up to modern board gaming standards.
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I’m on board for this. Some really cool creators are involved with it, and it appears universal enough (for my tastes) to be useful across various games.
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I love DungeonQuest because it epitomises what I think a dungeon crawl should be like. You don’t want to meet anything, every encounter is potentially deadly, and the absolute best you can hope for is to sneak in, steal some treasure from under the nose of the sleeping dragon, and book it out of there. (In another wonderful touch, I love that many of the monsters you meet have a good chance of running away from you too!)
So yes, that is what floats my boat. I find the idea that there should be an upside to getting into fights to the death, even going so far as “you must kill X things to become powerful enough to kill thing Y”, to be an awkwardly forced bit of gameyness that is totally unnecessary and over-used.
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I mean, that’s a totally fair approach to doing dungeon delves, and I think it’s really interesting in other contexts, namely roleplaying games (Torchbearer is really neat). But in a boardgame? Making the optimum way to play to be to not engage with any of the things in the game is just utterly anathema to my idea of fun.
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I could understand the complaint if it were a choice, but it isn’t. You cannot choose to optimise your play by not interacting with anything, you encounter things by chance.
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Yes, and that’s actually part of the problem, also. Interacting with anything in the game is bad and penalizes you, but you don’t get to do anything tactical or interesting to avoid it, either. It’s just purely “do you want to risk playing this game more?” I don’t.
I think you could do a really interesting fantasy stealth/heist game about using special powers and tools and stuff to evade patrolling monsters and make it out with the treasure, with combat as a partial failure state. But Dungeonquest isn’t that. (And, to be fair, is a very old design, so probably that’s a lot to expect.)
That’s a completely unrelated complaint rather than “part of the problem”, but one I understand. It’s a very simple roll a die and see what happens (9/10 times you die) game that’s over in 10-20 mins, and nothing more than that.
I disagree. If it were always bad to encounter monsters, but part of the gameplay was making interesting decisions about how not to encounter them, I’d probably like it. I’m backing burncycle, after all.
Anyway. This is all getting well off the actual topic. I only brought up Dungeonquest because I think it’s a push-your-luck game being sold as a dungeon crawl, and Wiz-War (which is actually going to be Kickstarted) is a treasure race being sold as a wizarding duel and I’d be into what they’re being presented as but not the game they actually are.
OK, last word: I think push your luck is a perfect match for the dungeon crawl theme, rather than some kind of mis-match or misleading marketing. I do agree with the criticism of Wiz-War.
Maybe, but since the entire genre in boardgaming is pretty much defined by stuff it doesn’t do, I think it’s fair to call it misleading.
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The edition of D&D I had in the 80s, to pick a contemporary genre-defining example, tied “XP” to gold. You got nothing for fighting monsters other than their gold, if the DM saw fit to have them carrying any, and a player’s aim was to get as much gold as possible with as little risk as possible (much like DungeonQuest).
There’s no denying that later D&D, and a lot of other games, went a different route, but eh.
I’m backing this one as well. Heard some nice things about the first issue (which I’ve added on).
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Ah crap, I’m totally buying all of it
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Great price for the all in edition. Always thought it was ludicrous how much they were selling a dozen cards for!
I’ll wait for the retail on the expansion. Their expansion pricing structure is messed up yet again, but hopefully will be a bit cheaper at retail if it’s the same as previous expansions.
I’m betting on the retail expansion price being the same as the ‘discounted’ price + VAT, without having to pay $17 for shipping (plus $3.40 on the VAT for the shipping).
Damn, looks like I missed out on the cloth bundle add-on already. Yeah, the Ultimate edition is a very good deal, especially considering UK prices for the 2nd ed base game.
You don’t want the cloth map. It’s illegible, which is not great for a game with the rules printed all over the map. It’s not completely unreadable, but it feels like the text takes a fraction more effort than the novelty is worth.
The benefit of the cloth bundle was the bags, but the bags are now standard in the all-in, so there’s really no point.
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