Another new box-full-o’-minis in an oversize tabletop dungeon crawl ~

Michael Eckenfels, 21 March 2017

There’s about sixteen billion board games now dealing with dungeon crawls and sporting cool minis, or enough to choke a bag of holding – whichever reference you get first.

I’ve since realized I was expecting an RPG experience

I hadn’t heard of Sword & Sorcery before (go figure). According to BGG’s page, this game “is an epic -fantasy cooperative board game in which 1-5 players fight together against the forces of evil, which are controlled by the game itself.”

This last bit was enough to intrigue me. I’d had a momentary flirtation with the D&D games; specifically with Castle Ravenloft, which I played, and Temple of Elemental Evil, which I have yet to play. These D&D games struck me as too simplistic, but I’ve since realized I was expecting an RPG experience, and was disappointed because of it. I need to revisit those games with a different outlook on what to expect.

This one, though, seemed pretty cool for a variety of reasons. Not only the “1-5 player” aspect of it, which is admittedly a huge selling point for me (I like running multiple players in cooperative games), but also because this game has a lot of Galaxy Defenders (another game) in it. And it should, because Gremlin Productions created both of these games.

There’s also the 8.3 rating on BGG, which is impressive in and of itself, as well as the 95 (!) videos covering it, as well as over twelve hundred threads in the BGG page for it. Not bad for a game that was just released in 2017.

For a final reason, the minis are cool as hell, as you will see momentarily.

I tried to talk myself out of this game, mainly because of a couple of reasons. One, a common observation on this game, is that it is fiddly. I can’t expand on that until I play it, of course. Two, because it has ‘only’ seven scenarios, though I’d heard there are plans to release expansions. But of course there will be – if you buy them, the companies will create more for you to buy!

So enough of why I bought this. Let’s get to the unboxing.

This thing is heavy. Like, tennis elbow much?

The back gives you a good idea why. Check out all the tiles and minis. And you will here momentarily!

Opening the box reveals a huge display of tiles, wrapped in plastic, so you know there’s a lot of ’em.

Six layers’ worth of tiles, in fact.

And a rule book for the ages. This is probably one of the more minor things about the game I wasn’t sure about, but ties into the ‘fiddly’ statement I made earlier – it’s 64 pages long.

The artwork is impressive…

…and it’s well-organized. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve not played it yet, I’m just repeating some of the observations I’ve seen about the game. And with 64 pages of rules – whoa. But as you can see here, it’s pretty well-organized and uses a lot of icons.

There’s a lot of parts to this game, lots of rules to learn. It’ll be interesting to see if they all have to be absorbed before diving in or if there’s some kind of introductory parts to it.

A close-up of the final mission to show you indeed, there’s only seven missions in this box.

Some more of the icons used in the game. I mean, look at all this – poisoning, blinding, stunning, slowing, exhaustion, bleeding – there’s a lot of things that are bad that can happen to your characters. Sweet! Not just “take X HP of damage” with minimal effects.

The ‘Book of Secrets’ is not a National Treasure movie in this case. (Who knows if Nic Cage is in here, though…) This book holds all the pre-programmed paragraphs and other goodies that you read while playing, so no spoilers will be displayed here (nor in anything else).

The cards. Looks like creatures, events, encounters, and other things. A rich amount of content so far.

DICE. These are pretty busy but I like ’em that way. Looking forward to see what they all mean and how (if at all) they interconnect with each other.

A close-up of said dice.

The heroes. Some of these are suffering from a bit of warping, but that’s nothing that warm water and cold water can’t fix.

This detail is pretty incredible. I’m no miniatures expert, but it’s very nice.

This Paladin-looking guy has some nice detail on his shield, too.

The green bad guys. From what I’ve seen I think the guys at lower left are goblins, the four big guys are orcs, and the other dudes are from the Pirates of Penzance Action Playset. Or something.

The orc figures have a lot of detail on them, too.

More closeups of green-ness.

A big, detailed, and probably un-heroic purple monster.

The lead guitarist for an unnamed death-thrash-eviscerate metal band, or another purple monster. You decide!  (ed note – looks like a bass player)

Blue dudes!

You can see these are the same pieces, just a different color. I think that’s to facilitate different game-controlling features.

More close-ups!

Red guys! Though this is all the red guys you get.

They do look cool close up.

The “Immortal Souls” storybook, which is not something you just thumb through casually as it lists out each of the seven scenarios/missions your characters go through, and contains spoilers.

A player guide, which looks rather detailed. I wonder what I got myself into here.

This is how the detailed minis were packed, each color in its own individual bag.

Sword & Sorcery looks like a great game…but will I ever get it to the table? We’ll have to see about that.

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