Ok I am back after posting and I want to say I hope you all liked what I have wrote so far. I started playing the game at 2 pm yesterday and ended up on a mad playing streak that lasted until 6am this morning.

The first game was here the other 3 were not. Yes for all you husbands out there this may be a very bad thing if your wives want it to be. I had some explaining to do this morning when I got home. She was gone most of the day yesterday and seen us setting up the game and everything. When she got home I was gone and that was around 10:30pm.

The first game we played lasted around 7 hours but we were getting a feel for how the game plays and also took alot of breaks playing for drinks etc. We liked it so much we decided to take it to my brother in laws and show him how to play. It was around 9:30 when we left and we had other stops to make so we arrived at his house at around 11pm. We played 3 other games and they lasted until 6am. So it took around 2 hours per game. These were 4 player games and the 1st 2 we lost and we won the last game.

Ohh well I will start back in. I got to play the overlord for the first game since I was the one to read the rules and figure stuff out. From a D&D stand point it was pretty fun because I told the other player from the beginning it was similar to D&D but the difference was the overlord is trying to take out the players to win the game. So it is more of a Overlord vs hero's then overlord keeps a balance vs the heroes. Any one who plays an rpg will know what I am talking about.

As the characters were choosing their skills and starting equipment I was putting together the map and getting all the creatures and pieces together in order to play. This is a pretty nice balance as we got done at around the same time.

I started talking about overlord cards earlier and I would like to tell you some more about them but first I better start into telling you about the start of the overlord turn.

The players in the game go first and then its the overlords round he starts the game with 3 overlord cards. On the start of the overlords turn you get threat tokens equal to the number of heroes on the board and you also draw 2 overlord cards. An example would be on turn one if you had 3 heroes you would get 3 threat tokens and draw 2 cards for 5 cards total.

The threat tokens are what is used to play the overlord cards. The overlord player can have no more then 8 overlord cards in his hand at one time. You can discard overlord cards at any time to gain more threat to play a card. It seems complicated but it is very simple. On the bottom of the card there is a number to the left and one to the right. The number on the left is how many threat tokens you need to play a card. The number on the right is how many threat tokens you get if you discard the card.

Each overlord card does something different. There are 4 different types of cards and they are event, power, trap, and spawn cards. The event cards help out your monsters by doing things to benifit them. The power cards cost alot of threat but they stay on the board after paying the threat cost and do various things to really help out the overlord player. The trap cards are just that they trap chests, doors, make pits for the heroes to fall in etc. Spawn cards let the overlord spawn monsters and you can only play one spawn card per turn.

The first step to the overlords round is drawing threat and drawing cards now I would like to talk about the next step which is spawning monsters. Just like in a video game like everquest or other mmorgs you can spawn monsters in this game but it has to beout of the heroes line of sight. Also you can't spawn a monster in an unexplored area of the dungeon. For a D&D player just think of this as a random encounter check.

Last in the overlords round is activating monsters. You can play all of your monsters one time in a turn by moving and attacking with them. After you have done this it is the hero's turn again.

I have told you about hero creation now I would like to tell you about what a hero can do on their turn. Any hero can move or act first just like in D&D. The people playing the hero figures decide who is going first then play their hero. I really like this as it leads to very good gameplay and does not limit the same heroes going at the same time each turn.

There are 3 steps in a heroes turn.At the start of a heroes turn is the refreshing card step. When a card is exhausted you turn it sideways to keep track of if a hero used it. This is usually a shield as they can prevent a hero from taking a wound.

The next step is equiping items. A character can have 2 weapons equiped. An example being a sword and sheild or another being a 2 handed bow etc. Each card has a hand at the bottom that shows if a weapon is one or 2 handed. Next you can have 1 armor equiped self explainitory ,3 potions same,2 others being like rings etc, and finally a player can have 3 items in his pack. So a break down of what a player can have would be 1 or 2 weapons, 1 armor, 3 potions, 2 other, and 3 spaces for items in your backpack.

To switch around these items on a heroes turn would cost 2 move actons. The guy I picked earlier in the review had a 5 on boot or to move so at the beginning of the turn if he wanted to equip different items he would only be able to use 3 more move to do other things in the action part of the turn.

Last is the action part of the hero turn. On this part of the turn the heroes can move on the board and attack. A hero must pick one of 4 things to do. Using this as an example if a character has 5 on move he could do one of these 4 things.
A. a Run action which would double the heroes speed. So he could move 10 spaces
B. a Battle action which would let a hero attack 2 times but not move. No move so only 2 attacks
C. an Advance action which would let a hero move his speed and attack.
So he can move 5 and attack. A hero can attack at any time in the move so a hero could move 3 spaces attack and fnish moving the other 2 spaces.
D. a Ready action which would let a hero move or attack then afterwards make a ready action which is one of 4 things them being
D1. Aim used when using a ranged weapon
D2. Dodge used when a player get hit to make the overlord rerol a dice
D3. Guard can make an attack on the overlords turn
D4. Rest this lets a hero regain all of his fatigue but he can not be hit by an attack on the overlords turn or the ready order would be gone.

Note at any time during these actions you could use your fatigue to give your character 1 point of move or to use an extra black dice when attacking. An example would be if you made a battle action you could attack the 2 times and then spend 2 fatigue to move your character 2 spaces. So fatigue really shines in this game.

Well I have talked alot about the hero's and overlord so now I want to talk about character death. When a character dies he restarts the game in town. This is kind of like respawning in a video game but I think it works out well here. I like it as it adds some balance to the game so once you loose your charcater it is not gone for good. In D&D terms I guess you could think of it as your charcater ressing.

I have neglegeted to mention conquest tokens and they are very important in the game as this is what makes the overlord win the game if you run out of these tokens. On the first quest you start out with 5 tokens and you loose tokens when the overlord runs out of overlord cards or your character dies. There is a penalty if your character dies so you will want to play smart. The hero I chose as an example looses 3 conquest tokens if he dies and it varies per hero. The conquest tokens are set in a pile for everyone to see. The heroes can also gain conquest tokens during play if they open chests activate glyphs etc.

Glyphs are teleporters so you can go to town in different parts of the dungeon. They have to be activated to use them so a hero has to make it to one to use it. It is a way to speed up game play so you don't have to go all the way to the beginning of the dungeon to go back to town.

Well that is about it for the review or overview of the game I hope you liked it. A lot of people could probally have summed it up in lesser words but this is my first time doing one so I am not to good at it. I have not rated it yet but I am giving it a 10 as I have really enjoyed the game greatly.

If you see any words with the letter i missing out of them please note my little one spilled pop on my computer desk while my nephew was on the compter. He did not notice it until the pop started going on my keyboard and my i key sticks sometimes.

Nice write up.

Have the heroes won a game yet? I've played it twice so far and I've killed the heroes both times, once in the first room and once in the final room of quest 1.

Yes on the last game we played out of the 4 the hero's won. I was using Ronan, my nephew Mad Carthos, and my brother in law was using Varikas the dead, and my brother was the overlord.

Basically we kept dieing by trying to go to area 2 first so we went to area 3 and then started clearing it out and I had the skill that added 2 to movement so I ran up opened the top door and grabbed the key then closed it. We then proceeded to go to area 4 to Narthak and it was a hard fight but we won with all of us dieing one time.

I think we had opened a silver chest and a bronze one adding to the conquest tokens. I am not sure of the total for conquest tokens but I know that the heroes could not die again so it came down to the last draw for us.

Vaikas had 2 wounds left and Ronan and Carthos just died. Vaikas used 2 fatigue to move 2 spaces then battled and missed the giant the first time then the second time he did I think 6 or so damage. Then Carthos ran in and had an item that gave +1 blast with one surge. His +2 damage helped on magic attacks and I can't remember what all special skills he had. Then I advanced Ronan in and I had the skill card that let you spend fatigue to make an extra ranged attack and ended up finishing him off. It was a close game and we lost the other 2. The ame where I was overlord was just me and my nephew and brother and they lost.

We also was playing on the first 2 games when you entered the area like area 1 all the monsters were placed on the board. The last game we played with monsters being placed on the board with los to the hero's and I think that it helped us out alot. I am not quite sure exatly which it goes by but I liked the los of the hero's when entering an area alot better.

I've run it a few times. One time, when we had an experienced board gamer / RPGer involved, he realized that death != loss of items after the war of attrition was starting to weigh on the group (they hadn't figured out how to cover line of sight to prevent spawning). So he made a mad dash to get a chest opened so the treasure could be distributed because his death only lost 3 victory points and they had activated a glyph already. That changed the balance of play quite quickly based on what they got out of it, especially since the dice were with him and he survived the dash.

Thanks for the review..

Im about to buy this game, and Im currently reading all about it, that I can get my hands on

Your welcome glad you liked it. I started painting some stuff up and got about half of the hero's painted now. It has taken me a while but I am slowly getting them painted up.

I am most likely getting this game in January for 59$.

I read the rules and read a few reviews and it sounds like a great game.

For the most part it seemed complicated, but reading your review you made it seem really simple. Thank you.

Are the plastic minituares very bland? Does it really spice up the game with painted figures? Just wondering....