Like many of you, I've been on the hunt for the perfect RPG board game for years. I've played just about every major one: from way back in Magic Realm through Dungeon Quest and Talisman (in various incarnations with various expansions). Through Runebound with its character deck expansions and any number of others. I've trumpted the enjoyment I found in Prophecy and lamented the length of play found in Descent. To be sure, I've found distinct and enjoyable moments in all of them (with only a few exceptions - ahem - Return of the Heroes), and yet each has left me still wanting. Tomb was only known to me as a logo with a touch of other photos on the Geek and simple claims of "Recruit a Party. Kill the Monsters. Take Their Stuff!" At least it wasn't pretentious. But would it offer anything else?

A smile split my face when I laid eyes on a stack of Tomb games at GenCon 2008. I quizzed them just a bit about how the game worked - "Does one person play as the Dungeon Master?" "No, everybody gets to do that in the game." "Are there dice?" "Yes." "It is a set adventure or what?" "It has two tombs and they are filled with different monsters and treasure each time you play." I picked up a copy to look at the box back, a claim of 2-6 players and 60 minutes of playing time and it was a hefty game. I like heavy games - makes me feel like I'm about to get my money's worth in components. But in any event, I had no expectations whatsoever. With only a bit of a pause (a few hours?) I found myself coming back, handing over the cash and claiming a copy as my own. And what happened next was pure joy.

Having some moments by myself at the Con, I found a corner of the Board Game Room, flipped slowly through the glossy pages and immediately found my smile expanding, now coupled with chuckles and statements of "yes!". This game had ideas that had gone missing in all the other games. For one, each player plays an entire party of adventurers. I really like this idea as it reminds me of all those aged computer RPGs like Wizardry, Bard's Tale and Might and Magic. It isn't like so many others where you play a single adventurer and find tag-along hirelings or followers as luck favors. No, here you spend turns recruiting your party from an Inn - another wonderful reference to CRPGs. The Inn is where you warm up, build up or retreat to lick your wounds. Each player picks 5 random adventurers from a bag, chooses one for their starting member and puts the others in the Inn. There's 84 adventurers available - but it feels more like hundreds. They are really different and *feel* different.

To clarify differences, let me explain. There are 4 stats: attack, skill, magic and holiness. And there are 3 ranks of dice: green, blue and red -each 10-sided, but green are the weakest, blue a bit better and red very nice indeed. So a character can have 2 green, 1 blue and 1 red in Attack for example. And you would roll those dice to determine hits. Each die has either a hit (an axe) or blank on each side. Again, green have just a few hits possible and red has a bunch. So right here you can see there can be wide differences in the characters. Attack is used for combat, skill for disarming traps (and other stuff), magic for spells and holiness for prayers (cleric spells) and healing. But beyond these numeric things, each character has a special thing they can do. And these are really fun, original attributes. Like one character can absorb some huge hit to your party and die - thus saving someone else in your party (he's called Chaff by the way - nice!). Or another guy (a rogue) can cause monsters to re-roll dice. Or a really interesting one actually appears 4 times in the pool - a wizard. If you have more than one of them in your party, they are all improved in their stats. Wildly good ideas here.

Anyhow, back to reading the rules. What's the dungeon like? How do you play? On your turn, you can do 1 of 9 different actions. They range from recruit a character while in the Inn to playing an action card to healing your party to picking any 2 cards from spells, prayers, items and tactics to moving your party to raiding a crypt (a room) in the tomb (dungeon). By the way, the game board is double-sided. One side has nice wide halls and maybe a dozen rooms. The other side - maybe should be called the advanced side - has what looks like more rooms, narrow halls and all kinds of special stuff like traps, magic portals and rooms with special rules (like in this room, you can't use treasures in combat). The dungeon is filled by all the players taking turns drawing cards and putting cards in the rooms - you have three and you place one, draw a new one. Rooms have a capacity of 1 to 5 cards - a bit like Talisman. So because the dungeon is filled this way, you can load a room with things that only you know about - a very nice treasure with a patsy monster or just fill it with traps. It's a nice mechanic because what do you do? Do you take a chance that you'll be the first to a certain room? But you only maybe know one or two cards in that room for sure because somebody else put the last card there. Now I admit we ignored this mechanic and played our first game by just tossing out the cards randomly - and that works too and it has the feature of speeding up the first part of the game. Filling player by player is good, however, and we played our later games that way.

Anyhow, back to the 9 actions. Pretty much they all go really fast except the raid a room. This is where the game shines and fails simultaneous. And the rulebooks isn't alot of help either (more on that in a moment). When your party raids a room, the door on the way in has an 'R' or 'L' on it - and this means the player to your left or right plays the 'Crypt Master' (CM). That guy picks up the cards out of the room and looks at them. Traps are played first (there's probably 50-60 different traps), then monsters and then, if the party survives that, they get the treasures (if any). The way traps are resolved is another original mechanic and loads of fun. Each trap is unique and all the CM tells the raiding player is how many characters in their party he can elect to try to defeat the trap and what attribute will be used. For example, you might get to use 2 characters and you'll be testing Skill. What the CM doesn't say is how many hits they need to beat the trap nor what happens if they fail. You roll the total dice for all the characters you have elected to use and if you beat it, you get experience points (XP). Rogues help here because they typically have more and better dice in the Skill attribute. If you fail, any number of terrible things happen.

After you get past any traps (and if you decide to stick it out), you fight the monsters. This is a place where the rules really stink. It wasn't clear to us on our first play how you resolve combat by monsters and character taking turns. A monster acts, then a character acts. What can a character do? He takes a 'Battle Action'. What are the possible Battle Actions? Listen close: Attack, Battle Action and Flee. So one of the Battle Actions is also *called* Battle Action. Yikes. And to further confuse things, under this "second" Battle Action it says it doesn't count as an Attack. Huh? We just had to house-rule this one. We decided that these are 3 different types of 'Battle Actions'. And each character can either Attack, take an Action or cause the entire party to Flee.

Alright, so setting that bit of confusion aside, combat plays out as you might expect. Monsters have all kinds of things they can do - and there are probably 70-80 monsters in the game, so lots of variety again. They have the same attribute package as characters and some interesting effects. Monsters have hit points ranging from 1 to maybe 5 or 6. Characters typically have 2 or 3 hp. And combat is a ping-pong affair. One of the monsters attacks first (chosen by the CM) and one character takes the hit for the party (chosen by the raiding player). Then one of the characters attacks and chooses a target monsters. This all gives the party a small advantage - and is also really enjoyable since you get to decide which of your characters might die. You push him forward - "take a hit for us, fighter!" - and he takes the hit. And in general, the party outnumbers the monsters so they get more attempted hits before the monsters get to try it out again. This all feels right - again, just like so many CRPGs of the past.

I have to say resolving a room is very time consuming. 60 minute play time? I can't see it ever happening. The problem here is the number of combination effects. It's what you want in this type of game - my spell does this, and my special ability does that, but my treasure can do this other thing and then the monster has this special effect - it gets sticky with lots of questions and comments. But again, that's what makes this game great too - because there's so much to play with here. Spells are really cool and so are a number of treasures in the game (there's certainly a good 60-70 treasures available). Spell casting is easy - you have a hand of cards that you gain from hanging around in the Inn. They are of two types: Wizard Spells and Cleric Prayers. Spells generally cause damage or do other booming effects and Prayers heal and do clericy things. There's no hand limit, so you can sit in the Inn and collect spells and prayers to be able to cast later. Many spells are used and discarded. Many others are used and attached to your wizard or cleric in your party and can be used again and again. Very nice! If a character dies, all attached spells and items are discarded.

The way you win the game is by 'banking' treasure, monsters and traps. Treasures - you can optionally bank them when you find them or you can equip them and use their effects. Keep in mind if that character dies, the treasures he has are discarded - so that's the risk. When the last room is cleared, the game is over. This is a nice abrupt end that I appreciate. Now to be honest, it's a weakness too. Recall that some rooms can have up to 5 cards. If that's stacked with monsters - especially with some of the tough monsters - then the game can truly drag on for a long time. Somebody has to test that room and see how ugly it is. And then everybody else has to buff up in the Inn or by taking out other rooms to get enough spells and treasures and a nice enough party to take it out. It feels fine, but does take time.

Let me just wrap up here with a few more comments. I really, really like Tomb. It is just an incredible dungeon romp. It has an incredible amount of variety given the size of the tomb deck and number of characters available. It plays like I want this type of game to play: with an inn, spells, items, tactics (I didn't talk about those, but that's basically a stack of 'other' action cards), monsters, treasure and a (almost fast) unique dungeon set up. Nobody has to be the dungeon master for the entire game which means nobody has to spend time being superior. For me, it's my new favorite. Prophecy? I'm going to let it gather dust. Runebound? It doesn't stack up well anymore. Descent? That one is a convention game or for some crazy long gaming weekend.

I played Tomb three times at Gencon when I could have played any number of other games instead in the same time. And you know what? Tomb *made* Gencon for me. It made it fun. It made it a huge smiling experience. I went back to the AEG booth and told them: "You guys need to update BGG. You need to promote this game better to that community because I'm telling you, they will *love* this game."

One final note: you can play this game solo. That makes it a home run for me. Not since Magic Realm could I pull that off. I may indeed have found that one game I've been looking for: the fast way fun dungeon romp. So far, it certainly is wildly fun!