Picked this game up at GenCon yesterday. I hadn't heard anything about it, but watching the demos a couple selling points caught my attention. The goal seems to be a full-on role playing experience in less time, without the requirement to have a DM plan an entire game.

This speaks to me. To put this game into context I'll first mention that my fantasy board gaming experience is somewhat limited. I play games mostly with my family and am not a true D&D type gamer. My family likes Talisman, but every time we've played the fun tends to peak before the end of the game. The turns get kind of repetitive: roll, move, fight; repeat. Despite the overall repetition, we just love the way the characters gain various weapons, followers, and abilities.

On the other extreme we have tried Descent three different times now and never get past the second room before running out of evening. I appreciate what they've done and the game is certainly impressive but unless I took some sort of Descent DM certification course I could never run a game fast enough for my family to finish in a reasonable time.

Enter "Tomb". We played the game last evening after returning home from GenCon and I think we may have a winner on our hands. Granted, the first game did take 3 hours and we only played 3/4 of the tombs on the 'easy' side of the board, but the good news is that by mid-game everyone except my 9-year old had a good grasp of the rules and was really getting into the gameplay. The ability to decide how many crypts you want to fill make the game length very customizable.

So what is the gameplay? Each player recruits a party of characters from the inn and goes on raiding parties to clear crypts. Smaller tombs are closer to the inn and larger tombs are farther away. The tombs themselves are just collections of cards describing the various traps, monsters and treasures that have been placed there by the players at the beginning of the game. There is definite strategy to placing items, however on our first game we didn't know what was good/bad, so it was all pretty random. I immediately forgot everything I placed.

Tomb does a pretty good job of organizing the player's turn. First, a player can adjust equipped items on their party. Move a sword here, switch spells on the two wizards in the party, etc. Then the player needs to make a choice about what type of turn this is by doing one of the following:

- Recruit a new member for your party at the Inn
- Use your clerics to heal party members
- Acquire items for your party at the inn.
- Move the party toward a crypt
- Raid a crypt
- Return to the inn

Raiding crypts is the core of the game, but everything else you *could* do with a turn is always a strategic choice on how much risk you are willing to take by attacking crypts potentially out-manned and out-gunned.

There is a huge stack of cards for traps, monsters, and treasures, as well as 84 different potential party members. Lots of of monsters, treasures, characters and items have special abilities that can be used; not to mention the tactic cards and spells and prayers available to the magic characters.
Tomb does a relatively good job of keeping it all straight. There are three main types of abilities:

- Turn: You can use this ability instead of doing one of the things listed above. These are often powerful, but you can't do them in combat and they do consume your entire turn.

- Battle Actions: These can be taken as a battle action instead of (I think) the character performing an attack.

- React: These can be played at any time on anyone's turn whenever the trigger occurs. For example "React: When a character dies, The scepter of skulls resurrects it and they are added to your party. Discard this card" (that is a made-up example).

Other abilities are constant when attached to a character.

When fighting monsters, the battle order is monster-character-monster-character, etc., until every monster and character have had an attack. That is a single battle round, and rounds continue until either all monsters are defeated or the player decides to cut-and-run.

One thing I found confusing is that DM for that crypt selects which monster attacks but the raiding player selects who will take the damage. Conversely, the when the party is attacking, the raiding player selects both the character attacking and the monster to take the damage.

The attribute rating mechanic is also worthy of mention. the game comes with 21 10-sided dice. 7 green, 7 blue, 7 red. All the dice have either blanks or hits. No numbers. Green dice have 3 potential hits on the dice, blue 5, and red has 7 of 10. Clearly, rolling red dice result in more hits.

The attributes of attack, skill, magic and holiness having ratings composed of how many dice of each color you roll. For example my fighter may get 1 green, 3 blue and 2 red dice, and his spear may add 1 green and 1 red dice to the attack. When you roll you simply count the hits and that's the damage to the creatures hit points. It's a very easy system to use, yet supports a wide range of attribute values.

Complaints
I do have a few.
Some of the abilities are a little incomprehensible. One card I had allowed a character in my party to add his attack in with a currently attacking party member, it had the statement "This counts as an attack for only both party members". Huh? I had no idea if the character adding his attack would still be able to attack himself that round. Other cards also caused some quizzical looks around the table.

As with any system that provides lots of interacting abilities, the potential exists for occasional unbalanced gameplay. My son was just beside himself with two of his party members. he had a powerful wizard with a spell that let him roll his magic attribute against the creature's HP. If he exceeded that value, the creature was instantly killed. He also had a fighter that doubled wound damage, and he put a good weapon on the guy and was regularly able to dish out 14+ damage on an attack. My son won the game quite handily btw (65 XP to the next closest player at 24).

I also am not crazy about the party tokens that move around the board. They have identical artwork with very subdued color differences.

All in all, I suspect Tomb will see frequent play this year in our house. Right now the argument is whether we use the persistent XP campaign rules. With 65 XP my son has already qualified for a free re-roll at the beginning of the game to determine start order.