Announcing New Game Night Kits for Descent: Journeys in the Dark Second Edition

Help your local Descent: Journeys in the Dark Second Edition community explore Terrinoth with our new Fall 2014 Descent Game Night Kits! These exciting kits are now available for pre-order through our B2B store or your distributor.

The Descent Organized Play program provides a new, cooperative variant of Descent for players to experience. In a normal game, one player controls the forces of the overlord, assaulting the heroes with monsters and Overlord cards. However, the cooperative adventure introduced in Game Night Kits pits one to four players against encounters that represent various evils and adventures in the realm of Terrinoth. Instead of a one-against-many game, all players win or lose together.

The order deadline for these kits is May 30th, and the Fall season begins in September.

How Does Descent Work With Organized Play?

In the Fall 2014 Game Night Kit for Descent: Journeys in the Dark Second Edition, you will find a new adventure, Nature’s Ire, enabling one to four players to experience a mini campaign over the course of a single evening.

When playing Nature’s Ire, up to four players follow a twisting path, working through a series of encounters, passing tests, and battling monsters in a quest to find the missing townsfolk of Blue Rock. Every encounter is represented on an Exploration card, which features special rules and conditions that the heroes must meet before they can advance. After players complete an encounter’s objective, whether through rousing success or painful failure, a new Exploration card is drawn, and a new encounter is revealed with monsters and dangers for players to face.

In the cooperative variant of Descent, the overlord is replaced by the overlord track. A doom token and a fate token start at opposite ends of the overlord track, and players lose if the doom and fate tokens ever meet. Doom is an inescapable force that slowly progresses when the heroes fail encounters and run afoul of other disastrous events. Fate, on the other hand, is a fluctuating force that the heroes can affect both positively and negatively based on their progress. For example, whenever a hero is knocked out, fate advances by one, but when the heroes successfully complete a main encounter, they may be able to reset fate to its starting point.

The overlord track is not the only obstacle players must overcome in cooperative Descent. Monsters attack from the shadows, preying on the weak and keeping heroes from achieving objectives. In place of a human overlord player, Nature’s Ire uses cards to activate monsters and attack the heroes. Each Activation card contains actions for every monster group in Nature’s Ire, and with ten Activation cards, players will never be quite certain how the monsters will act.

Although the pace of cooperative Descent moves swiftly, players will still have a chance to increase their character’s skills and find some loot along the way. Each time the heroes complete one of the first two main encounters, they all receive experience points as a reward for victory. Players can immediately spend these experience points, securing new skills for their heroes.

Players will also be able to collect loot in Nature’s Ire by slaying monsters. Every monster they kill adds to the loot track, and when it reaches a certain point, players reveal a number of Item cards and give one to a player of their choice. The more master monsters they defeat, the more Item cards players can reveal.

What’s in the Fall 2014 Descent Game Night Kit?

Each Fall 2014 Descent Game Night Kit comes with everything a retailer needs to support and grow a local community:

• The Nature’s Ire cooperative adventure for Descent: Journeys in the Dark Second Edition
• Four translucent green power dice
• Four sets of acrylic fatigue tokens–two ‘threes’ and four ‘ones’
• Four dice bags
• One 16-page rules booklet explaining how to play a Descent: Journeys in the Dark Second Edition cooperative adventure
• A promotional poster featuring Desmond in search of the missing townsfolk
• One informational pamphlet on running a Descent event

Are You a Retailer?

If you’re interested in ordering a Fall 2014 Descent Game Night Kit, you can do so through your distributor or through our B2B store. The deadline to order is May 30th, with the season starting in September.

…