A bit of background of what happened.
Descent Journeys in the Dark is one of those dungeon crawl boardgames that did not find a good target audience. The game is good but is not child friendly enough to play with kids and it takes way to long to play as an adult. It also tries to be serious and not-serious at the same time, the DC of dungeon crawls.
That being said I liked both the first and second edition and I own both of them and a good number of expansions. We had a rather small but fun and passionate community around this game. We also had a very good relation with the designers that would often ask about balance issues or how would this card play in x scenario.
Shortly before or early during the pandemic Fantasy Flight made a new Descent game, Descent Legends of the dark.
https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2020/10/22/descent-legends-of-the-dark/
The game featured every woke trope, a they/them character, a furry character, strong white female warrior, a black girl dwarf with a butch lesbian haircut, a broken shell of a white male elf and a magic black dude. No option for other heroes - older versions had a mix of female and male of everything, not anymore, you have to play woke characters.
There was also announced how the team was almost all new young hires. I think the older devs were somewhat involved but they were already working on the Star Wars games and probably other games.
Needless to say we were not happy with the game so Fantasy Flight did the normal thing and nuked our forums. No one was saying anything racist just that we did not like the art and the characters are not popular with players, is hard to buy an expensive game when your regular players do not like the characters or that 3d cardboard terrain tends to break. But they did take down all the forums as they could not allow fan criticism.
Time passed and the expansion they announced does not look to be in any news anymore, as far as I can tell it is on indefinite freeze.
I've also checked the download for the app that is connected to this game. It has 10k downloads despite being required to play. This is an abysmal number considering that the game can't be used without the app.
There was an app for the previous version of Decent, that was completely optional and it was made very late in the games and there was little hype anymore but it still had over 100k downloads.
We do not have sells numbers but it does look like the game is a major flop.
OK maybe I'm a boomer but why the heck does a boardgame need an app??
Decent 2nd edition had an app, that was totally optional. It offered new campaigns and the app acted as an AI for the monsters. It was very popular. They introduce the app after most people played the game for a long time so it freshened things up.
FF however did not realize that we liked it as an additional feature not as the main game. Is like saying you like ketchup and then being offered just ketchup on a plate.
Now their new boardgame - is part mobile game. So is not even a proper boardgame. If you wanted a mobile game is not hard to move the entire darn thing on a tablet and be done with it.
To me is more of a thematic thing. I want boardgame to be just cardboard, plastic and dice and being able to play without technology. I still like having a technology to help if you want but not being mandatory to play. It just feels like moving towards a computer game.
That's my worry. More specifically it gets the consumer reliant on the corporations making product and more vulnerable to getting nickel and dimed just to play something they ostensibly own.
More generally I worry it's part of the general societal trend of moving people to the pods and mediating all relationships through a screen. Can't stand things like tabletop simulator for that reason lol
It all serves to making atomized corporate and state slaves of us all.
I don't think they didn't realize that.
Look at the Warhammer Fantasy 3rd Edition which was also by FF. They intentionally added special dice and cards that you needed in order to play the RPG. And of course you never had enough dice/cards so you needed to buy additional packs if you wanted to have a fun/smoothe experience.
FF is purely managed by greed.
It's beautiful. The app can be used to track and harvest data from users, disable used product sales into perpetuity, link players to accounts and ban them for wrongthink, and retroactively censor and remove content post printing.
It's everything pathological cultural marxists could want.
The X-Com boardgame has one as well. Every player has a unique role (researcher, commander, ...) and the initial phases of a round are time limited. If you manage everything in time (the app shows you that) you get a bonus if not you are punished. It also tells you at which locations enemy UFOs spawn.
After the times phase it tells you the order of the other phases and it has an easy summary what to do. So you don't have to consult the rulebook as often if you rarely play.
Oh man, Descent 2nd edition was the tits- I remember that I sucked HARD as a dark lord, and the rest of my friends didn't want to play as the bad guy. The day we discovered that there is an app that allows the AI to assume the role of the antagonist was the day we played the game for half a day straight
I bought Descent 2nd edition just before they announced this new game. Now every expansion is so expensive on second hand markets because there will be no reprints and people were smart enough to not buy the new one. if only I knew earlier I would buy at least 2 or 3 expansions. Right now I'm in the middle of translating and printing all class and equipment cards from expansions on my own, this alone should make the game last for years. Shame there are no 3D files for us to print the miniatures and map tiles.
Are there similar, non-woke co-op games for 3 players with multiple classes and characters? I was wondering about Gloomhaven (tho it might be too complicated for one of my friends) and Arkham Horror LCG ( I know it's not that similar, but I've heard only good things about this game) but I'm afraid this game will be dead before I'll buy one full expansion, because it seems FFG runs on fumes rn and sells their property left and right to other companies😔.
Edit: Thank You guys, I really appreciate the answers. I'll talk with my friends later this week and talk about getting Jaws of the Lion 1st to see if the normal Gloomhaven is for us
Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion offers a paired down Gloomhaven experience. It's cheaper and more streamlined than the box box version. Haven't played Descent, so I can't do I side to side comparison. My group didn't find Jaws to be very complex but we also trend towards more complex games in general.
YMMV of course: My group played Descent 1st, then 2nd, edition fairly regularly. We got most of the expansions, painted some of the figures, we were into it. But since Gloomhaven we haven't even looked at it, so much so that when the owner announced he might need to sell all his Descent stuff to make some room and some cash we were cool with it. No one even offered to buy it off him. (The one time we got a craving of any note, someone had the Star Wars themed version of the system and that was good enough.)
Played through Gloomhaven twice, plus Jaws of the Lion once (great standalone, some parts of which can be used to expand Gloomhaven) and Forgotten Circles once (utter garbage, don't bother).
We're nervously optimistic about Frosthaven, our two main concerns being the wokeness starting to seep in and the Forgotten Circles guy being part of the development team.
Oh, you probably know this but unlike base Descent, Gloomhaven's monsters don't require a player to control them. We do use an app, but a free one for managing monsters so the guy in charge of keeping track of them doesn't have like six decks of monster AI cards and a bunch of big square monster ability/HP cards taking up space.
Honestly the best part of Descent was having a competitive overlord. Even more so in 2nd edition then the first. It can be a lot of fun if you like that 1 vs many stile. Is why I liked Descent.
Definitely try Gloomhaven for the coop, probably the best out there. I've tried Sword and Sorcery, is fine but it is just not enough customization and fights are to easy. DnD boardgames are surprisingly fine, nothing spectacular but they are very easy to set up, rules are very basic and I remember decent boss fights. The price was lower then other products and it was fun to play.
If you want an easy 1vs many style, heroquest had a reprint recently so you can probably find it at a decent price on a discount. Expect some changes from the original, they added female orcs and female mummies and the elf character is now female.
Unfortunately, much like MTG, D&D, and a lot of other "nerd" hobbies, board games are another hobby where its industry has become utterly infested with woke "soc justice" types.
The board games sub on reddit has gotten especially bad, as well.
Get woke, go something something
Get woke, get ESG money.
I only stopped recommending War of the Ring because it pays the woke Tolkien estate, but if you can find a used and complete copy of it, buy it. Considering you like the theme, it's easily my favorite multi-hour two-player board game.
This is an eerie, dark age. I see Wokeness as the (alcohol) Prohibition of his age. A great folly, popular until realised then just as swiftly hated and abandoned.