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.
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.