When it comes to board games, Descent: Legends of the Dark, the high-concept campaign-in-a-box from Fantasy Flight Games is as good as it gets. The app-assisted game was released back in 2021 and boasted over 50 pieces of terrain and over 36 highly detailed minutes.
Fans of the game have been waiting for news of a continuation pretty much since the game was first released and now, Fantasy Flight Games has finally unveiled the first expansion for the game, Descent Act 2: The Betrayer’s War.
In an interview with Polygon, the games lead designer Philip D. Henry said that when planning the expansion no idea was too crazy.
“One of the things the app lets us do is, we can have all of these kinds of threads behind the scenes – the manuscript is more than 140,000 words long. Players don’t need to worry about tracking what happened when they finished quest 9 in Act 1 because thanks to the app they can check that at any time and we can use that to inform the story or the mechanics, or just kind of how the story evolves.”
For those who haven’t yet experienced the joys of the first Descent game, Descent: Legends of the Dark is a cooperative game where players take on the role of a group of heroes who are tasked with defending the world of Terrinoth.
Descent Act 2: The Betrayer’s War will see all six heroes from the original game return, only with new abilities. When players jump into the sequel, the app will detect the player’s endgame state and pick up where they left off, with all of their previous successes and failures taken into account. However, if players don’t have that saved game anymore, the app will give them a quick and easy-to-follow survey to try and get them to where they finished off.
Fantasy Flight Games hasn’t revealed everything for the new expansions yet; however, we do know that players will need a copy of the original game to play this sequel, and all of the new quests will fit into the already established game footprint. Only this time, the game will build out to be taller, not wider.
According to Philip D. Henry, players can expect the terrain build to be at least 30 am off the table to match the scale of The Betrayer’s War’s big boss. This 30 cm pre-assembled miniature serves as the centrepiece of the entire experience.