Dark Venture - First Impressions

I received my copy early last week. It turned out that I actually got both the base game and the Vile Invaders expansion. I haven't had a chance to play yet, but I did read through the rules. Aside from some murkiness around the distinction between holding and equipping, the rules look pretty clean. I have barely looked at the components yet, but that and the encounter booklets must be where the magic of the game happens, because the rules seem relatively generic. In terms of influences, I suspect that this game is seeking to be a much more playable version of Magic Realm. The default rules assume a competitive environment, but there are also solo and co-op rules. I saw that the Kickstarter came with access to a music mix, but my second-hand purchase did not. So I am going to burn a couple of mix discs of my own, including a couple of tracks from the soundtracks to Wizards (1977) and some prog rock like Pink Floyd's Shine On You Crazy Diamond.

Though I was sorely tempted to play some Arkham Horror today, I felt dutybound to play recent acquistion Dark Venture. I burned two discs worth of prog rock for background music, then sat down to play a solitaire game. The rules were mostly straightforward, but setup was a bit fiddly with pieces.

My character was a freaky-looking mutant hero with leather armor and a double-bladed sword. My goal was to rack up at least 20 points worth of quest points over the course of a full day. My initial heroic quest required me to encounter an eggman, defeat him, and return a stolen item to the starting crossroads. Unfortunately, no eggmen appeared the whole game. I also had various side quests, which seemed to be more like pressing whims than anything deserving the word quest.

Right away, I met a potential follower, who seemed to be an undead mutant dwarf. He didn't like me and ran away to an adjacent location. I followed him and tried to make friends again on the following turn, but he wasn't interested. Pursuing a couple of easy side quests pushed me to explore quite a few locations. I fought some bestial dude and killed him, but didn't even feel like picking up his spear.

Later, I lucked into 3 more heroic quests and managed to accomplish both of them. I had some neutral or friendly encounters, and got a horse to ride. I cautiously avoided a fight with a hairy wolf spider dude called the dreadmortis, and finally made friends with another hero known as the Plantman. I only came up with 15 quest points, but it was enough to be called a ranger.

Dark Venture is pleasant to play, except that new characters and some encounters require you to search an entire card deck for a specific card or two. This happens at least every other turn, and then you need to re-shuffle. NPC characters are persistent, in that they stay in the game at their location unless killed, so that adds some additional fiddlyness to keep track of on the table. Initiative and combat is quick and easy. For such a compact box, Dark Venture takes up a surprising amount of table space. I suspect that the game is more fun with at least one other player.

As I said in the Arkham Horror thread, how this game handles narrative is interesting to me. Like the very few adventure games that I would consider to be good, it puts the control in your hands instead of throwing random things at you and you just have to deal with it. What really makes it unique, however, is that that control is happening both at a table-level and on a meta level, giving you the freedom to choose what NPCs and areas to populate the game with. Is that more fun with one other person? I don’t know, depends on what you’re looking for. Throwing certain locations and NPCs down in front of an opponent certainly makes it a more confrontational experience and the race to get VPs is stronger, but it also introduces a lack of control that I could do without.

For some reason this game gave me anxiety.

After reading the rulebook twice, I still felt unprepared to tackle it, since none of the rules really sunk in. We finally jumped into it and I, nervous as hell, read from the rulebook a third time as we tried to figure out how to play the thing.

It's a mess. The rules give you a sort of framework, but be prepared to have to just figure a lot of things out and make judgement calls. It's also a mess on the table, with cards and tokens and standees and cubes all over the place, making it difficult to know what's going on at any given point.

As for the gameplay, well, I can only tell you about what we deciphered as the gameplay, and only for a brief period until we decided to bag it. What I felt was, there's no reason to play this instead of Fallout or Talisman or Western Legends, or any number of other adventure type games. Its only appeal is its unique, mondo theme, which I admit was what drew me in, but that's not enough to stand on.

We bagged it after I think three rounds of digging through decks over and over and trying to figure out what the hell was happening at any given point. Two out of three of us just weren't having any fun and I gave my copy to the third guy; may he find some enjoyment in it.

Dark Venture is a sandbox adventure setting in a small box. The sandbox isn't deep, but there is enough variability for plenty of replay. What makes Dark Venture different from all the other adventure games is that the encounters stay in play and fully fleshed out stats just like the heroes. This makes the game somewhat messy and cumbersome on the table, but also yields a richer experience. In effect, it's greatest weakness and strength are linked like two sides of the same coin. It struck me like a more accessible version of Magic Realm, stripped of excessive rules but also of the control offered to MR players.

The closest comparison that I can make to Dark Venture is Escape from One Million B.C., except that Dark Venture wants to keep track of equipment and several stats for every character in the game, not just the player characters. In particular, Dark Venture wants to keep track of current hit points for all the NPCs in play, and also have them heal some damage each turn. Escape gets a little fiddly by moving characters and dinosaurs every turn, where Dark Venture only moves characters in response to specific encounters with players.

Shellhead wrote: Dark Venture is a sandbox adventure setting in a small box. The sandbox isn't deep, but there is enough variability for plenty of replay. What makes Dark Venture different from all the other adventure games is that the encounters stay in play and fully fleshed out stats just like the heroes. This makes the game somewhat messy and cumbersome on the table, but also yields a richer experience. In effect, it's greatest weakness and strength are linked like two sides of the same coin. It struck me like a more accessible version of Magic Realm, stripped of excessive rules but also of the control offered to MR players.

While doing a lot of laundry and ironing yesterday, I set up a 4-player game of Dark Venture so I could really get an understanding of the game. And it was revealing, though I only got 75% of the way through the game yesterday. It's not a long game, but I was also doing laundry, plus each character has a variety of things to keep track of, like quests and items, and the changing map state.

Dark Venture is definitely inspired by Magic Realm, but is played with less than 10% of the rules complexity of Magic Realm. If you ever wanted to play Magic Realm but couldn't get through the rules (like me), Dark Venture is the game for you. There is a lot less structure to the game, and the Dark Venture map could potentially cause sanity loss to someone with OCD. There is a lot more potential for PvP in Dark Venture, but the worst outcome is getting knocked unconscious and potentially missing a turn or even two. Where Dark Venture actually surpasses Magic Realm is the heroic quests. Magic Realm characters set their initial targets for gold, spells, notoriety, etc, and then obtain through killing enemies and finding loot. Dark Venture characters can score points in all kinds of ways, depending on their current quests and sidequests, but these quests tend to encourage specific goals instead of general opportunism.

In my game, one of the four heroes started with a very interesting heroic quest. Every time he encountered another hero (there are a total of 11 heroes in the game), he could make a Mind roll to see if that character was the traitor plotting against the king. Then he had to defeat that character in combat, to uh beat the treason out of them, to collect 6 quest points. Since this hero happened to go first on turn one, he had a convenient chance to screen 30% of the suspects immediately. Unfortunately, he made the very first roll against the big, strong hero with a heavy blade. They fought, and the strong guy knocked him out. When the strong guy got his turn, he stole the unconscious guy's armor and put it on, then walked off to seek adventure. The game was nearly half over before that first hero finally managed to beat the strong guy, collect 6 VP, and take back his armor.

Also on turn one, another character left the starting clearing, then played a wolf there for the remaining characters to fight. By the end of turn one, 2 of the player heroes were unconscious and another one was imprisoned in a tower. There is probably too much potential for PvP combat in this game, but another heroic quest showed the potential advantage of cooperation. The archer hero drew a heroic quest that involved going after twin brothers who were also tax evaders. Each brother was as tough as a hero, and sniping at them from a distance with the bow wasn't workable, as each shot would either provoke the twins to retreat or counterattack. But then the strong guy drew a heroic quest that allowed him to gain 5 quest points if he helped another player complete their own heroic quest. Working together, these two managed to eventually defeat the twins and collect the taxes.

Though I'm only 75% through the game, the plantman looks likely to win. He got lucky regarding his heroic quests, and his natural healing ability was augmented by two healing items so that he was getting back 5 hit points every turn, compared to 2 for a normal hero. It also helped that he steered clear of the PvP fighting, which seems to only be advantageous if picking on a wounded character and if a win results in quest points or a desired item.

When I stopped playing yesterday, there were at least a dozen locations in play, and nearly as many characters on the board. A few dead enemies in the discard pile, a drop pile of loot in one clearing, and a scattering of tokens indicated locations that had already been searched.

I made a house rule to address my least favorite aspect of Dark Venture: shuffling. For a game with a limited print run, it is undesirable to have a lot of card shuffling that will wear down the cards. Dark Venture constantly wants to be shuffled. At the start of the game, the first player draws three heroic quest, keeps one, and shuffles the other two back into the deck. Each player repeats this process. Most characters in the game enter play with a prefererd item or three. You take those cards from other players' hand of cards, or more likely fish through the item deck for them, and then shuffle. Several heroic quests name a specific location, character, and/or item, which must be taken from other players' hands or from the relevant decks, which are then shuffled. My house rule: when searching a deck for a card, just draw and discard rapidly and then replace the discards at the bottom of the draw deck instead of shuffling. It saves a lot of shuffling, at the expense of letting players get a preview of the order of cards in the deck.

Circling back to my original point, playing Dark Venture yields comparable results to playing a game of Magic Realm. Heroes explore, fight monsters, fight each other, team up with each other, gain loot, and rack up victory points. Magic Realm does this with a complex, detailed, internally consistent set of rules that offer strategic choices. Dark Venture gets the job done with a fairly simple set of rules that rely more on luck and less on strategy. I really like Dark Venture, but I confess that I also just purchased a copy of Magic Realm and have been studying rules and tutorials while waiting for it to arrive. Magic Realm will likely become a toad that only gets played solitaire or when I can schedule it as an event game with friends, but Dark Venture is something that can actually get played in more normal gaming circumstances.