Over the last couple of months, I have been playing Sword and Sorcery with a couple of my friends as part of a weekly game night. Sword and Sorcery is a fully-cooperative fantasy campaign game of heroes taking on hordes of enemies with some light role-playing elements. Since it’s a campaign game, it fits right into what I want to be doing, and I was really excited to have some folks who were interested in regularly meeting up to play. Though the initial campaign (Immortal Souls) was only six sessions, we are planning on continuing on to additional content in the coming weeks.
My spoiler-free thoughts on the game after the jump.
First, it should be said that I own the kickstarter version of the game, which has some extra components that are pretty cool (and also available for retail, but aren’t in the base version of the game) – metal coins and plastic chests and doors. Without the upgrade, these are cardboard components, and, with the coins especially, the upgraded pieces add a bit more board presence, which is nice. I also have a few extra heroes, treasures, emporium items and other goodies that I just added as I saw fit. I left out a lot of stuff that added complexity (such as backgrounds), but that was mostly to keep the gameplay smooth and setup as short as possible.
From a gameplay perspective, the game played relatively well. Adventure setup takes a bit of time, but I feel like it is significantly less than Galaxy Defenders (the sci-fi co-op game also by Gremlin Project) or Descent 1e (Fantasy Flight’s dungeon crawler). One major improvement over Galaxy Defenders is the new encounter deck doesn’t have to be customized for each adventure – this makes one less deck to build on setup and one less deck to separate back out on tear-down.
During play, the action feels pretty good – the way special action cooldowns work is pretty novel, and easily allows tracking various abilities in various stages of cooldown without a ton of extra chits. For me, I also feel like the enemy AI is complex enough without being overly complicated – sure, it usually boils down to either walking over and hitting their preferred target, or attacking from range, but when you have multiple guys on the table, that makes more sense than the very complicated AI of Kingdom Death: Monster.
In terms of the Immortal Souls quest itself, I liked the story but there were definitely some dangling threads that I hope get picked up later. The pacing seemed pretty good, but I do think we outclassed our opponents in the later couple of missions (twice we found ourselves on an empty map with no enemies for multiple turns). I also really like the branching story that takes player choices into account – it gave the action more meaning than just killing all the orcs. On the other hand, the extra book of secrets was a little too obfuscated; it would be nice if they listed all possible terrain/models that you might need in a given mission so that I didn’t have to go hunt for them mid-game. Sure, there are some surprises that are ruined by this, but the genre savvy among us weren’t that surprised.
Overall, Sword and Sorcery is quite a good action adventure dungeon crawler. It beats out Descent (first edition, to be fair) and Galaxy Defenders, but doesn’t quite hit the level of Fireteam Zero (for me).