Tomb: Recruit a party. Kill the monsters. Take their stuff.

The folks at AEG sent out a demo copy of their new game Tomb to the shop and I decided that it would be rude NOT to try it out! So I took it along to FAQ (http://www.black-lion.co.uk/societies/faq) last week to see what we thought of it. This review is based on that play alone.

First off the components for this game are beautiful. You get two boards, the Inn board and a two-sided Dungeon board so you can choose which tomb to pillage. There are lots of character markers made out of thick cardboard with plenty of stands to hold those that make up your adventuring party and those you want to recruit. There are so many characters that the game also comes with a poster so you can scan them quickly. There are also several decks of cards: spells, prayers, items and tactics cards and an enormous crypt deck full of monsters, traps and treasure to go into the tomb.

The three types of dice in Tomb have different chances of success: Green dice have a 30% chance of success, blue dice 50% and red a whopping 70% chance of success. Each character piece shows the 4 skills used in the game: Attack, Skill, Magic and Holiness and how many dice of each colour this character can roll when using the skill. One negative thing about the components is the choice of colours for the dice and the adventuring party markers. The blue and green dice are really hard to tell apart in bad light and some of the party markers are too close as well. This is a small grumble though because I’d rather have good mechanics and have to squint at the dice then bad mechanics and lovely components.

The premise of Tomb is that you are trying to assemble an adventuring party to raid a tomb full of individual crypts where you will kill monsters and take their stuff. Traps, monsters and treasure all have an XP value on them and at the end of the game (once all the crypts within the tomb have been cleared of cards) the player with the most XP wins.

The large crypt deck means there is a huge variety of monsters, traps and treasure and every game will be different. What ensures this is that these cards are laid in the crypts by the players. So you may know that you put some nice treasure into a certain crypt but you don’t know what your mates have been adding in there!

Each player takes a starting character out of a choice of 5 randomly picked characters. Those discarded then go into the inn and can be recruited later by you and your opponents. You can then choose how to spend your turns: while in the inn you can recruit more people to your party, draw cards from the spell, prayer, item and tactic decks. Or you can enter the Tomb and attempt to raid the crypts or even pickpocket other adventuring parties for a choice item.

When you raid a crypt an R or L on the door tells you whether the person to your right or your left will become the cryptmaster. The cryptmaster gets to take all the cards out of the crypt and play them against you. The first cards revealed are the trap cards, if you pass that then the monster cards are revealed all at once and if you defeat all of them then the treasure cards are passed to you. This means that if you flee during the encounter the cryptmaster is in the position of knowing what treasure is left and whether it is worth going there for it.

Our game ran to about 3 hours but we were all new to the game and still learning the rules. We found that the rulebook was badly laid out and it often took us a while to find the information we needed which also didn’t help with our playing time. I fully expect playing time to go down the next time I play even with new players because I have a better grasp of the rules now and can answer questions rather than having to search through the rulebook for 5 minutes. There is also an FAQ available which should help and the designers of the game seem keen for people to ask them rules questions either in the Board Game Geek Tomb forums or on the AEG ones.

Overall I was very impressed with Tomb. I know at least one of the guys we played with felt there was way too much downtime. However, I was interested in the game the whole way through because even during other people’s turns there was a chance to gather information. That unsuccessfully raided tomb definitely has some treasure in it and I think I can take that monster, hmm maybe I should go there next. The guy to my left has a character that makes him uber-strong when he’s cryptmaster so I should avoid crypts he’d be running for me. Tomb was good fun, interested me during the whole game and I am quite desperate to play again!