Re: New dungeon crawl board game: Super Fantasy: Ugly Snouts Assault

Posted by MortiS-the-Lost on Apr 08, 2014; 11:12am
URL: http://the-lost-and-the-damned.71.s1.nabble.com/New-dungeon-crawl-board-game-Super-Fantasy-Ugly-Snouts-Assault-tp7580705p7580725.html

Excellent - Nice to see someone else posting reviews here!

Most of the time when I buy a game, it will be one that contains miniatures that I can use in other games so that even if I don't ever play the game I've still got something out of it. So for that reason I probably wouldn't buy this game - The wooden bits are nice, but firmly on the side of being board-game components rather than miniatures.

I think perhaps I would like to see a future edition of this game which included miniatures, perhaps stylised ones like the ones from the strangely similarly titled 'Super Dungeon Explore' but Chibi, Bobble-head and/or Manga style miniatures aren’t really my thing.

Talking of Super Dungeon Explore I'd be interested to know how Super Fantasy compares rules wise to Super Dungeon Explore as from the box cover alone it would appear to be some what of a copy-cat game. I've never played SDE but I'd like to get hold of a few of their chest/mimic miniatures for my own games.


 ^ Super Dungeon Explore

Of course I see no reason this game couldn't be played using miniatures from another game, it wouldn't be hard to match the Heroes from this game with existing miniatures from any number of sources. The 'Ugly Snouts' of course can be represented by nearly any Orc miniatures but I feel  OtherWorld's Pig-Faced Orcs would be a most appropriate (if rather expensive) choice.



New mechanics however are always interesting to me because I'm constantly looking for new things I can incorporate into my own rules.

The 'charging spells' mechanic seem quite interesting and it sounds like it would fairly easy to incorporate into HeroQuest by using the 'black shields' on the HQ combat dice in the same way as the stars on the Super Fantasy dice.

I'd be interested to know how many Sword, 2 Swords and Stars symbols appear on each dice.
The dice rather remind me of the ones included in the D&D Adventure Board-Game and it sounds like the basic 'to hit' mechanic of SF works in much the same way, however the combined 'dice as action points' mechanic gives this game a whole new dynamic - over all the mechanics rather reminds me of the way the dice work in Elder Sign and Arkham Horror, but crossed with Space Hulk in a strange but certainly effective way.

The turn tracker/timer reminds me of DragonStrike but again this game add just a little twist to a basic mechanic to make it unique - moving the timer an extra space when a hero gets knocked out certainly add tension to the game and of course keeping the hero in the game and the player playing make the game a lot more friendly to play than the typical 'you're dead it's game-over for you' way of doing things. This sort of thing could be easily added to DragonStrike or any other game with a timer mechanic for that matter.

The spawning points of course bring to mind the recently trilogy D&D dungeon crawlers (Castle Ravenloft, Wrath of Ashardalon and The Legend of Drizzt) and although I see why they've done the Fate Dice based mechanic for spawning monsters, I can't help but think a card-based mechanic might have worked better for the varying monster stats of SF.


 ^ Apparently there's a 4th one now too

Having now read about the way Super Fantasy plays, I'd say the reason solo-play has added difficulty is probably to counter-act the habit of solo-players going easy on themselves when it comes to the monster's turn. As with most of these corporative games I don't consider AI rules to be a selling point and house-ruling in some optional GM rules would go a long way towards making the monster more challenging.

Poor translation might kill this game for a lot of people, but I'd  like to see what Marco would make of the original Italian version should he come across it.