Thinking about updating Tomb

As I mentioned in the what board games are you playing thread, Tomb has always held a special place in my heart. No one would call Tomb a perfect game, but it has some endearing qualities.

Any time I have a game idea, I write it down. I have a lot of them. Most of them will never become anything, because they are just ideas with no substance. Yesterday, though, something notable happened. I was thinking about Tomb, as one does, and all of a sudden 3 of my fragmented game ideas coalesced into one actual game idea. At the core of it would be Tomb, but updated and streamlined (had to work that word in there, Jim!) for today.

My question to those of you familiar with Tomb is, what are the parts of Tomb you hated / loved?

Side question to people familiar with Euro games; I almost never play Euro games, I generally hate them. But I am aware of a scoring mechanism that I want to appropriate; what is a game that uses the following: all players have to take a given action, but the first person to do it pays more, the second person pays a bit less, etc. It would be the opposite of the Ritual of Annihilation from Cthulhu Wars.

A bit on my current thinking:

• The setting is modern day; all party members are regular folks.
• Attacking other parties directly is out; I always felt this was half-baked in the original, and it resulted in a ton of extra rules complexity
• All players have the same end game goal towards which they are racing; no more banking XP
• Strict equipment rules that prevent power creep
• Enemies have come to our world via portals, ala Doom
• It's called Dungeon Mall

It got a lot of play around here in its time, iirc, most people weren't fans. I wish I remember what their beefs were.

A good way to update it would be to put it in a recycling bin.

I don’t even realy remember why I didn’t like it.

I’ll be damned, I actually found my old review of it. God, it’s a bad review. Too long.


One of the games getting the most buzz after this year’s Gen Con was TOMB- the first board game published by CCG/RPG firm Alderac Entertainment Group, a company etter reknowned for cult classic CCGs such as LEGEND OF THE FIVE RINGS and WARLORD.. I thought that the concept was particularly novel and offered something new to the dungeon crawl genre- players control competing parties of adventurers that are recruited at an inn and their combined abilities and acquisitions contribute to the relative strength and survivability of the party. It’s a definite change from the “one character per player” impetus of dungeon crawl games like DUNGEON and HEROQUEST or the purely cooperative play of a game like DESCENT. I was sold on it, but I’m an easy mark for this particular genre- what was interesting to me about the initial reaction was that a lot of folks, including Eurogamers, were giving the game higher marks than I would have expected.

The goal is to earn as many XPs (a fantasy way of saying “victory points”) as possible by killing monsters, overcoming traps, and picking up treasures- pretty straightforward stuff. The game features two different dungeons filled with various rooms into which pre-designated numbers of Tomb cards (bearing those previously mentioned monsters, traps, and treasures) are placed at the beginning of the game with the vaults nearest the entrancing getting one or two cards and deeper chambers getting five cards. One of the dungeons has special rooms with various effects and a couple of on-board traps, teleporters, healing wells, and other landmarks. Once the rooms are filled, players- represented by a counter with the TOMB logo and a graphic on it that represents the entire party- can recruit adventurers from a pile that are sitting waiting for a job at the Inn, a sideboard area where spells, prayers, equipment, and tactics cards can also acquired to increase a party’s life expectancy- at least a little bit.

Once a party consisting of any number and combination of rogues, fighter, clerics, wizards- each with a unique special ability- is assembled, the player can send them down into the titular Tomb to raid the rooms. Each room designates a player to the right or left of the raider that gets to manage any monsters or traps that may be in the room. Combat and skill checks are a success-based system wherein players roll colored d10s that have varying probabilities attempting to reach a target number of successes- green dice have a 30% chance of hitting, blue 50% and red will put axe to skull 70% of the time. And most characters will roll a combination of these according to their particular stats in Attack, Skill, Magic, and Holiness. Treasures and weapons generally add dice or bump up character’s dice to the next highest color. There are tons of possible combinations of character, item, and spell effects and of course weird but not insurmountable rules issues pop up out of the variability.

So most of the game is getting a party ready and equipped for a dungeon dive, making your way to a room, raiding it, and then seeing what’s in there. When enough of your party has bit the dust you head back up to the inn to hire some more hapless saps to feed to the dungeon- apparently there’s no adventurer’s union and word never gets around that turnover in your party is awfully high. Characters die with an alarming frequency so it’s best to not get too attached to any of them- and since there’s no character development or progression beyond sticking an item or spell on them, there’s not really any reason to care about them anyway. When your party finds treasure, it can be banked for guaranteed VPs (sorry, “XPs”) at the end of the game or attached to a character so they can use it. If they die, however, the item and its points are lost forever. Once all the rooms are emptied, the game ends and the person with the most VPs (damn it, I mean “XPs”) wins the game.

It all sounds pretty good so far, right? There’s theme, solid interaction, some fun die-rolling, tons of characters, monsters, treasures, and traps. There’s a couple of twists, like the fact that a party with a rogue can rob another party of a treasure by being within walking distance and making a skill check, that add some punch and nastiness to it. There is a good sense of surprise and uncertainty in exploring the rooms and the huge variety created by the interactions of card effects, character abilities, and item buffs imparts upon the game that feeling of vast possibility (along with rules weirdness) that characterize the best adventure games. It’s not surprising that the game has a CCG pedigree and that the designer, John Zinser, cut his teeth on that kind of variable, fluid design.

All of the good will I had toward TOMB crashed and burned when I actually sat down to play the game and it turned out that TOMB is a sloppy, unpolished design that feels like some prototype you’ve been suckered into “playtesting” by a guy who told you how awesome his game was going to be. I knew the game was in trouble during the setup phase, which is a protracted process wherein players have a hand of three tomb cards and take turns placing them in the Tomb rooms. The idea is that players have a little control over what’s in each room, so you’d think that you could put a bunch of traps in one room and then casually avoid it for the rest of the game, letting your competitors walk into their doom. That’s certainly possible in the small one- or two- card rooms, but once three or four other players have put cards in rooms it becomes pretty much impossible to remember what is where- let alone when you actually start to play the game. This process takes 15-20 minutes depending on the players and is best replaced by simply dealing cards out randomly- and unseen- to each room.

OK, so a simple house rule fixes that part. But it doesn’t really get any better. So much of the game seems to be spent in the Inn, drawing cards and picking out adventurers. It doesn’t help that the character cards are printed with tiny text that analysis-paralysis prone players are going to insist on reading every time they select a character. This may mean that a player is spending five or more minutes looking over the 10-12 characters available at any time. I’m not a math person, so when I was picking characters I really had no idea if a character that had 2 green dice and 1 blue die was a better fighter than one that had 1 red die. In a couple of my games, the players mutually agreed that it was better to either pick characters based on the class you need to round out the party or the awesomeness of their names or pictures than their special abilities or stats.

TOMB states that it’s a 60 minute game, but that’s surely a joke. With one or two players 60 minutes is possible if unlikely, but a five or six player game is going to be three hours despite a simple “one action” turn structure- that being said, TOMB is definitely best as two or three player game. As when picking characters, the game tends to slow to a literal crawl when a player raids a room. It is a very interactive encounter, with an adjacent player controlling the monsters and traps, but it’s strictly an exchange between two players and in rooms with three or four cards a single raid can wind up easily taking ten minutes as players pour over their tiny-text character cards to decide who should fight or attempt to disarm a trap and then analyzing which of their cards they should play to tip the odds. The outcome is almost always massive party death unless the raiders have overwhelming superiority. It really kind of gets old going back to the inn and picking out a new party every time your people get ruthlessly slaughtered.

I really hate how TOMB handles characters as disposable heroes that are little more than an expendable, faceless resource- it’s completely contrary to the whole “RPG on a board” concept and unlike a game like DUNGEONQUEST where you have a single character whose loss will mean that you are eliminated from the game the stakes never feel like they are particularly high- if everybody dies, you can just go get some more idiots to follow you into the dungeon that are just as good if not better than your former colleagues. It’s cool that the 84 character cards are all unique (except for a couple of copies of some cloned wizard) in terms of special abilities and statistics, but they really have no character whatsoever since there is no character development or advancement beyond attaching items and spells to them. I think Mr. Zinser attempted to address that shortcoming with the treasure mechanic, whereby players can choose to attach powerful (and VP XP-rich) treasures to characters that are lost upon their deaths. So you have a choice to make your people stronger, but you risk losing points.

I’m sure Mr. Zinser thought that was pretty clever, giving the player a choice to increase chances of success while also increasing risk. However, it just doesn’t work and it imparts a MUNCHKIN sensibility to the game where players with the best treasures immediately become targets for other players to actively attempt to reduce points. Of course, when you’re robbed by a rogue they’re going to take your best treasure. And of course when you’re raiding a dungeon the player controlling the monsters is going to pick the character with the best treasure to attack. Getting a really sweet treasure is much more of a liability than a boon and since there’s such an extreme turnaround in terms of characters there’s never a sense that your characters are “powering up”- they’re just becoming bigger targets. I don’t have any problem with “bash the leader” mechanics and I generally like games that have a high fatality rate. But the presence of these traits in TOMB feel more like lazy design than brutally fun gameplay elements.

TOMB feels very much like the kind of game that was pretty much par for course in the early to mid 1990s- before SETTLERS and contemporaneous with the rise of the CCG largely on the back of MAGIC: THE GATHERING. Not that there weren’t great board games being published back then, but there were an awful lot of sloppy, boring, and less-than-innovative games floundering around the board game shelves of any given retailer. Designs seemed lazy, uninspired, and repetitive. It was that stagnant environment, where crudely designed fantasy games struggled to find traction against new gaming alternatives, where TOMB would fit in most nicely and playing the game really kind of reminded me of how advanced and modern games like DESCENT or PROPHECY are. TOMB is a total throwback to standard fantasy board game mechanics despite its attempts at modernization and simplification. But more significantly, games like that feel complete, polished, and well-considered. TOMB feels rough around the edges, and not in an endearingly scrappy way.

I am tremendously disappointed in TOMB and I’m frankly surprised at how much I despise the game- broken down along mechanical lines, there are games that are much more crude and primitive, much less soundly designed, that I absolutely adore. DUNGEON is a good example- it’s almost the most braindead, idiotically designed game ever published but it has a real charm and a singular personality that makes it one of the most purely fun games ever published. A game can be practically half-designed and stupendously clumsy in its execution and still be fun. It could be that TOMB tries to be more than that, offering players the illusion of strategy with that whole setup routine and the ability to pick and choose characters. The victory point thing (yes, they’re victory points- get over it) doesn’t have the same attraction or thematic pull as trying to survive the night in the dungeon, or to accumulate the most money, or to beat some ultra powerful boss monster. Instead the game feels like it’s stuck in some kind of moebius loop of dying and recruiting to a degree that there’s no feeling of questing, adventuring, or narrative.

The game, despite good production values, a fresh conceptual element, and plenty of die rolling, card-flipping mayhem, falls completely flat and feels repetitive and tedious when it should feel unpredictable and fun. Everything about the design feels second rate outside of the “you control a party” conceit and it turns out that any originality in the game is pretty much an illusion. This is the same fundamental game as DUNGEON, SORCEROR’S CAVE, DUNGEONQUEST, or any other dungeon crawl but with the impetus moved from survival, adventure narrative, and character development to getting victory points as quickly and efficiently as possible- it’s kind of like a Euro in that respect and that may explain the appeal it has in those quarters. A big part of the game is budgeting time because deciding how many turns to spend in the Inn getting equipped and recruiting heroes versus turns spent trying to get a hold of treasure is the most significant decision in the game.

The rules, with their inconsistent terminologies and failure to work without a thorough FAQ, seem like they aren’t quite beyond reproach. I could probably come up with ten or fifteen house rules and rules tweaks that would make the game better overall- aside from the random card distribution mentioned previously, eliminating total hero death is one way as is limiting the amount of treasure that can be lost when a hero dies. However, I don’t buy a $60 board game expecting to fix it up with a pastiche of my own rules and home-brewed variants. If I want to write rules, I’ll design my own game. And it won’t be TOMB: THE HOME GAME EDITION.

There are plenty of really great dungeon crawl and fantasy adventure games on the market right now- in fact, the past couple of years have been kind of a golden age in the genre. Obvious titles like DESCENT aside, games like CUTTHROAT CAVERNS have demonstrated that there is room for innovation and new approaches to the whole adventurers-in-a-cave schtick and it’s unfortunate that TOMB comes up so short with such a promising twist. It fails to make its mark on the genre almost completely and it almost feels like a signal that the Golden Era of Fantasy Board Games may be coming to a close. With so many dungeon crawl choices out there right now and plenty of great classic ones like DUNGEON and DUNGEONQUEST, it feels like TOMB is going to wind up buried and forgotten once the initial excitement wears away.

On the Euro question hotseat asked: Champions of midgard has a reduced price when buying an extra worker (5,4,3,2,1). That's the first one that comes to mind.

Michael Barnes wrote: I’ll be damned, I actually found my old review of it. God, it’s a bad review. Too long.

A very fair assessment. A lot of that, I'd like to do away with. Assuming I bring this thing to fruition, I suspect that the final similarities to Tomb would be superficial. The high points, worthy of keeping, in my opinion:

• sheer variety
• tons of dice

WadeMonnig wrote: On the Euro question hotseat asked: Champions of midgard has a reduced price when buying an extra worker (5,4,3,2,1). That's the first one that comes to mind.

Ah, good call. I have actually played that one.

hotseatgames wrote:

• The setting is modern day; all party members are regular folks.
• Attacking other parties directly is out; I always felt this was half-baked in the original, and it resulted in a ton of extra rules complexity
• All players have the same end game goal towards which they are racing; no more banking XP
• Strict equipment rules that prevent power creep
• Enemies have come to our world via portals, ala Doom
• It's called Dungeon Mall

There's a meta-RPG out there called, IIRC "POWER KILL" which has the conceit of the GM playing shrink and interviewing the PCs. The PCs think they are mighty elves etc. delving into dungeons and slaying goblins, but they are actually unhinged people in the modern world raiding the projects and killing poor people who just want to be left alone.

As an idea, it's kind of amusing, although it's a criticism that's almost as old as D&D. As a game, it doesn't sound very fun but I'd rather play it than TOMB.