I am running a Super Dungeon Explore hangout game this Tuesday, but since Melissa wanted to get in a practice game we decided to run a small Dungeon Crawl using our newly-painted kobolds. Yeah, I know that they are one of the default group of minions, but we quickly got our hands on the Rocktop Gang and Fireflow Denizens, so they kind of fell by the wayside. For awhile. A long while.
Anyway, a Dungeon Crawl is the shortest game you can run: there are only two tiles, two spawning points, and you just have to kill a mini-boss to win. For Heroes she opted for the Deeproot Druid and Star Guild Sapper, a fairly durable dwarven duo.
She went first, as the Heroes are wont to do (given that they go first on a tie), but failed to hurt anything with the Deeproot Druid’s Stranglethorn, which set the tone for the first part of the game.
She popped a treasure chest and drew a +1G Armor mithril rune, but gave it to the Deeproot Druid, and over the next few rounds I was able to gang up on the Star Guild Sapper and take him down with Mob bonuses and focused Flinger fire.
Eventually the mini-boss spawned, and this is where things took a turn. See, one of the Deeproot Druid’s powers is called Briar Armor. Despite the name it gives you no actual Armor bonus, but does give you Backlash, which makes it so that any time you succeed on a defense roll whatever attacked you takes a wound.
Normally this would not be a problem, as the Deeproot Druid only has 1B 1R for armor. Good, but beatable, especially if pretty much everything at your disposable has Mob, which lets you stack on more Blue dice.
Except she also has a Green die, which will almost always roll stars.
I tried to play it very cheap, having Knuckleheads stand next the Deeproot Druid just so Rex could grab some more Blue dice to hopefully pound him into dwarf-debris, but on subsequent turns Melissa would have it roll out Stranglethorn, which thanks to some lucky loot drops gave her a bunch of Will bonuses.
This rapidly whittle away the bonuses, and ultimately it came down to one dwarf, and one kobold ogre.
And in the end Angry Bear won the day by one wound. This was a very close, very tense game, especially considering that Melissa had failed to destroy any spawning points and was drastically outnumbered by pretty much every kobold at my disposal when the mini-boss spawned.