I’m enjoying the game a lot. I picked it up a while back when it was on sale last, but it was on my back burner until last week. I’ve got the physical game, but I’ve put off playing it because from the rules, it felt really abstract. Now that I’ve played it, I wouldn’t say that at all.
I don’t think the expansions are critical, but I do recommend them. Given that they’re normally pricier (I think I paid $3 each for them), if you pick the game up, start playing it immediately to see if you like the basic mechanics. If you do, you’ll like the expansions.
At root, the game is about trading meeples back and forth. You have 2-4 actions per round, depending on how many people are playing, and whether you’re playing a Long Game, which is somewhat recommended with one expansion and required if you’re playing with both. For each action, you can take meeples, take a quest, take money, or buy a building which allows for new actions.
Meeples come in four D&D flavors: fighters, clerics, wizards, and thieves. If you have enough of the right kinds to finish a quest, you can do so at the end of your turn. Finishing a quest doesn’t cost an action, but you can do only one per turn. That’s important if someone plops a nuisance quest on you - those are quests that MUST be finished before regular quests, and which have poor rewards. Rewards are points, money, meeples, cards, and such. The kinds of meeples required and the rewards generally make sense with the name and theme of the quest. For example, “Heal Wounded Gray Warriors” is a Piety quest, requires Clerics and Wizards, gives you a few points and a ton of fighters. It’s a great pre-requisite if you have a high scoring quest that requires a lot of fighters to complete, like Bolster The City Guard.
Timing’s pretty important. It may sound like the typical multiplayer solitaire of a Euro, but you’re competing with other players for a limited number of actions, and if you don’t take it account what other players are likely to do, you can find yourself blocked for several turns. Similarly, there are times you need to be aware of what other players want when choosing actions, since you may block them.
There are Intrigue cards, which you earn various ways, like taking the space that gives you the first move. Those kinda-sorta don’t cost actions. You place a worker in the harbor to play an Intrigue card, and once everyone has played, workers in the harbor can move on to take another action. However, since the second action comes after everyone else, the delay may mean all the actions you wanted are taken, so there’s an opportunity cost to playing an Intrigue card.
There are a lot of combinations here, like quests that give bonuses to particular quest types, and quests that give you bonuses, like a free Intrigue card every time you pick up a Wizard. Further, each player has a secret Lord card, and each Lord gets bonuses for completing particular kinds of quests.
There’s also the question of long term investment in buildings. Those cost money, and an action to build. They all give actions that are better than the basic actions. If you use someone else’s building, they get a reward. For example, the owner might get a Fighter every time someone uses the building. The owner doesn’t get that if they use it themselves, so they have an incentive to let other players use the building.
Undermountain and Skullport both add additional basic buildings, additional quests, additional cards, and additional Lord cards.
Undermountain mainly adds a mechanic where some actions leave bonus Meeples on other spaces, which go to the first person who uses that space. Which can be, for example, a way to encourage other players to do something you want, like reset the quests, or use your building. Undermountain also makes it easier to use Intrigue cards, which is welcome.
Skullport adds Corruption. Certain very powerful actions and quests add Corruption, which is a score penalty at the end of the game. The more corruption everyone has taken, the worse the penalty per Corruption token. Early on, the temptation to use the very powerful spaces is high, since you get a big bonus for a minor penalty. Then it starts to add up, and toward the end of the game you’re desperate for actions which reduce your Corruption. It’s a great temptation mechanic. Generally speaking if you avoid the Slave Market and similar areas entirely you’ll lose, but you’re letting yourself in for long-term problems if you do buy slaves. There are some Intrigue cards which reward staying straight, so if you start with those, you can wallop the other players as they play in the dirt. There’s also a Lord, the Beholder crime boss Xanathar, who scores bonus points for corruption instead of quests. He doesn’t want too much Corruption, but a middling amount is fine.
I like the base game, and I like both expansions, either separately or together.
