STARBURST recently got its hands on a proto-type for Legends Untold, a card-based dungeon crawling adventure game that smashed its goal on Kickstarter at high-speed. The game has had lots of interest since it debuted at 2016’s UK Games Expo and promises to be quick to set-up and only take an hour to play. But is it as good as the hype suggests?
The core idea behind the game is that you play simple folk who may very well become heroes. You run through a sequence of scenarios that tell a tale of how humble heroes become mighty. The game is entirely card driven; the dungeon is generated by drawing cards, skills and equipment are powered by cards and so on. You roll dice to pass skill tests and work with the rest of the players to solve problems and so on.
The game design encourages taking risks and plunging forwards. The bigger the risk, the bigger the reward. The dungeon is totally random, the monsters are totally random. This is a rogue-like video game in table-top form and boy is that a fun thing. It’s not without its flaws, though.
Legends Untold is a complicated beast. You’re tracking many elements here; the game itself is a strange hybrid of complicated table-top RPG and miniatures based dungeon crawler. The cards are covered in information and every little thing affects every other thing; for example, light sources are a thing that is tracked. This is both a good and bad thing; working out how close one is to a torch in order to take on a monster adds to the thrill of the fight, but it also slows things down.
The version we played lacked a concise rulebook and it’s certainly a game that needs a quick-reference table. However, once you get going it really does get going. It’s a bit of a rough game; the random nature means that you may have to backtrack through places you’ve explored in order to win the game, and its lack of an actual narrative can make it a little bit boring. The art is strong and engaging, but the world isn’t.
Legends Untold is something new and interesting in a market that is rapidly growing crowded. Fantasy gamers looking for something new might want to check it out. It’s on Kickstarter till mid-December.
LEGENDS UNTOLD / PUBLISHER: INSPIRING GAMES / RELEASE DATE: TBC
