Four Against Darkness

Saw this on the BGG hot games list and thought I’d see what the new Kickstarter crap is...turns out it’s not KS, it’s put out by the company that does A Song of Blades and Heroes. It’s a little solo/co-op hack and slash that is just a book and needs only D6s and graph paper. I got the $8 PDF, it looks really neat- very old fashioned. But reading through it, I thought about how it seems to capture all of the things you want in a dungeon crawl without piles of miniatures, tokens, administration, cards, 3 hour play time, and so forth.

Anyone played it? Looks like there are several books for it...seems more compact and nteresting to me than Legacy of Dragonholt and more game-like than the gamebooks.

Surely you meant to type $80. A game for $8 is absurd.

Well it doesn’t come with any dice and the art is in black and white. I think it may be a game for paupers.

Ganesha is awesome. I’ll check it out. Thanks for that link.

Michael Barnes wrote: Saw this on the BGG hot games list and thought I’d see what the new Kickstarter crap is...turns out it’s not KS, it’s put out by the company that does A Song of Blades and Heroes. It’s a little solo/co-op hack and slash that is just a book and needs only D6s and graph paper. I got the $8 PDF, it looks really neat- very old fashioned. But reading through it, I thought about how it seems to capture all of the things you want in a dungeon crawl without piles of miniatures, tokens, administration, cards, 3 hour play time, and so forth.

Anyone played it? Looks like there are several books for it...seems more compact and nteresting to me than Legacy of Dragonholt and more game-like than the gamebooks.

I have a very specific use for solo games, and that's as a way to take a 5 or 10 minute break during marathon grading sessions. This usually requires colorful, diverting pieces, shallow decision making, and an ability to leave the game for a while and jump right back in when I'm ready to return to it. Not much beats the DandD Adventure Games for that, but it wears thin over several years.

I printed all the 4AD stuff out a year ago, played it once, thought, "this would be very clever if I were really serious about solo games," and haven't really pulled it out since. I kind of wish it were a more compelling 2-player experience.

How similar is this to the old 70s/80s Tunnels & Trolls solo dungeons (as I bought a heap to relive some teenage times) ?

Thanks for mentioning this. I saw it in the BGG Hotness but didn't click due to the name (thought it was another Kickstarter dungeon crawl). Checking it out now.

Is it a game with 2 stats and 600 special rules?

Yes, it is good. I mentioned it in 2016.

Check out this very simple and quick RPG. It reminds me of a combination of OD&D, Basic D&D, and Heroquest. It's called Four Against Darkness. I've been experimenting with it and have had fun. It reminds me of my less than organized D&D day-dreaming doodles in my high school notebooks. You can play it solitaire or with a friends. You just need two D6, a pencil, and some graph paper. It's portable. You can play it anywhere where you can doodle and roll a D6.

www.ganeshagames.net/product_info.php?cP...6stt6g0ld9kefjj1tss4

www.ganeshagames.net/index.php?cPath=1_55

Reviews:

skirmishwargaming.com/four-against-darkness-rules-review/

dieheart.net/4ad-playtest/

andyslack.wordpress.com/2016/04/20/revie...ur-against-darkness/

fortressat.com/forum/35-mos-eisley-canti...ing?start=240#233004

Number one on the hotness.

I don't know how that algorithm works, but I've enjoyed watching this rise up the list like a slow middle finger to all of the overproduced, under-edited KS product that usually floods that left column.

Ok that's enough talk about TOS for me today.

I bought it and after 20 pages or so I so far fail to get the hype. It's super generic and the rules are ... not well written. It might be fun and maybe I can play it with the kids and that is good, but it seems like too much effort for what it's worth.

I think it's funny that this much hype is surrounding what amounts to people remembering (or perhaps even discovering) what the goddamn baseline dungeon crawl actually was before board games kept bouncing designs off of the concept with varying levels of success. It's not exactly a Philosophers Stone of escapist gameplay, forever out of reach or something. It just hasn't been done well. To make matters worse, aside from a few outliers, we've mostly ended up with equally generic adaptations, perhaps without the graph paper but with no ostensible gain either. For example: Sword & Sorcery.

Way back when I bought the first edition Dungeon Master's Guide, I came across some tables for randomly generating a dungeon map. My blue box basic D&D set didn't come with the usual B1 In Search of the Unknown Module, and instead had random monster and treasure tables plus a set of geomorphic dungeon maps. So I had the idea that I could play solitaire D&D by rolling up some characters and then just randomly creating the dungeon and contents with those random tables. It got boring after a few rooms of mindless combat. Four Against Darkness looks like even less of a game than my attempt at solitaire D&D.