Today I'm talking about something that I don't even know exactly what it is, but that intrigued me, perhaps because of its hybrid nature; having played a few games with it, however, I'm pleased to talk about it. It's something that is placed halfway between a role-playing game "old style", a game book, a roll & write and a dungeon crawler.
I'm talking about the Italian edition of Four Against Darkness (1-2 players, 45-60 minutes) created by Andrea Sfiligoi, published by Ganesha Games and now distributed by MS Edizioni.
The game can be played alone or in the company of a friend (both in cooperative and competitive mode) and there are also rules to turn it into a role-playing game simplified to all intents and purposes.
With Four Against Darkness you can create a group of adventurers and launch into the exploration of a dungeon that is generated "procedurally" (to use a video game term) from the game manual so as to be always different without needing a Master. It will also allow you to let your characters live more consecutive adventures, making them better and improving their equipment.
A BIT OF HISTORY.
It is not a novelty in the strict sense since this game, or rather this series given the success and the number of foreign releases, dates back to 2016 but it is only a few months that we can find it in Italian. The most curious thing is that it is a very Italian product, in fact Andrea Sfiligoi lives and works in Italy and has behind him many other products, mainly regulations for wargames. As often happens this game has found success thanks to the English edition, both physical and PDF, which rightly made it accessible to a global audience. Given the interest and the success, the possibility was born to publish also in Italian, which I caught on the fly.
In English at the moment there are already at least 15 other volumes that expand the game world, provide adventures and themed environments, new rules, new characters and much more; I would like to emphasize however that the basic manual in Italian already guarantees many hours of play, and has already been announced the release in Italian of another volume that will add a short campaign strongly themed. Also on BoarGameGeek there is already a lot of material created by users such as character cards, schematics summaries, maps and more.
TYPOGRAPHICALLY SPEAKING.
The volume is 96 pages, printed in black and white on coated paper of excellent weight. It contains everything you need to play, including a second set of advanced generation tables with monsters and threats that can only be dealt with by high-level adventurers (the whole party must be at least 3°), thus ensuring a lot of games.
HOW TO PLAY.
The first 35 pages of the manual describe all the elements of the game that concern the management of the characters: classes, equipment, attacks, defense and spells. The next 25 pages explain how to generate the dungeon as you explore, all the related actions: searching the rooms, approaching enemies, healing companions, rescue missions, leveling up and much more.
Although we are talking about about 60 pages in total, it is not a particularly challenging reading, because the manual is not written with a small font and is full of images, tables and examples. Despite this I will not go into too much detail of the rules because I am interested in giving you just a smattering ... just enough to understand if this title is for you.
Let's start by saying that to play just a pencil, a eraser, a sheet of paper and checked the card of the characters.
The whole game is based on the six-sided die (from now on d6) and depending on the case we will have to roll only one or two summed (2d6 with results 2-12) or two using the results as a unit and dozens as a d66 (results 11 - 66).
When we use it for various checks (attacking, defending, breaking doors, defusing a trap, solving a riddle, etc..) the natural 1 will always be a failure and the natural 6 will always be "explosive" or will allow us to roll the die again adding the second result.
All shots within the game are always made by the players and we will never roll anything "on behalf of others": this means that when we attack we will roll the die adding the class and weapon bonuses and compare the result with the level of the monster, while when he attacks us we will always roll our die to defend ourselves from the attack ... always adding various bonuses and comparing the result with the level of the enemy.
to be continued in the next part