One of the games getting the most buzz after this year’s Gen Con was TOMB- the first board game published by CCG/RPG firm Alderac Entertainment Group, a company better known for cult classic CCGs such as LEGEND OF THE FIVE RINGS and WARLORD.. I thought that the concept was particularly novel and offered something new to the dungeon crawl genre- players control competing parties of adventurers that are recruited at an inn and their combined abilities and acquisitions contribute to the relative strength and survivability of the party. It’s a definite change from the “one character per player” impetus of dungeon crawl games like DUNGEON and HEROQUEST or the purely cooperative play of a game like DESCENT. I was sold on it, but I’m an easy mark for this particular genre. What was interesting to me about the initial reaction was that a lot of folks, including Eurogamers, were giving the game higher marks than I would have expected.

The goal is to earn as many XPs (a fantasy way of saying “victory points”) as possible by killing monsters, overcoming traps, and picking up treasures— pretty straightforward stuff. The game features two different dungeons filled with various rooms into which pre-designated numbers of Tomb cards (bearing those previously mentioned monsters, traps, and treasures) are placed at the beginning of the game with the vaults nearest the entrancing getting one or two cards and deeper chambers getting five cards. One of the dungeons has special rooms with various effects and a couple of on-board traps, teleporters, healing wells, and other landmarks. Once the rooms are filled, players, represented by a counter with the TOMB logo and a graphic on it that represents the entire party, can recruit adventurers from a pile that are sitting waiting for a job at the Inn, a sideboard area where spells, prayers, equipment, and tactics cards can also acquired to increase a party’s life expectancy…at least a little bit.

Once a party consisting of any number and combination of rogues, fighter, clerics, wizards (each with a unique special ability) is assembled, the player can send them down into the titular Tomb to raid the rooms. Each room designates a player to the right or left of the raider that gets to manage any monsters or traps that may be in the room. Combat and skill checks are a success-based system wherein players roll colored d10s that have varying probabilities attempting to reach a target number of successes: green dice have a 30% chance of hitting, blue 50% and red will put axe to skull 70% of the time. And most characters will roll a combination of these according to their particular stats in Attack, Skill, Magic, and Holiness. Treasures and weapons generally add dice or bump up character’s dice to the next highest color. There are tons of possible combinations of character, item, and spell effects and of course weird but not insurmountable rules issues pop up out of the variability.

So most of the game is getting a party ready and equipped for a dungeon dive, making your way to a room, raiding it, and then seeing what’s in there. When enough of your party has bit the dust you head back up to the inn to hire some more hapless saps to feed to the dungeon—apparently there’s no adventurer’s union and word never gets around that turnover in your party is awfully high. Characters die with an alarming frequency so it’s best to not get too attached to any of them and since there’s no character development or progression beyond sticking an item or spell on them, there’s not really any reason to care about them anyway. When your party finds treasure, it can be banked for guaranteed VPs (sorry, “XPs”) at the end of the game or attached to a character so they can use it. If they die, however, the item and its points are lost forever. Once all the rooms are emptied, the game ends and the person with the most VPs (damn it, I mean “XPs”) wins the game.

It all sounds pretty good so far, right? There’s theme, solid interaction, some fun die-rolling, tons of characters, monsters, treasures, and traps. There’s a couple of twists, like the fact that a party with a rogue can rob another party of a treasure by being within walking distance and making a skill check, that add some punch and nastiness to it. There is a good sense of surprise and uncertainty in exploring the rooms and the huge variety created by the interactions of card effects, character abilities, and item buffs imparts upon the game that feeling of vast possibility (along with rules weirdness) that characterize the best adventure games. It’s not surprising that the game has a CCG pedigree and that the designer, John Zinser, cut his teeth on that kind of variable, fluid design.

All of the good will I had toward TOMB crashed and burned when I actually sat down to play the game and it turned out that it’s is a sloppy, unpolished design that feels like some prototype you’ve been suckered into “playtesting” by a guy who told you how awesome his game was going to be.

I knew the game was in trouble during the setup phase, which is a protracted process wherein players have a hand of three cards and take turns placing them in the Tomb rooms. The idea is that players have a little control over what’s in each room, so you’d think that you could put a bunch of traps in one room and then casually avoid it for the rest of the game, letting your competitors walk into their doom. That’s certainly possible in the small one- or two- card rooms, but once three or four other players have put cards in rooms it becomes pretty much impossible to remember what is where let alone when you actually start to play the game. This process takes 15-20 minutes depending on the players and is best replaced by simply dealing cards out randomly, and unseen, to each room.

OK, so a simple house rule fixes that part. But it doesn’t really get any better. So much of the game seems to be spent in the Inn, drawing cards and picking out adventurers. It doesn’t help that the character cards are printed with tiny text that analysis-paralysis prone players are going to insist on reading every time they select a character. This may mean that a player is spending five or more minutes looking over the 10-12 characters available at any time. I’m not a math person, so when I was picking characters I really had no idea if a character that had two green dice and one blue die was a better fighter than one that had one red die. In a couple of my games, the players mutually agreed that it was better to either pick characters based on the class you need to round out the party or the awesomeness of their names or pictures than their special abilities or stats.

TOMB states that it’s a 60 minute game, but that’s surely a joke. With one or two players 60 minutes is possible if unlikely, but a five or six player game is going to be three hours despite a simple “one action” turn structure- that being said, TOMB is definitely best as two or three player game. As when picking characters, the game tends to slow to a literal crawl when a player raids a room. It is a very interactive encounter, with an adjacent player controlling the monsters and traps, but it’s strictly an exchange between two players and in rooms with three or four cards a single raid can wind up easily taking ten minutes as players pour over their tiny-text character cards to decide who should fight or attempt to disarm a trap and then analyzing which of their cards they should play to tip the odds. The outcome is almost always massive party death unless the raiders have overwhelming superiority. It gets old going back to the Inn and picking out a new party every time your people get ruthlessly slaughtered.

I really hate how TOMB handles characters as disposable heroes that are little more than an expendable, faceless resource; it’s completely contrary to the whole “RPG on a board” concept and unlike a game like DUNGEONQUEST where you have a single character whose loss will mean that you are eliminated from the game the stakes never feel like they are particularly high because if everybody dies, you can just go get some more idiots to follow you into the dungeon that are just as good if not better than your former colleagues.