Daniel (@dungeondive) takes a first look at Altar Quest, the Sadler Brothers’ dungeon crawl for their Modular Deck System. He came to it wary: Street Masters, the system’s first game, struck him as slow and grinding for something meant to simulate a beat-em-up, and Brook City’s buddy-cop theme never called to him.
The rulebook nearly ended things. Daniel reads the range and line-of-sight passage aloud to demonstrate a text with no pictures, no examples, and no personality, as if the designers had printed their internal design document. He compares it unfavourably to the instructions for the kitchen faucet he fitted the previous weekend, which had jokes and cartoons and left him keen to start. A BoardGameGeek member’s rewritten tutorial saved the game for him, and he has since played four times, winning once.
What he found is a mechanisms-forward puzzle unlike anything else in his collection. Hero dice roll successes, exploding criticals, and focus symbols that feed a token economy for mitigating bad rolls. Altar dice show the ebb and flow of dungeon magic: spend one, roll one. You assemble a quest from a hero, a scenario, a threat faction (rat-men, frog-men, crow-men, werewolves), an altar, and a boss. He loves the static HeroQuest-style map, where you choose your starting stair and route-planning becomes its own mini-game, but misses flavour text on enemy cards and regrets that equipment only appears in campaign mode.
Daniel says Altar Quest asks the players to bring the theme themselves. Is a mechanisms-first dungeon crawl a fair trade for cleverer combos, or does a crawl without flavour text lose the point?