Daniel (@dungeondive) breaks from the Souls run for a short announcement: Forgotten Depths, long out of print, looks set for a new print run. The evidence is a BoardGameGeek thread from a publisher picking the game up — he reached out to the poster for clarification and got no reply before filming, so the hard details end there, and he cheerfully admits the rest of the video is an excuse to talk about one of his all-time favourites.
The argument he makes is more interesting than the news. He states plainly that he does not usually value novelty: most of the crawls he loves play much the same, and that suits him fine. Forgotten Depths is his exception, because every ordinary step of the genre is handled a little sideways. Each of the three explorers carries a personal combat deck and a personal loot deck, so the fighter finds armour where the wizard finds spells. Dungeons are built from map cards traversed node to node, and the open-circle symbols must be connected into shapes as you lay them — larger, more complex shapes unlock better points of interest, arriving as tarot-sized cards bearing lore, searches, ambushes and panoramas.
He ranks the expansions too: the campfire conversation deck deepens world and character without adding much play, while the Ever Chamber’s hidden forge and the modular lore set carry the mechanical weight. Not a campaign, saveable between biomes, and best at two heroes.
Daniel is explicit that he doesn’t normally prize novelty — that most of his favourite crawls being alike is a feature, not a flaw. So what makes the novelty in Forgotten Depths land, when so many self-consciously innovative designs just feel like friction?