TOMB board game


Card & Board Games

Liberty's Edge

This is a playtested review of AEG’s TOMB board game.

They supplied me with a copy to try out. Figured I'd share the experience.

The game emulates the carnal basics of Dungeons & Dragons: build a party, kill things, and take their stuff (edition comments not necessary). You win by making good choices in your adventuring party makeup, strategy when facing off against monsters and other players, and a whole lot of luck. You accomplish these tasks by delving into crypts in the tomb and facing the challenges within. When all the crypts are empty, the one with the most XP value of items and kills is the winner.

The game aesthetics are really good. The box itself is strong and sturdy and would hold up to wear and tear. There is a poster showing all of the character cards you can use to build your party. There are two game boards; one is the Inn, where all the players start. The other is double-sided: one side is a basic play introductory tomb and the other is a more convoluted, advanced version. There are hundreds of game cards of different types. Most use art recycled from a plethora of AEG products. There is a big game bag with drawstring to hold the ton of full-color character tiles. There are also a bunch of plastic stands to hold up the character cards during play to help organize everything. A plastic tray has individual slots to hold everything in place during transport.

Outcome of actions is determined with three differently colored 10-sided dice. Green dice have just a couple of axes (successes), blue have half axes, and red dice have mostly axes. When you want to accomplish anything you check the ability of the character card who’s trying the activity against a preset difficulty number. You roll all the dice (usually a combination of colors) and count up all the successes. If you get equal to or higher than the number needed, you succeed. If not, you fail.

The basic rulebook is just that, basic. To try and keep things quick and clean (and to dive right into playing) the book used large type and topical boxes to call out references to rules without loads of detail or examples. The book is only 16 pages long, so it’s not a chore to find anything although a little index would have helped. The rulebook is also short because most of the game is what designers like to call “exception-based”. The rules set everything up, and then during action in the game you promptly break every rule as you go.

I will not duplicate the instruction manual as the review; after all it’s available for free HERE. What follows is the game we played using this set. Everyone rolled the dice for initiative and the one with most successes went first, continuing clockwise around the table.

First, we built the tomb. The map is of a tomb with various rooms called crypts. Each crypt door has a number showing how many cards need to be in the crypt to fill it. There are three types of cards to go in a room: traps, monsters, and treasure. Each player gets a hand of these cards and you take turns going around the table placing cards face down to populate the different rooms. There is some semblance of strategy to this, but for most of us it just felt like a busy exercise. For example, if you put one card in a crypt with a 1 on it, you might opt to just put a treasure in there, and hope to be the first one to go get it. Conversely, you could put a trap in there and remember to avoid it. Any room with a number higher than 2 (most of them) became a random jumble as we all added to the rooms and no one could really remember what was in any of them anyway. To be perfectly honest and to speed play the next time I might just randomly dole out cards per crypt with no one knowing what’s in them.

We all began with a party marker at the Inn, and took turns. The first part of the game is where you make direct decisions in building your party. Characters come from four basic class types: fighter, mage, cleric and rogue. You can have anywhere from one to five members in your party. You want to make sure you have a mixture of the classes to best overcome the different obstacles within the tomb. I like to consider the fifth member as the defining strategy of your party. A group with two rogues wants to get by traps and pickpocket treasure from other players. One with the extra cleric wants to stay alive. Two fighters are good for overcoming monsters and two wizards lets you bust all sorts of rules and really mess with the whole game. During your turn, you can recruit one character. If it’s a wizard or cleric, you also get a prayer or spell card to get them on their way. During your turn you could also select extra spell or prayer cards and attach them to your respective classes. Or you could take an item card and equip it to any character (like a hardy weapon or good piece of armor) or a strategy card to mess with other players during game play.

We all had good times during this phase of the game. Building a party is always fun. The names of the characters are evocative and because of play not all the tiles are available at a time, you have to select from the limited possibilities of who is in the Inn at the time waiting to be recruited. You examine the tiles and see what the characters have to offer. They all have their own strengths and weaknesses and seem comparably balanced. There are no ‘loser’ characters that we saw in play. Each character tile has four different abilities: Attack, Skill, Magic and Holiness. Attack is for fighting creatures, skill is in disabling traps and other noncombat accomplishments, magic is for empowering spells and holiness effects prayer power. Each is represented by a number of dice in green, blue and red colors. For example, a fighter may have an attack score of 2 green, 2 blue and 1 red dice. When you attack you’d roll 5 dice: 2 green 2 blue and 1 red. When they fall, you count up the axes that show face up to see if you succeed. Different characters have different settings. Adding items or treasure can enhance these scores (as an example, if our fighter there was equipped with a halberd with 2 red dice, the character would add those 2 red dice to its total when attacking a monster).

Once folks started getting 3, 4 and 5 character parties we started moving out into the tomb. We had 6 players for this review (maximum for the game), and turns went pretty quickly outside combat. Once you knew what you could accomplish within a turn, game play was fast and easy. When you enter a crypt with cards, the person to your left or right (designated on the map) takes those cards and become the Cryptmaster for the encounter. The Cryptmaster’s job is to make everything as tough as possible for the acting player. And as a word in general, don’t get too attached to your party members, they die on a fairly regular basis.

A typical room might go like this: let’s say one with four cards in it. The Cryptmaster player picks them up and keeps them to himself. Let’s say there’s one trap card, two monster cards and one treasure card. The player must make his way through, in turn: traps, then monsters, to get to the treasure. You overcome traps by selecting one or more characters with good skill scores to defeat a target number set by the trap. You overcome monsters by attacking them or casting spells at them and causing them wounds during combat. The Cryptmaster gets the fun of choosing monster attacks and also harming your characters.

Encounters took the most time. Everything came to a halt while the delving player and Cryptmaster squared off in larger crypts. Of course, this is still entertaining to watch but when they grind on can be annoying. Some rooms just contained treasure. In that case there’s nothing for the Cryptmaster to do but turn the cards over to the player! Combats with monsters can take some time. Monsters frequently have exceptions built into them, and can also equip spell, prayer and item cards just like characters. In a room with multiple monsters, this can quickly overwhelm the Cryptmaster trying to quickly learn a whole strategy based off his new, many options. By the end of the game the combats were running smoother; it certainly takes some practice to get a hang of how they play out during the game. We had some difficulty working out the turn order when you had character and monsters with powers that let you act first, specifically calling out “if the other guy goes first, you go first instead.” Well, OK, this went round and round a few times if both players had such a power and we wound up houseruling it.

Strategy comes into play in a number of ways. Many of the treasures you unearth are magic items you can attach to your characters to make them more capable in their die rolling. But, if you do this they don’t count toward that XP pool you are trying to collect. You need to return to the inn map to “bank” treasure tiles for them to count. Overcoming monsters and traps also has a XP value you can bank immediately upon defeating them. Your buddy just got a treasure you want? You can try to have one of your rogues’ pickpocket another player’s party member! Opposed dice checks help decide the outcome, and we saw plenty of successes and a few failures during our play as items went back and forth between player parties!

Luck does have plenty to do with the game and helped make sure the game was sufficiently “swingy” enough that no one player continually dominated play except by virtue of the dice. One fellow had good luck to roll only three green dice and see all successes, and we also saw players roll up to eight dice of all colors and not get even one success from the bunch! My personal game play was skewed by having the dumb luck to walk into a crypt with pretty much the hardest trap in the game. After my first move and delve, my entire party was slaughtered and I had to start again at the Inn building a new party while my friends continued exploring their crypt rooms.

The last portion of the game comes when there’s only one or two crypts left to delve. Parties race through the tomb or hold up at the inn waiting to play their strategy cards to mess with the game. Here’s when a lot of the pickpocketing took place. One player used a strategy card to set the inn on fire and no one could return there for a number of turns. There was a lot of laughter as parties tried running out of pickpocket range to keep their treasures because they could not return to the inn to bank them! And when it came to that horribly deadly trap that killed off my entire party? Everyone left that room till last. My wife tackled it, and even with her potent party still failed. But she had the special strategy card called “send in the bard”. If she fails at a trap, play the card and the trap kills a bard not affecting any of your actual party!

The rest of the players all had a good time. In the end the XP totals for the players came out to 67, 55, 43, 39, 15 and 7. Yes, I was the 7. We didn’t come even close to using or exploring all the possibilities of the crypt cards of traps, monsters and treasures and look forward to another try. Everyone agreed the game was fun and look forward to playing again. The game play promised at 2 hours doesn’t remotely count for your first game. Learning the massive exceptions that can come up in play takes some time, as does running multi-monster combats but we all agreed future games would run quicker.

If you also visit the link above, you will see AEG has completed work on a sequel/add on game called Tomb Cryoptmasters. I am told this version can either be played alone or mixed with the maps, cards and character of the first game to create a really massive experience. They also heavily updated the rulebook making things clearer and easier to reference, especially the exception situations. They also make inter-party full-on combat an option. They say it’ll be available at GenCon. I look forward to checking this out as well.

Dark Archive Owner - Johnny Scott Comics and Games

I've played this game a couple times, and absolutely love it! In fact, I bought a copy for my brother-in-law (who is not a gamer, but loves fantasy novels and books) and he plays it every chance he gets.

If you've never played this game, give it a shot. I really think you'll like it.


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