Super Fantasy: Ugly Snouts Assault Review

Michael

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Posted by Michael on Apr 22, 2015

Five years ago, there were barely any dungeon crawl games on the market. Kevin Wilson’s Doom board game from 2004 eventually led to Descent, which sort of put the genre back on the map. Just a half decade and a couple of Space Hulk reprints later, there are tons of these kinds of games out there largely thanks to Kickstarter campaigns for mediocre attempts at recapturing the feeling of playing Heroquest or Warhammer Quest in the 1990s. But there have been a couple of great hall-crawling, hack-and-slash titles to come out of this boom, and Marco Valtriani’s Super Fantasy: Ugly Snouts Assault is most definitely one of them.

With a cartoony illustration style and old-timey cardboard stand-ups instead of miniatures, the first release of what will hopefully be a number of Super Fantasy titles bucks quite a few trends. Thankfully, there is no “overlord” player role, which almost always sets me against a game because I have yet to see an example where this concept provides a consistently satisfying game for all players. So I’m glad that’s out of the equation. You don’t like the whole co-op trend? Well, the good news here for you is that there are a couple of adversarial scenarios included, a PVP rules set and a monster-bashing competition. I’m also glad that there are no miniatures- the cardboard stand-ups do just fine- and that this is very much an all-in-one purchase game without a ton of micro-expansions or Kickstarter bonuses, although there is a sequel (Night of the Badly Dead) available soon.

The character classes are also a breath of fresh air, playing fast and loose with expectations. The dwarf is a master duelist instead of the usual axe or hammer-slinging mechanic. The mage is a little girl. The rogue-type is a double-wielding gunslinger with a rock star attitude. Each character has three special abilities that operate on a novel cool-down mechanic, each upgradable over the course of the game. They all come with unique weapons, armor and equipment as well.

The bad guys are the Ugly Snouts, which at first blush are the usual tribal orc-types but they’re much more colorful, comic and…smelly...than usual. There is a definite sense of humor throughout the game that is quite refreshing given the drive toward making everything darker and grimmer. Fortunately, it has more of a European comics style so it steers clear of Munchkin levels of obviousness or flaccid parody.

It’s a scenario based game and there is a nice complexity arc built into the six on offer, each widening the scope a bit while forming a simple narrative. Generally speaking, each scenario tasks the players with making their way through the Ugly Snouts’ dungeon and defeating a boss monster before a turn tracker runs out. Along the way, you might have to flip some switches to unlock doors or disarm deadly traps. You’ll smash barrels and open crates to find great loot. And of course, you’ll slaughter plenty of Ugly Snouts in a couple of different varieties as well as some of their pets along the way.

The action is fast and fun rather than think-y and tactical. I am especially enamored of the action system, which does away with the usual “move and/or attack” model, action points or other methods. This is a completely fresh mechanic. When it’s your character’s turn, you take six action dice and decide what you want to do. You can move or attack, of course. You can choose to attempt to unlock a door or use a tome to cast a spell. Whatever you do, you choose however many dice out of those six you want to roll to make the attempt. There are three die faces- one sword, two swords and a star. The swords count at face value, the star means that the result is equivalent to an applicable statistic on your character card. So if you are the dwarf, for example, a high strength makes those stars extra valuable.

Budgeting the dice and choosing how much to use on each action is a very cool, very compelling part of this game that gives it some tactical heft and an element of risk-taking. You can decide to go all-in to make an attack or try smaller rolls. If you really need to get the hell out of there, you might want to put most of your dice in a move roll. Additionally, you can also withhold dice to get a defense token for each that you save. When the Ugly Snouts attack, they automatically hit you unless you have these defense tokens to pay for a defense roll. This makes for some really tough decisions in the heat of battle as you can wind up exerting all of your effort on offense and leaving yourself quite literally defenseless.

Each character has three class-specific abilities as well that can modify actions in radical ways, increasing damage, number of attacks, returning dice to the pool, giving defense tokens to other players or affecting movement. Each of these has a four-step cool-down between uses, so they have to be recharged. Any time you roll a star, you get to move one of your cool-down markers up a step or you can take a charging action to try to get one of these powers ready to go for the current or subsequent turns. The abilities are really fun, and deciding when to use them while anticipating the reset adds another interesting tactical layer.

After the heroes take action, there are a couple of monster tasks that occur. Rooms adjacent to where the fighting is going on may “wake up”, since all of the Ugly Snouts are sleepy at the beginning of the game unless they awaken. Everything moves using the shortest path to the good guys, and then there is a simple attack triage that determines which hero takes the hit. There are respawns for the Snouts, so there is a never-ending flow of baddies to battle- this makes the game quite tense since there is also a time limit to get to the end. Most games I’ve played tend to end with the heroes getting bogged down or losing sight of the objective.

It’s tough to find enough time to pick up some treasures in between all of the fighting and running, but it’s worthwhile. There’s a great selection of small and large treasures including new weapons, armor, potions and items that are pretty essential when fighting the tougher enemies and the final bosses. Fortunately, your heroes also level up over the course of the game. Whenever a player does damage to a Snout or performs a successful unlocking/opening task, they gain a point of experience. At certain thresholds, these XP unlock upgrades to the character’s three class abilities. There are two upgrades for each, and each makes the corresponding power considerably more powerful.

Between the brilliant activation mechanics to the satisfying sense of development over the course of the game and on through the simple pleasures of hacking, slashing and looting, the Super Fantasy system has a lot to offer. I’ve found the game’s mix of old school charms and new school conveniences irresistible, and it’s one of those titles that the folks I game with kind of roll their eyes at when they see it in my Ikea bag- not because they don’t like it or don’t want to play it, but because I bring it every time. It is a far superior game than many of the more popular titles in this genre, such as Descent, and I am absolutely on board with any future Super Fantasy releases.