Didn’t expect this to happen so fast, but I got to play my first game down at Endgame today. (Actually, I’m still there, posting from the back room. Matt asked me to say “These postings brought to you by Endgame,” but I said no. Then he slipped me a twenty.) We played with one starter and one booster – Aaron here at the store told me that a starter’s just barely enough to play two-player, and now I see what he means. Your selection of monste– sorry, Mage Spawn is going to be awfully tight otherwise. As it was, I had one episode of being allowed to place a single, solitary 25-point foe to go beat on Matt, but the highest I could find was a 14. Anyway, there is indeed a lot of convoluted strangeness to the combat rules, which gets even weirder when you throw in the special abilities – they tell me that the Heroes in Dungeons are changing the game a great deal. Where in previous MK games, an average figure would have one special ability, maybe two, the Heroes in MK Dungeons are littered with little colored dots on their stats. (There are no entirely new special abilities in the game – the total menu is the same as it was in Whirlwind. Wow, it almost sounds like I know what I’m talking about.) At any rate, it does matter what Hero you play, as well as how you spend your movement points. Attacking costs you movement, as does opening a chest and, more importantly, disarming it – some chest traps are nasty, as I found out firsthand. As weird and woolly as certain sections of rules get, the overall experience seems balanced, fast, and fun. When you’re killed, you’re not out of the game: you can still use your two activations per turn to move Mage Spawn and try to kill your opponents before they get out with any loot. I’m definitely looking forward to playing more, and I may even be able to get away with it without spending more money. We’ll see.