Steamforged Games has announced that their upcoming board game Bardsung is going to be arriving on Kickstarter on November 10th. We've discussed some morsels on the game previously but we got a few more details about it this week.

Bardsung // Steamforged Games

Bardsung plays out as a one-to-five player dungeon exploration game but with a little bit of a twist in the tail. As Sherwin Matthews, the Lead Designer on the game stated in a recent article looking at exploration in the game, it also blends together some notes from choose your own adventure games of old too.

Bardsung Dungeon Delving // Steamforged Games

During the game, you'll be choosing that route which will help you inspire songs of legend. This plays out pretty literally when you dive into the dungeon delving portion of the game. Unlike dungeon delvers of other stripes where you build the entire board ahead of time, the focus in Bardsung is on exploration. This is more in line with the way you might play out a roleplaying game as the players.

Bardsung dungeons/encounters are set up across a playmat which has escape points and you'll slowly but surely work your way through tile after tile, dealing with monsters, riddles, traps and dead-ends with the hope of getting out the other side alive.

Bardsung Exploration // Steamforged Games

Here you can see such a dungeon which has been explored during an encounter in Bardsung. The layout of the dungeon is effectively procedurally generated as you play with the change for all sorts of random things to happen as you go. Perhaps you'll bump into wandering monsters or maybe you'll find secrets that you need to uncover to progress.

This does sound like a lot of fun and as long as the mechanics for doing all of this flow and feel natural then I can see this being a fun experience for players. Again, this feels like the folks at Steamforged Games are looking to fuse together the feel of a roleplaying game like Dungeons & Dragons with a traditional dungeon-delving board game like Descent.

Bardsung Combat // Steamforged Games

As well as that interesting exploration mechanic you've also got to juggle a few extra things too. You'll be mixing and matching up your marching order to make sure that you keep key characters at the fore and then diving into a combat system which (apparently) is going to be fun and full of cooperative puzzle solving.

Interestingly it also mentioned within the blurb for this game that whilst your heroes can level up and change as your campaign unfolds, so can the enemies. They can gain equipment, skills and even hold grudges against the heroes who "kill" them. This reminds me of the Shadow Of Mordor Middle-earth video game.

Bardsung Dungeon Delving // Steamforged Games

With an already interesting cast of characters that we've looked at in the past, I think it will be fun to learn more about the game over the next few weeks. It seems like you'll be able to follow lots of developments on the game over on their Blog plus as part of their Facebook Group.

Are you tempted by this or are you done with dungeon delvers for now?