Bardsung is a co-operative dungeon crawler, with heroes exploring on an expanding tile map. It comes in a huge box containing five hero characters, hobgoblin enemy mobs, wandering encounter monsters and a large boss creature, and has a really nice presentation to it, themed around the unfolding legendary tales told by the bards. Also inside are plastic trays to keep your tokens and models well sorted, and dashboards for the heroes. It is nicely put together and looks great. If you have the stretch goal fables box then you have access to eight more heroes and extra monsters.
The game overall looks amazing, the artwork throughout ranks alongside the best i have in any of my dungeon crawlers, heroes and enemy cards are well drawn and have personality. The tiles also look great, being colourful and with great lighting effects and contain zone areas rather than individual squares or hexes. Models are good quality, better than many crawl games, but arguably slightly below the Cursed City and Descent Legends of the Dark lines which are just exceptional. The variety and choice of mobs and wandering encounters in this set is immense and will keep give you plenty of options.
The books that come in this set are lovely, well presented, colourful with great artwork and the adventure book in the main box is a huge 179 pages long containing a campaign, monster encounter information, narrative story passages and options to scale the player count including a one character solo mode. It is one of the best dungeon crawl books, only beaten by the great Warhammer Quest 1995 roleplay book. An additional 100 pages of narrative one off adventures are located in the fables box, plus the books also contain arena style boss encounters. While monsters are well covered in these books, I would have liked to have had better hero guides as well included which explain the open choice upgrade paths, but these available on kickstarter site so i created my own printable cards > Character Path Cards
The game themes its campaigns around hobgoblins and metal contructs, a tweak to the normal that i really appreciated. These core mobs are then added to with a host of additional wandering monster enemies and creatures that can appear during certain missions, or can be involved in their own one off narrative stories. The variety of content here is great, you can select the type of game you want to play from a number of options such as following a campaign story or simply getting through a dungeon to the other side, and the game also has scaling rules to allow you to play with less than four heroes, and even an option to solo with one character.
Gameplay is not overly ground breaking, each hero comes with their own weapons and abilities plus a number of roleplay stat modifiers (things they are good at) which help mitigate test rolls. Characters will move around the dungeon tiles and attack mainly using a 20 sided dice with modifiers, but with weapon damage after a hit being checked for a critical hit using different dice types. Heroes and enemies do not have many wounds, and each successful attack will generally only deliver one or two, so everything is quite tight. Initiative order is completed by a card track, and enemies use a pack of relatively simple engagement cards so you know how to act and who to target, and the colourful tiles are zoned which eliminates much of the annoying line of sight issues seen elsewhere.
Adventures are semi random, in that you will draw rooms and corridors which spawn enemies from shuffled decks, and you will have challenges and battle effects also drawn from a deck, however the game does pre-build these decks for each adventure, giving each chapter a coherent story theme flavour. It is one of the better implementations around, and within each run every battle does offer up some minor environmental adjustments to alter tactics. The potential wandering monster pool, spawned by an echo mechanic can also change between games.
There is a lot of upgrading choice, where earnt xp enables you to obtain new abilities, either from your own character path or even one from another hero, upgrade existing skills to an improved level or you can increase your general skills which will affect test rolls. Weapons will potentially receive forge upgrades from the campaign story, but gemstone treasures you find can also be added to weapon slots to improve them. Gold is generally used to refresh healing potions, toolkits or charms which will get used up during your adventure survival.
Overall this is a great looking dungeon crawl box, with some narrative content that can lift the experience. It is not overly deep in rules, so you will not be overly bogged down by enemy reactions and is a fun game rather than deeply strategic. However relative positioning to monsters and other heroes is important, which adds some depth. Despite the over lengthy campaign, which definitely could have reduced the number of runs needed per chapter (which is easily fixable), it has become one of my favoured dungeon crawl boxes due to its presentation, a smooth easy to play style, but with just enough conditions, modifiers and upgrades to keep the interest. Dungeon runs are individually quicker to play than most crawlers, and the monster set is varied and interesting.
The creaters have provided a quick reference sheet > Guide and errata list with printable cards > Bardsung Errata
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Expansions
There are expansions you can add to enhance the gameplay and visual appeal (my additions highlighted green = own, blue = part owned, red = not purchased) :
Fables Box
This was the extras kickstarter box and is certainly remains the most useful addition you can get. It has eight new heroes, new skills and equipment and loads of new enemies including notably a hobgoblin with lantern and the cave shark. The extra adventure book is 100 pages and contains new narrative storylines and one off scenarios. This is an awesome box.
Lost Levels
A gameplay expansion covering the deeper dungeon levels with a mechanical constructs theme and additional adventures, and seems a good addition if you want even more content, but is very theme specific. Its price was relatively high, and potentially there is better value in getting the newer Epic Encounters additions.
Component Additions
Custom cream and orange dice, plastic doors and terrain pieces, together with a neoprene play mat are all available. Whilst these are generally nice to have they do not really make the game better, and only the doors for me give any real value to separate the rooms, but you may already have these kind of items from other dungeon games.
Foreteller Narration App
If you want a deeper storyline audio read to you with atmosphere then this could be a neat addition. For me it is not something i have added but its a nice option to increase the immersion.
Epic Encounters Local Legends
As part of Steamforged Games roleplaying campaign in 2022 a new outdoor Bardsung adventure book was added including 38 miniatures and 54 cards and 10 maps. This was a very nice addition for Bardsung fans, however it comes with a high cost, but is probably a better addition than Lost Levels given its variety > Local Legends.