Stop what you are doing right now and pre-order Cave Evil

No announcement, just stopped by EEE's site and there it was: Cave Evil 13th Anniversary Edition. Looks like a p500? You should be ordering it and not still reading this.

store.cave-evil.com/products/cave-evil-1...r-99-20-usa-shipping



Crappy picture, but we just played this the other night and it always slaps.

Cave Evil is presented near the 18 minute mark.

I never found a copy of this back in the day and have never played so, contextualizing with the modern state of board game design: Try to sell me on it, Charlie.

You know I trust your opinion and our tastes are damn near symmetrical. But I look at videos of this and read about people's experiences and this starts to strike me as a Dungeonquest, where some people have such fond memories of it from yesteryear that it glosses over the fact that, mechanically, the game is janky and outdated. I mean, you know me. Don't get me wrong. I own janky and outdated games like The Hellgame and will probably never part with them. But I'm in a state right now where for me to spend $100 on a game, it has to be (ahem) illuminating. I already have too much stuff gathering dust.

Nah, it's still great, but you really need to be into this type of game and have a group that is also into it.

The selling point is primarily emergent narrative. You unearth new rooms and run into neutral monsters that you can recruit or fight. You find things like bombs that can auto-kill any enemy, even ones your opponent spent several turns scrounging up resources to recruit. Or the bomb can accidentally go off and kill your own unit.

Sometimes you play for three hours and build a large army of beasts, then the end game boss awakens and just eats you alive.

It's long, a little slow, but pretty unique. It feels maybe more like a very creative wargame than a dungeon crawler. I'm totally ok keeping it around to play once every couple of years. I stick by my original review I wrote a decade ago.

im not charlie but its like a much longer more complicated wizwar. you do random bullshit, but now everything is black and nearly illegible and takes a lot longer. its mainly about the vibe, which to be fair is immaculate.

i traded away my old copy a long time ago for Runebound 2e and a pile of expansions, and the only reason i ever regretted it was when i saw that cave evil was selling second hand for like $400 i know some people adore it, but personally i think youd be better off with an art/lore book.

From Michael Barnes: "I love it, it’s one of my favorite games of the year. But I’m well aware that it’s like telling folks that Ulver’s black metal album “Nattens Madrigals” is a masterpiece while knowing full well that most people will think it’s just a bunch of ill-produced, amateurish noise. It isn’t going to be for everybody, and there are things about it that are willfully obscure or esoteric. Cave Evil is definitely not mainstream- it’s pretty old fashioned in an Avalon Hill/SPI kind of way, the artwork would be regarded as crude by many (when in fact it’s awesome and appropriate to the subject matter), and it’s a fairly ruthless elimination game like Titan or Wiz-War.

Putting the black metal stuff aside, I still think it’s a great game. It’s like some long lost fantasy game from 1982, and I think that was exactly the design goal. There’s more Gary Gygax in its creatures and concepts than Tolkien, and I really appreciate that.

Yeah, it’s expensive. It’s tough when you can get something like Drizzt or Gears of War for the same price and get tons of plastic toys. But for as much as I like both of those games, neither has the heart or the genuine “indie” spirit that Cave Evil shows. This is totally what I mean when I talk about bringing in new themes, new settings, and new influences. It's also a self-published, made-in-the-USA game with a very limited print run made by people who are totally passionate about both games and obscure music. Your $70 is buying something more precious than bubble gum machine figures."

Barnes' original review .

If anything, I would argue that the atavistic design means the game hasn't really aged at all. It's still going to be an impossible sell to most and an unthinking given for a few.