Does this mean we’re spelunking?
•••Game Stats•••
•Publisher: Indie Boards & Cards
•Designers: Richard Launius / Pete Shirey
•Artist: Scott Hartman
•Players: 2-4
•Sweet Spot: 3-4
•Mechanics: Tile Placement / Dice Rolling
Exploring the depths of this treasure-laden cave will provide you with equal parts risk and rewards. As the cavernous paths unfold, heaps of gold will lay at your fingertips. But beware; you won’t be the only adventurer vying for a sack full of pilfered pennies! You’ll be going head to head against other supernatural spelunkers; each completed room being its own personal battleground. Time to find out if all that glitters is gold!
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Brooks: Sooo… we were definitely a mixed bag of opinions about this one!
Lizzy: Yes, we were, indeed… yes… indeed.
Kitty: Well, I liked it the most, so I guess I’ll start. Delve is the lovechild borne of a dungeon-crawler having a drunken, one-night stand with what he thought was Carcassonne in the dim light of the tavern… but what was actually Carcassonne’s unfortunately homely looking second cousin.
Lizzy: More like Carcass…
Brooks: Liz, be nice!
Lizzy: Hey, I was nice enough to finish playing it!
Kitty: As you can see, this format quite displeased dear Lizzette. As fans of both tile-laying/exploration games and dungeon-crawlers, we felt Delve would be a smash… but instead it made Liz want to smash it. The parts of Delve that are good are actually quite satisfying, which we’ll touch on first. As the sprawling cavern unfolds into scattered and sporadic pathways and large conjoined rooms, personal stakes grow in each newly formed area.
Brooks: As these cavernous rooms and narrow passageways reveal more and more loot with every tile added, the player placing said tile has the option to secretly station a gold-guard (if you will) to try and deter other pillagers from invading their ever-growing bountiful territory. Because of the secret nature in which most of a player’s guards are placed on the board, each turn is infused with the essence of press-your-luck. A single room can stretch across ten or more tiles and multiple warring factions can have seeded various guards in this one room. This adds a touch of tension over the impending room-war to come.
Lizzy: I suppose I’ll concede that those aspects were what initially drew us in. Do you risk allotting the majority of your delvers into one particularly valuable room or should you spread them out in a quantity-over-quality fashion? This paired with the inevitability of player clashes and the triggering of events made Delve feel fresh at the beginning of play. Unfortunately for me, it went downhill quite quickly. The artwork for the player boards and delver characters is cute and the tile quality was nice, but there was something somewhat off about all of it as a whole.
Brooks: Exactly! Delve seems to suffer from two specific problems. The first lies with the artwork Lizzard just mentioned. The drawings are very well done, yet it doesn’t match the theme very well. The cutesy, comical style clashes with the overall tone of the game, and not in an acceptably ironic sort of way. The room tiles, while being nicely drawn, are a problematic blur of three main colors: black, brown, and tan (the blue water tiles being the main exception). For someone with full or partial color-blindness (like myself), telling certain rooms apart took close scrutiny; and overall, the evolving map turns into a boring sprawl of same-after-same, even for those who aren’t color impaired. A much needed infusion of colors and map details would’ve made a world of difference.
Kitty: The second main problem is with pacing and variety. While gameplay itself is rather speedy, as most of the decisions are about tile and delver placement, the insipid sense of sameness creeps in after the first few room clashes and events occur. While this didn’t bother me as much as it did Liz and Brooks, the beige-buffet of choices caused the game to feel like it was running on autopilot after about halfway through.
Lizzy: The encounter cards also became bland after a while when it became apparent that for the majority of them, picking the second option or going with the obvious choice would lead to the desired outcome. For example, with Gloomhaven (not that this game, or any, are able to compare), event cards are unpredictable and creatively complex, enabling players to actually care about their decisions and feel engaged. A lack of repercussions and completely weightless decisions make the experience feel more and more dull as it trudged on. I was eventually praying for sun tiles so that game-end could be triggered.
Kitty: For remote play, we did some of our regular hacks like prop tiles and delvers up for camera display, as well as sending reference pictures before the game. The cave tiles were actually numbered, which is normally very helpful for remote gaming, but some of the numbering was either not there, or extremely difficult to read. The pacing certainly needed to be tighter and there needed to be an additional mechanic to boost the complexity and immersion.
Lizzy: Delve’s crux was simply being too generic. Get in, get loot, squabble over territory, and try to get out. Simplicity in a game can be beautiful, subtlety can be inspiring and engaging, but being generic just leaves everyone a bit uninspired. Honestly, I had more fun while reading the rulebook! The word “delver” was written so many times that Brooks made a game out of replacing all instances of “delver” with any other D-word each time! Sometimes you have to make your own fun!
Brooks: Doppleganger… duck-farmer… donutter…
Lizzy: Mmm… donuts!
Kitty: Quick, finish the review while she’s distracted by food, before she says anything worse about Delve!
Brooks: On paper we should’ve loved this game. In reality, Delve felt more like a dry work of reproduction. It truly does hurt our hearts when we don’t like a game, because we generally love or like everything and we give all games a fair chance, but Delve fell short in most of its primary objectives. For Kitty and I, the experience was rather tepid. For Liz, it was a complete cave-in.
Brooks: 3.5/10 ~ Kitty: 5/10 ~ Lizzy: 2/10
!!!Game Playlist!!!
Cold Cave ~ Gin Wigmore
Hollow ~ Tori Kelly
Underground ~ Adam Lambert
In The Dark ~ Dev
Batshit ~ Sofi Tukker
The Deep ~ ZZ Ward / Joey Purp
Cave In ~ Owl City
Underground ~ KONGOS
Barton Hollow ~ The Civil Wars
Cave ~ Future Islands
Long Distance Gamers 