We just got Imperial Assault for Christmas and it is very similar to our favorite board game, Descent: Journeys in the Dark. Imperial Assault is essentially a dungeon crawl RPG board game that is star wars based. Tonight we played the tutorial with two heroes and an Imperial player after taking a while to read all of the rules and sleeve all of the cards. We haven't delved into the skirmish or campaign mode yet to see how the game is actually played, but overall the game seems very similar.

One difference that I think I will appreciate that others may not appreciate is that in Descent: Journeys in the Dark, your character has a base class type and you can choose several different classes that all have individual class decks to be where as in Imperial Assault, the character you pick has a specific class deck and that is it. Now on the one hand with Descent: Journeys in the Dark, you have a lot more variety, on the other hand it takes a lot longer for everyone to read the cards and decide what to be. Often in our gaming group, people will take a character and if it has say a yellow base class type, which means they can use any of the yellow class decks, they will always choose the necromancer. If someone picks blue, they will often take the same healing class because it is very strong and that is what they know.

Now we usually vary it up, but at the beginning of playing with our group they didn't want to read through all of the other expansion cards I had purchased and just read the hero cards instead. With Imperial Assault essentially locking you into your characters class which takes less setup time for people to read cards, and lets them actually play characters that feel different when playing them. I feel this allowed the designers to give the characters in Imperial Assault stronger powers and not worry about a specific character/class combo mixture being too powerful as they can thoroughly playtest a character with all of their abilities at different experience levels more easily. The character powers in Imperial assault do seem pretty strong comparatively.