image © CoolMiniOrNot
The Massive Darkness Ed1 board game base set is a board game base set for the Massive Darkness system from CMON. The Massive Darkness base set box was first produced in 2017.
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Details - Massive Darkness Ed1 board game base set from CoolMiniOrNot
Board game base set: Massive Darkness Ed1 base set
Product name: Massive Darkness Board Game, Product code: MD001, Set type: Board game base set (Game base set), System: Massive Darkness system, Range: Massive Darkness range (Fantasy range), Company: CoolMiniOrNot & Guillotine Games, Production: 2017.09.29-2019-? (out of production?)
Designer: Raphaël Guiton, Jean-Baptiste Lullien, Nicolas Raoult
Style: Cooperative, Solo, Miniatures, AI controlled enemies, Modular board
Players: 1-6
"In Massive Darkness, you’ll join forces with the other players to enter the underground lair of the Darkness. You’ll work together, jumping from shadow to light, engaging the enemy when the moment is right. The minions of the Darkness can be anything from orcs, to goblin warriors, to giant spiders. You’ll never know what creatures await you around every corner. Play the quests in order to follow the storyline, or create your own legends using the tokens and modular board tiles. The Lightbringers won this war once before. Now it’s your turn to add your names to the history books!"
image © CoolMiniOrNot
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Contents - Massive Darkness Ed1 board game base set from CoolMiniOrNot
image © CoolMiniOrNot
System
1 Rulebook (Online version)
6 Plastic Hero Dashboards
18 Color Plastic Pegs (3x orange, 3x red, 3x blue, 3x green, 3x cyan, 3x purple)
12 Custom Dice
3x Red Attack Dice
3x Yellow Attack Dice
3x Blue Defence Dice
3x Green Defence Dice
280 Cards
213 mini-cards
20 event cards (E1 to E20)
19 Starting Equipment Cards (SE1 to SE19)
10 Door Cards 32 Level 5 (D1 to D10)
176 Treasure Cards (T1 to T176)
41 Level 1
36 Level 2
34 Level 3
33 Level 4
32 Level 5
6 Artifact Cards (A1 to A6)
50 Guard cards (G1 to G50)
10 Level 1
10 Level 2
10 Level 3
10 Level 4
10 Level 5
12 Roamining Monster cards (RM1 to RM12)
6 Lesser Roaming Monster
6 Greater Roaming Monster
6 Class Sheet Pads (20 sheets of each)
Battle Wizard x20
Bloodmoon Nightrunner x20
Nightshade Ranger x20
Paladin Of Fury x20
Pit Fighter Berserker x20
Shadow Barbarian x20
106 Tokens
10x Level Tokens
2x Level 1 Token
2x Level 2 Token
2x Level 3 Token
2x Level 4 Token
2x Level 5 Token
15x Door Token
6x Pillar Token
2x Dark Bridge Token
6x Objective Tokens
3x Lair Objective Token
2x Artifact Objective Token
1x Library Objective Token
34x Treasure Tokens
30x Treasure Token
4x Special Treasure Token
1x Starting Zone Token
1x Exit Token
1x First Player Token
20x Wound Token
10x Five Wounds Token
Miniature figures (75)
6x Hero miniatures
1x Bjorn
1x Elias
1x Owen
1x Sibyl
1x Siegfried
1x Whisper
69x Enemy miniatures
21 Dwarf
1x Dwarf Agent
27 Goblin
1x Goblin Agent
15 Orc
1x Orc Agent
6 Roaming Monster figures
1x Giant Spider
1x Hellhound
1x High Troll
1x Liliarch
1x Ogre Mage
Miniature accessories
6 Coluored plastic rings for the bases (orange, red, blue, green, cyan, purple)
Miniature scenery
9 Massive Darkness Base Set game tiles - double-sided game tiles
 image © Nagy Gábor (Nagual) |
 image © Nagy Gábor (Nagual) |
 image © Nagy Gábor (Nagual) |
| Bjorn | Elias | Owen |
 image © Nagy Gábor (Nagual) |
 image © Nagy Gábor (Nagual) |
 image © Nagy Gábor (Nagual) |
| Sibyl | Siegfried | Whisper |
 image © Nagy Gábor (Nagual) |
 image © Nagy Gábor (Nagual) |
 image © Nagy Gábor (Nagual) |
| Abyssal Demon | Giant Spider | Hellhound |
 image © Nagy Gábor (Nagual) |
 image © Nagy Gábor (Nagual) |
 image © CoolMiniOrNot |
| High Troll | Liliarch | Ogre Mage |
 image © CoolMiniOrNot |
 image © CoolMiniOrNot |
 image © CoolMiniOrNot |
| Dwarf Agent | Dwarf Defender Minion | Dwarf Defender Boss |
 image © CoolMiniOrNot |
 image © CoolMiniOrNot |
| Dwarf Warrior Minion | Dwarf Warrior Boss |
 image © CoolMiniOrNot |
 image © CoolMiniOrNot |
 image © CoolMiniOrNot |
| Goblin Agent | Goblin Archer Minion | Goblin Archer Boss |
 image © CoolMiniOrNot |
 image © CoolMiniOrNot |
| Goblin Warrior Minion | Goblin Warrior Boss |
 image © CoolMiniOrNot |
 image © CoolMiniOrNot |
 image © CoolMiniOrNot |
| Orc Agent | Orc Enforcer Minion | Orc Enforcer Boss |
 image © CoolMiniOrNot |
 image © CoolMiniOrNot |
| Orc Flayer Minion | Orc Flayer Boss |
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Review - Massive Darkness Ed1 board game base set from CoolMiniOrNot
Opening the package
System: It is based on the Zombicide system, designed by the same people who made Zombicide.
The weapon selection is good. It was nice to see all of them have some advantage over the other, and there is no over-powered one among them.
The dashboard has a sliding edge for easy removal of cards. This is an excellent addition to previous implementations.
Changes to Zombicide:
- Special dice instead of target numbers: This make it easier to read the rolls, but cumbersome to know which dice you need to roll.
- Spawn points instead of sewers: Enemies don't come from the edges of the board, but from the indicated spawn points.
- The difficulty of enemies is tied to the progress on the map: Instead of using the XP of the characters, you have to check how far they have reached.
- When you open a door, you draw one Door card: Instead of drawing spawn cards individually for each room, you draw one Door card that shows which rooms have spawns and which rooms have treasure.
- When you choose a character, you have to choose a hero card and a class for him: While this makes the game a bit more difficult to play, it gives more choices and abilities.
- Increasing threat: You have decks of cards for each level of difficulty. When you run out of cards for a level, instead of shuffling it, you start to draw from the next lower level deck. This gives you harder to beat enemies even if you remain on the same difficulty level.
- Unlimited inventory: There is no limit on how many cards your character can carry.
- Automatically opening doors: You don't need special equipment or dice rolls to open a door.
- Shadow and Light zones: There are some Shadow zones on the map that modify the abilities of characters.
- Line of sight into rooms: There is no limit of line of sight for seeing into rooms unless there is a wall that blocks it.
- Move: For every movement action you can move 2 zones instead of 1.
- No double weapon use: You don't have weapons you can use in both hands.
Improvements to Zombicide:
- Bonus activation at spawning: During spawning, if you don't have enough miniatures to spawn all of them, you don't put any on the board, just activate that kind of enemy once. As bonus activation is powerful enough, you don't make the enemy max out its numbers before the activation is taken.
- Limited search: You can only search on the indicated zones. When you search the zone once, the treasure markers are removed so you can't search there again. (I used the same house rule for Zombicide, so for me this is an improvement.)
- There are no dead characters: If a character would die permanently, the game ends and you lose. This means there is no lost time for the players who lose their characters.
- Limited choice of balanced items: There are not many item types in the game, but all of them have advantages over others. Of course the magical levels make them more useful at higher levels.
- Enemies get different powers each time: When you spawn an enemy, you draw an item card it can use. This way you won't get the same enemy twice.
- Signature moves: You have a special resource (XP, collected by killing enemies) you can spend to power special moves. This gives an additional choice for the player.
Theme: Dungeon crawling fantasy
Contents: It's massive, and also heavy. The price is accordingly high, but the box is stuffed with content.
The package is so full of contents it's hard to put everything into the box after you've punched out the cardboard pieces. It's also not easy to put the miniatures back into the plastic trays and into the miniatures box. It's also hard to organise the cards - the spaces in the plastic tray do not lend themselves to sort them by level, and even if you put them unsorted, they will just fall out of the tray, so you should put them into separate nylon bags or use rubber bands to hold them together. Putting them into protector sleeves are probably unnecessary, but if you have plenty, it's probably best to sleeve the magical item and equipment cards, as those are the ones that will get the most use.
When you open the box of the miniatures, take a good look which miniature goes where, and put them in their right place. For example, if the Giant Spider is not turned to face forward, the monster shelf won't fit under the hero shelf, and you won't be able to stuff everything back.
Having a dedicated space for every figure is good if you bring the game around, as you'll be able to see immediately if something is missing, not just when you play your next game. If you only play at home, or you don't mind a couple of lost minis, you can pour all of the minis in the box, so you won't have problems with packaging. I suppose finding the right figure that comes up during events will still be just as slow.
What I'd recommend is that you put everything in small boxes. One box for each species of miniatures and their cards (probably sorted in nylon bags according to type), one for the cards (sorted by rubber bands), one for the mapboards, and one for the heroes, dashboards and character sheets. This will allow you to use everything when needed, yet you will be able to use the expansions.
Problems
It can be hard to track which card belongs to which mob. You could use coloured tokens to indicate this.
The dashboard is a great addition for the game. However, you need an additional class sheet and a place for your item inventory to play the game. It would have been nice to have a place to include those too. You might create class ability cards, and you just place them by your dashboard when you acquire them.
I find flipping the level markers a bit cumbersome. It would be easier to just have a place to record the "highest level reached", and you could always check that, without having to check the level markers on the map. A single dice is a perfect solution for this.
I think there's too much bookkeeping, and it's hard to follow what abilities you and your teammates have.
It's not easy to differentiate on the map boards between walls and open spaces.
There is no quest that builds on the Ogre Mage or Liliarch. These monsters could have been left out of the game.
The quest do not build on the separate enemy types included in the game - dwarfs, goblins, and orcs. There's not much difference in them in the game. I feel they could have just gone with only one species of enemies, or maybe with goblins for level 1-2, and orcs for level 3-5.
Problem - Rules
The movement rules seem a bit too fiddly. When you spend an action for Move, you get 2 Movement points to spend, and a list of options to spend them on. I would have preferred if the movement rules were just a part of the action rules, as if you would get only 1 Movement point.
After killing the boss, the killer takes their items, even if the boss was killed by a ranged attack, and the character is far away from the boss.
You can have an unlimited number of items on your character. I find this unrealistic, and there is no explanation for this.
Everything is scaled to the number of characters in the game, except the number of treasure cards you can find. This is balanced by the ability to transmute, so you can discard cards you don't need for potentially more powerful and useful cards. If you start to use house rules either on treasure or on transmute, keep their connection in mind.
There is no limit to the number of minis you should be able to fit into a zone. They are, however, limited in space, so you can have problems placing your minis. You will need to come up with ways of counting the minis if they can't fit. In Zombicide we used the house rule that you can only have as many miniatures in a location that you can cram into the zone. I recommend the same here.
If you have expansions, you can add those cards to this set. However there are no rules for building enemy decks, and it has a huge effect on gameplay. The more low level enemy cards you have in the decks, the easier the game gets, because when you run out of cards from an enemy level, you start to use the next level. That means if you include every enemy card from every expansion, you'll only encounter enemies from the current level. If you use only cards from the base set, you can run out of enemies from a level, so higher level enemies will start to arrive.
The wording of the Enemy Phase made me think for a while that the enemy figures get attack, move, attack, move, just like runner zombies in Zombicide. It took me a while when I've read someone explaining this is not the case.
There are some ideas I've written about optional rules: Massive Darkness - House rules
Problems - Quests
Quest 3: The team must choose a character. When you gather the 3 pieces of the artifact, the chosen character gets it, even if it far away from any of those pieces.
Quest 5, Quest 6, Quest 10: There is no indication of any use for the Exit.
Problems - Miniatures
There are tons of miniatures in the game, and it's hard to know what are they, as they look pretty similar. In Rum & Bones there were different bases assigned to different roles, but here the bosses look just like the minions. And the bosses don't indicate what minions belong to them - the goblin archer boss doesn't even have a bow. The goblin and dwarf agents have two weapons, that could be a good symbol to make them different, however the orc agent only has one, and the orc with two weapons is a simple minion.
It would make it easier to run the game if you had the minions on a different base, for example a rectangular one, and there could be cloak on the agents of darkness to show they are hiding in the shadows. I'd keep the round base on the bosses so i could put coloured rings on them.
Possibilities of improvement
Use the coloured rings to indicate the enemy bosses, and you'll be able to track this way which card belongs to which boss.
Use a dashboard for characters abilities, so you could use pegs or markers to show you've reached them. This way you wouldn't have to check both your dashboard and the class sheet.
Overall review
I really like the basic concept of the game, and all those things you get in the box. We had great times playing Massive Darkness with a gamemaster. I think this could be a nice addition to you collection if you use it as a sandbox, that can be changed to fit your wishes.
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Size comparison photos - Massive Darkness Ed1 board game base set from CoolMiniOrNot
 image © CoolMiniOrNot |
| Size comparison of the miniatures from the Massive Darkness base set. From left to right: Bjorn, High Troll, Abyssal Demon, Ogre Mage, Liliarch, Hellhound. |
 image © CoolMiniOrNot |
| Size comparison of the 3D rendered miniatures from the Massive Darkness base set. From left to right: Whisper, Ogre Mage, Hellhound, Giant Spider, Abyssal Demon, High Troll, Liliarch. |
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Videos - Massive Darkness Ed1 board game base set from CoolMiniOrNot
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Resources - Massive Darkness Ed1 board game base set from CoolMiniOrNot
Official
CMON: Massive Darkness Board Game: Official webpage.
CMON Shop: Massive Darkness Board Game: Official webpage. (2021: The article is offline.)
Kickstarter: Massive Darkness: The crowdfunding campaign for the boardgame.
Preview
CMON: Massive Darkness: Attacking the Darkness: Preview article.
Rules overview
Kickstarter: Massive Darkness: Bjorn, and the savage ways of the Shadow Barbarian!: Player's guide article about Bjorn and the Shadow Barbarian class.
Kickstarter: Massive Darkness: Owen, and the stalwart ways of the Paladin of Fury!: Player's guide article about Owen and the Paladin of Fury class.
Kickstarter: Massive Darkness: Elias, and the arcane ways of the Battle Wizard!: Player's guide article about Elias and the Battle Wizard class.
Kickstarter: Massive Darkness: Siegfried, and the fearless ways of the Pit Fighter Berserker!: Player's guide article about Siegfried and the Pit Fighter Berserker class.
Kickstarter: Massive Darkness: Sybil, and the agile ways of the Nightshade Ranger!: Player's guide article about Sybil and the Nightshade Ranger class.
Kickstarter: Massive Darkness: Whisper, and the sneaky ways of the Bloodmoon Nightrunner!: Player's guide article about Whisper and the Bloodmoon Nightrunner class.
Review
Anthony Karcz (from GeekDad): ‘Massive Darkness’ Is Gorgeous, Brutal, Dungeon Crawling Fun: Review article.
Toucan Play that Game: Massive Darkness Review: Review video.
William Niebling (from ICv2): REVIEW: 'MASSIVE DARKNESS' (BOARD GAME): Review article.
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Buying the product - Massive Darkness Ed1 board game base set from CoolMiniOrNot
Price
Base price (Massive Darkness boardgame base set)(2017): 120 USD
Where can you buy it?
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Do you have Massive Darkness Ed1 board game base set from CoolMiniOrNot? How do you like it? Would you recommend them to others? Tell your opinion in the comments!
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