Sword & Sorcery: Arcane Portal

Having played the base box and quite a few other games in the genre, I remain convinced that Sword & Sorcery is, by far, the best GM-less dungeon crawler I have put on the table. The second campaign, Arcane Portal, leaves goblins behind in favour of spiders and all sorts of poisonous insects, and it is every bit as good as the first one—perhaps even better, because some things seem to have improved along the way.

At its core, this is a cooperative dungeon-crawling experience without a GM, where the group pushes through the adventure against enemies and threats managed by the game itself. The feeling is consistently one of pressure: you enter the dungeon, face whatever it throws in front of you, and try not to come out of there in pieces.

The interaction is primarily cooperative, but for it to run smoothly, someone needs to keep things coordinated. The game is still a little awkward to explain, and when I brought it to a group of non-gamers I normally play RPGs with, it became clear that, without an experienced player to untangle questions, the downtime and manual-diving can become tiring. This is not a game you simply open and have everyone immediately know what they are doing.

But if you get past that hurdle, the experience is top-tier: tension, action, beatings, death. The story and supporting text are fairly vanilla compared with other games in the genre, but honestly, I do not ask a game like this to give me an audiobook. I want to feel stressed and slaughter things—and Arcane Portal gives me that generously.