Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
All the Crawl
Co-op dungeon crawlers are becoming so prevalent that they are pretty much their own genre. Open up Kickstarter or Gamefound, and you’re bound to see a flashy ad for some variant of this, often packed with oversized minis, excessive expansions, and a price tag that makes your wallet start sweating.
Early in my gaming career, I was enamored with these games, enjoying my time with Mansions of Madness, Gloomhaven, Arcadia Quest, Cthulhu: Death May Die, and many others. As time marches on, these games start to blur together, many feeling like different mix-ins of the same ice cream flavor. The theme changes, but innovative mechanics don’t always follow.
I had a chance to check out The Stygian Society, a game that came out in 2020 during the pandemic, with a cooperative angle perfect for partners stuck inside together.
But unlike other dungeon crawlers I’ve played, this one is a tower crawl, and a physical tower at that. Dexterity games are definitely not my thing, and it took me a good 15 minutes to build this centerpiece. At the very least, the table presence will turn heads.
The Big Climb
The Stygian Society plays out over a series of turns as players try to clear six tower floors and defeat the big bad wizard waiting at the top. Players choose a character, each with unique skills that map to familiar classes like tanks, rogues, and other fantasy standbys. Each randomly drawn floor features a new group of bad guys, and players must defeat them all in order to advance upward.
On a player’s turn, they activate a skill card, usually involving dropping colored hero cubes into the large cardboard tower along with peril cubes representing the enemy’s attack. Inside this sturdy skyscraper are little catches and shelves that dropped cubes can land on, leaving what tumbles out as anyone’s guess. Enemies resolve before heroes, and specified cubes are spent to activate abilities and attacks.
If the party is gravely wounded or the peril level rises to the maximum threshold, the players lose. Otherwise, they continue on to the next floor, gaining treasures and leveling up by adding new skills along the way.
Snappy Society
The first two floors of the tower felt very autopilot due to the limited number of abilities available. The game also offers three basic preprinted actions, including the “regroup” ability, which acts as an emergency removal of enemy cubes at the cost of a peril level spike.
I was worried at first that this would be it for the next few hours. But as we started smashing baddies and leveling up, I suddenly found myself with more skills than I could keep track of.
The biggest draw here is the tower itself. It gives the same uncertainty as rolling dice, but having some knowledge of what cubes are inside gives players a little more room to plan. Of course, cubes can still hang out inside and come out at the worst, or best, possible time.
Dread creeps in over time. The longer it takes to defeat a monster, the more peril rises, and the tougher they become. It encourages fast tactical planning, and each floor requires a different approach to come out on top.
There isn’t much downtime, as players are eager to see the cubes drop. There are even skills that activate on other players’ turns, teeing up some fun combo opportunities. The cooperative side isn’t siloed either, as one player can spend their turn generating cubes that the next player can use to pull off a massive attack. I was surprised that, despite how different all the heroes are, they synergize really well with each other. Because of this, the game feels balanced, and “quarterbacking” other players’ turns doesn’t really happen.
As you progress up the tower, the battles naturally get harder. Add in annoying status effects and cube mitigation, and the game’s bite really starts to show. But it never felt unwinnable like other similar games (Eldritch Horror immediately comes to mind). Table talk and planning ahead will help you overcome most obstacles, and a little luck will likely garner a victory.
When completing a room, there is often a treasure chest waiting for the team. But they aren’t always boons. I enjoyed that there can be negative repercussions based on the ending peril level, throwing a more cautious approach into the spoils of war. Rewards are great, but they might come with a few strings attached.
Though the experience is fairly fun, there’s a lot of fiddly upkeep that slows down the pacing. Throwing cubes into a cube tower is a delight, but sorting them after every roll and carefully moving them without tapping the sensitive tower, where even a small nudge can cause trapped cubes to fall, drags it down.
Not to mention checking every single enemy, floor card, status effect, and other condition each turn makes the upkeep feel like more of a chore, especially in the late game when a flurry of cards are sprawled across the table, and things are constantly triggering other things.
To make matters worse, the rulebook sucks. It’s very minimal and formatted in a way that hides critical information in lengthy paragraphs, making rules reference nothing close to quick. A lot of terminology isn’t covered either, leaving many one-offs up to player interpretation. Even a player aid would greatly help the game by reminding players of key terms, timing windows, and turn sequences.
It’s, of course, user error that we missed critical cube additions and subtractions, but in the late game, the conditional data points start compounding, so it’s easy to overlook something. One defeat was even mulliganed post-game when one small card was found to change the end result to a victory.
The game is also a bit niche in the BGG crowd, so finding answers to specific one-off questions is few and far between.
Race You to the Top
But if that’s the worst part of it all, then maybe it’s not so bad. The Stygian Society trades bulky plastic for cards and theater of the mind, and the table quickly starts to look like a tableau builder once the treasure and skill cards start piling up.
It hits the middle of the road for dungeon crawlers, but on the right side of that road. There’s some fun storytelling mixed into the game, a clever tower mechanism that changes the feel of combat, and enough variety to keep each play interesting. The upkeep and rulebook keep it from climbing to the very top, but if cube towers are your thing, this is worth giving a look.
The Stygian Society details
- Designer: Kevin Wilson
- Artists: Jacqui Davis
- Publishers: APE Games
- Release Date: 2020
- Player count : 1 - 4
- Age range : 14+
- Time range : 60 - 120 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Cooperative Game, Cube Tower, Memory, Solo / Solitaire Game, Variable Player Powers
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.07959 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 3.5.
- More articles about The Stygian Society.
