I have reviewed digital versions of physical board games. I have played video games claiming to be board game-like, usually because they involve rolling virtual dice. I have found this latter set pretty simple, with a single game mechanism.
Demon Loop may be something new. There is no physical Demon Loop. But it is claiming to be a board game implemented digitally. So far, so much heard before. The interesting part it is that it is designed by Alexander Pfister, the designer of the Board Game Geek Top 100 games Great Western Trail and Mariacaibo. At least it is “from” Alexander Pfister. The Steam page does not elaborate on Pfister’s involvement in the game. The question is whether it is a board game? Does it rival Great Western Trail? Is it any good at all?
During a player’s turn, they play any number of cards from their hand. These cards are multipurpose. Check mark for a board game attribute. Each card can be used for movement or for its special power. Demon Loop does have a deck manipulation mechanism. The player may occasionally add new cards to their deck. As far as I have gotten in the game, there is no ability to remove cards from their deck. I will not call this mechanism deck building. It is a pale shadow of the board game deck building mechanism established by Dominion and which serves as a central mechanism in games like Dune: Imperium and Star Realms/Hero Realms. In Demon Loop, deck manipulation is only a very minor part of the gameplay.
Demon Loop is basically a puzzle game. The hero moves around a “board” of a dozen spaces or so. They are trying to avoid encountering the monster that is chasing them until they have collected enough resources to pay for using one of their weapon cards. That weapon provides a number of dice that the hero can use to attack the monster. Each monster has a number of vulnerable points, each with a number of hit points. To each vulnerable point, the hero assigns a die whose value meets or exceeds the hit points for that vulnerable point. If the hero can destroy all of the vulnerable points, the monster dies. If he does not, the monster strikes back. Some of the vulnerable points reduces the number of dice that the monster uses in its attack, so the crack back might not be too damaging.
The game is divided into scenarios, each of which has several subquests. The hero has two time limits under which to complete these subquests. The shorter period awards greater benefits on completing the scenario. The longer period still gives benefits, and it allows the hero to progress. If the hero does not meet the longer time limit or is killed by one of the monsters, they may retry the scenario. The hero can also retry the scenario at any time to try to do better than they did previously.
That’s about it. There might be more mechanisms added later in the game, but it does not seem likely. I would guess that the game adds new cards and makes the puzzles harder.
That’s about it for Demon Loop. Wander around the board until you can fight the monsters. Kill the monsters. Repeat. If at first you do not succeed, try again. I did fail one scenario, primarily because I did not know I needed to upgrade my weapon a second time to take out the monster in one battle. I did not find the puzzle interesting enough to try again. And that’s the main problem with the game. It is boring. A good board game puzzle is one where the player figures out an action they need to perform they need to perform in a few turns. They then have to figure out what they need to do to get ready for that action. That sounds like Demon Loop. But the board game equivalent has several different prerequisites that can be gathered in multiple ways using multiple mechanisms. Demon Loop has implemented a greatly dumbed down version of this pattern.
It is not a good game. Is it a board game? No, it is not. First, it is a solo game. Yes, there are good board games that are designed to be only solo games (as opposed to multiplayer games that use AIs so they can be played solo). Almost all video games are single person. Demon Loop certainly has the feeling of a solo video game, rather than a solo board game.
Second, it is not a “board” game. Each location in the game has a pattern of spaces that the hero moves around. A board game would have a central board, perhaps with different areas on it, perhaps with secondary boards branching off of it. It would not have a whole stack of different boards. Having many different locations is a video game mechanism, not a board game mechanism. Unless it is Gloomhaven. Demon Lords is not Gloomhaven.
Third, the mechanisms used are only vaguely board game adjacent. The deck manipulation is much more similar to video games like Slay the Spire than it is to most board game deck building mechanisms. Most board games coming out these days that use multifunction cards have options much more complex than “Move or Action”. Look at Expeditions or any Garphill game.
Demon Loop is not a board game. It is not even a good video game. Which makes me ask what does it mean that it is “from” Alexander Pfister. The Magnolia Games webpage says Demon Loop is “from the pen of” Alexander Pfister. If this were a board game and Pfister was the designer, he would clearly get designer credit. It sounds like Magnolia Games is trying hard to keep from giving him explicit credit. Maybe he had the basic idea, but someone else is the designer. Maybe this a very early beta release, and it will get better before its formal release. Or it could be Magnolia Games is using Pfister’s name as the video game equivalent of click-bait, and he actually has very little to do with it. Whatever the case, Demon Loop is very disappointing.
Den of the Red Wolf 