This game is pretty damn fun I'm not a painter but I had fine tip sharpies to color them. Here are some of the prices I've colored.

The game set up takes a while and when your learning of the full campaign can fake 8 hours plus but there are save states to continue another time. Totally worth it!

Everything about this game is average...except the minis. If you're looking for a huge pile of them to paint then you can't go wrong. You'll not find this many for this price anywhere else.
But! Then it comes time to play the game.
Now, I'm a product of old school games like Hero Quest and i have to say, this is no Hero Quest. Of course, getting your hands on Hero Quest can be costly but even the AD&D series of games are more compelling (Wrath of Arshadalon, etc.).
We managed to go through one scenario and about halfway through the second before I really felt something was missing. Namely, the monster interaction. They are simply road blocks. As a reaction to an attack another player can move the monster towards you but that didn't really seem necessary most of the time and anti climactic when it did. The other thing was that the dungeon is all laid out there in the beginning so there is no mystery. Sure, you don't know exactly what flipping over an exploration token might reveal...but you know where they all are. The monsters are all on the board so you know what's "behind" every door before opening it.
So, it's basically you moving around with three explorers trying to be the first to gather up tokens and complet "quests".
It became ho-hum pretty quick.
This is a great example of the direction many games have gone these days; sub par gameplay with a box full of plastic and a high price tag to boot.
If you love painting minis then this game is a no brainer. They have a lot of character and the quantity/quality of them vs price really is worth it. But if you want a good, fun game to PLAY then you'd be better off with other REAL dungeon exploration games.

We are an active gaming house and have owned and played over 300 modern board/card games in the last couple of years. What caught our interest on this one (other than all the youtube reviews said it was "fun!") is the fact that there is a mechanic not found in many games.

+ PVP and re-spawning
This game has pvp (player vs. player) and respawning, just like video games. You may die, but you may kill others multiple times in one session. The game quests actually encourage this aspect for most scenarios.

+ Components
Like everything we've tried from CMON so far, the components are fantastic. It makes you feel like you're getting your money's worth with the quality of components in this game.

+ Miniatures!
Yes, this is one of the components, but the miniatures have great detail a I've seen some great paint jobs on boardgamegeek.

> This game really needs an organizer.
Once you punch the tokens you cannot fit the game back in the box. We had to dump the box the character figures came in, so the bags of tokens had someplace to reside. I found some great foamboard organizers people self-made (which is probably what we'll do), but there are some nice foam organizers a person can buy for almost the same cost as the game. ack!

-- Loss of a star because the LUCK is high in this game!
Everything comes down to two actions: dice rolling and what items you're team of characters are offered during the upgrade phase of the game. We had a punny, 2-attack goblin roll 8 crits in a row and thus decimated a character with 12 defense dice. Large swings in chance like this were the reason some of our family don't want to play this any longer, since their entire strategy can get derailed with the chance of a dice roll. Also, sometimes you have a ranged caster and no magic items provided in the item upgrade draft. So you go one or more scenarios without any upgrades.

> Leans more toward melee.
The chance of rolling ranged attacks is 3 (2 ranged + 1 crit) on a six sided die and melee is 4 (3 swords + 1 crit) on a six sided die. I get it, that ranged have the advantage of hitting from across the map (if unblocked), but it was no joke the number of swords a ranged attacker would roll compared to the roll they needed. This probably goes back more to the luck aspect than the fact that it isn't balanced.

+ Eleven (11) scenarios in the base game and a full "campaign" uses 6 of the 11.
If you run through a second campaign to play all the scenarios you missed the first time, only the last, final battle is repeated.
It took us about 10hrs to get through 6 scenarios (1 campaign).

+ The game scales fine for 2, 3 or 4 player.
We had more fun with even numbers as there were more competitors to keep each other busy and less ganging up on one person.

-- We have six in our family and I could not find an expansion for 5 or 6 players. Bummer!
I guess a second copy of the game and you could add more players, by putting the maps next to each other, but I don't know if that would be recommended.

+ Expansions galore!
With all the expansions that are out there, I think I read that there are over 100 playable characters now for this game. So even though the base game starts with 12 characters, there is plenty variety that can be captured through the expansions and characters for sale out there.

> Weak story.
This is a action video game not a role-playing adventure story. This may throw some people off.
This game is all about combat!

+ Across six scenarios in a campaign, scenario #2 and #3 I almost got no money = no ability to purchase upgrades.
I was going to hate on this game for what I was assuming, "if you fall behind early, there is no competing with the others later." But I was wrong and I found scenario #4 and #5 worked in my benefit. Thus entering the final battle I was able to compete with other players.

> I'm not sure about the balance of the game.
We found we had more success taking all our equipment upgrades and buffing out one main character out of our three, making that one as strong as possible. This left me wondering why do I even bother with a third character when all four of us would only play with one, maybe a second through an entire scenario? I realize the intent is that you buff out your characters evenly, but lack of upgrades because a scenario doesn't go in your favor may mean you can only afford one or two cheap upgrades that barely give one character the advantages of the next scenario which is always more difficult.

OVERALL:
We had fun and there were some very memorable battles. After speed playing through a full campaign we are tired and ready for a very different flavor game before we're ready to tackle another campaign. Was it worth the $50 I picked this up for on Amazon? Yes! Did I order some additional characters to add variety? Yes.
Will we sell this or keep it after another two or three campaigns? Maybe. We feel Imperial Assault has more replayability even though that is mostly combat focused too and has great miniatures. But this has a different, more fun feel and one we are still having a lot of fun with.

On turn three I killed two of my fiance's heroes. On turn four I killed the other. Would buy more.

My husband ordered this game and has been extremely excited about it. Once we got it we immediately pulled it out and started putting it together. At first this game seems intimidating since there is so much going on but in the end it is relatively easy and extremely fun.

Setting up the game is very easy and the guide and campaign guide are very easy to read. After the first few campaigns we were able to play without having to bring out the guide book. Each campaign took anywhere from 20 minutes to almost an hour. All in all you do 6 campaigns and depending on how many people you're playing with and how you're playing can determine the total amount of time. This took us about 7 hours complete. The first night we even stayed up until 5 AM because we lost track of time and it was just that fun.

This is the game that makes PvP fun in a board game. Easy to understand rules and a lot of fun for beginning board gamers to advanced this is a must play board game! If you are looking for a PvP board game where you can also work on a campaign that ends with a coop quest then this is the game for you. Each player controls 3 heroes in a guild and earns gear and gold from quests. Use the gold at the end of each round to purchase better gear that will make you more powerful or versatile in the next round. You can have a bad couple of rounds and still come back and win because it has a combat system based on dice roles. Role a critical on a dice and you get to role another critical. Sometimes you keep rolling critical hits and you get to keep rolling dice. I recommend you purchase multiple packs of dice so each player has their own set. This game is even fun if you only have 2 players. Also the miniatures are great for painting and really liven up the look of the game.