That brings me to a second point of criticism: the game has a lot of pieces and cards, but provides no way to organize them. Still, it’s a fun, quick game that, with a little work, is easy to set up. I like to treat my gaming groups as a team of adventurers united (to the degree possible) against a common foe, so the game theme of Dungeon – every adventurer for himself – isn’t really instilling the sort of gaming ethic that I’d like in the gamer-to-be in my household. The race for the most treasure just seems a bit uninspired to me and I could easily see a variant where the players are working together to gather a certain amount of treasure in a limited number of rounds. My biggest problem with this game is that, though the rules offer a few variations of play (including some solo scenarios), there is no cooperative-play variation offered. That’s honestly the extent of the game play. If they beat their number, the monster dies and they get a Treasure Card for that level. They then fight the monster by rolling two D6s against a difficulty provided on the monster card, determined by the Adventurer’s class (or spell for wizards). A wizard – who can attack monsters safely with spells from afar – can more easily move through the upper levels better than the thief … whose power, tragically, is to just find secret doors more easily.Īs the adventurer moves through the dungeon, they enter rooms and draw a Monster Card to reveal the monster that’s in that room. The dungeon is split into levels, with more difficult monsters and better treasures in the upper levels, so the different classes will typically be in different sections of the dungeon. The goal of the game is to reach a certain amount of treasure, with the amounts differing by class. In Dungeon, you play an Adventurer – either a Fighter, Wizard, Thief, or Cleric – who is going room-by-room through a dungeon, exposing and fighting monsters so that you can obtain their treasure.
There isn’t the sort of intrigue that drew our Black Gate overlord John O’Neill into Lords of Waterdeep, but the goal is something that most gamers can get behind: the one with the most treasure wins. This streamlined approach to the game design also makes Dungeon a pretty quick game to sail through. This is because there are no miniatures, just little cards and cardboard tokens. But, at the same time, that’s part of its charm.ĭungeon ( Amazon, B&N) is a straight dungeon crawl game at a bargain basement price ($19.99!) compared to almost any other RPG-related board game that you’ll find in the market these days. But one game slipped through the 2012 coverage here at the rooftop headquarters of Black Gate… in large part because it lacks the bells, whistles, and minis from some of these other games.
There were a lot of releases and announcements from Wizards of the Coast to get excited about in 2012, such as D&D Next, the Lords of Waterdeep board game, and the first four Dungeon Command faction packs (covered here and here). Dungeon board game from Wizards of the Coast