While currently there are two sets of the game, Dungeoneer: Tomb of the Lich Lord & Dungeoneer: Vault of the Fiends, the basic premise of each game is the same (and in fact both sets are interchangeable or mixable, although I highly encourage you not to attempt mixing decks as I will explain later). I will begin by discussing the basics of the game and later address each product’s unique aspects.
THE MECHANICS:
The basic game mechanic is simple. Roll a d6 and add a stat bonus. To determine success you either roll against a difficulty number or an opposed roll. Failure will often cost you a health (i.e. life), but hey you get 6 to start with and its only a little cardboard character that you didn’t even get to name so I say throw caution to the wind. Actually that is an aspect of the game that should be addressed. It is fairly easy to loose health in the game at the lower levels and a typical game of four players will often see one knocked out through character death.
The game also makes use of a wide variety of cards. There are hero cards (six in each set) which contain all the information you’ll need to run your character, map cards which are drawn to create the dungeon, quest cards which give your character goals to accomplish, tracking cards which allow you to track “peril” and “glory” (see later) and adventure cards. Over half the cards in the game are adventure cards and they come in a wide assortment including everything from treasure to monsters and everything in between that makes a dungeon delve seem so appealing to adrenaline junkie adventurers. Oh did I forget to mention the teleporting rooms… yeah you all remember the teleporting rooms (insert evil laugh).
The cards make use of an elaborate system of icons for conveying information. This can be very daunting at first especially considering that some icons do not appear that different from others. For instance a monster is played to attack another character. You determine how that creature attacks by its icons. There are separate icons for melee, magic and speed stats. If a melee icon is in a circle shape, that creature can attack with it, if the icon is in a diamond shape it can only defend with it. It will probably take about two games to fully memorize the various icons, but luckily the game comes with handy “Dungeoneer Symbol” cards that you can use as a cheat sheet.
While talking about the various cards one has to comment on the artwork. In one word – superb. Its dirty and gritty, browns and grays and colors that make you think of earth, being underneath the earth crawling through dark and dingy hallways with nothing more to light your way than the orange/yellow glow of a flickering torch. The art blows most other non-collectable card games out of the water. My one complain is that occasionally its gets a little cartoony, but top of the line cartoon none the less. You begin the game by randomly drawing a character from the deck of character cards. The characters are based on archetypes, necromancer, paladin, illusionist and assassin just to name a few and each card comes with an assortment of statistics that represent the characters abilities. The three primary stats are melee, magic and speed, which are the stats you will add to the d6 noted above. Stats can be increased through cards, treasure and going up in level. Each character has four levels although in the standard game no character will ever advance beyond third (when you get to fourth you win).
In addition to these three stats each character has a treasure and boon stat. The treasure stat determines the number of treasure cards your character can have in play at any one time. The boon stat determines the number of boon cards (permanent skill bonuses and special abilities) your character can have in play at any one time. This is an interesting concept in that it really makes the characters more dynamic. For instance the ork shaman character from Vault of the Fiends can have four boons but only one treasure. This is a character that focuses more on his skills than gathering magical items. While the human paladin character from Tomb of the Lich Lord is more balanced in his approach with two treasures and three boons.
Each character begins the game with six health (a.k.a. lives) and a special ability unique only to themselves. When you’re down to zero lives, you’re dead, done and gone. Cash in your cards and wait for the next game. Characters win by completing three quests or by being the last man standing. Completing thee quests however can become a challenge as each character can only draw two personal quests (i.e. only they can complete them). To accomplish the third quest the players are in constant competition to complete a global quest, which anyone can complete. This can lead to much backstabbing and general fun. Additionally everyone can see everyone else’s quests, which can lead to denial tactics by characters who are not in a position to complete one of their own quests on particular turn.
The final mechanic of the game is the use of “glory” and “peril.” As you move from room to room in the dungeon you gain points of glory and peril (generally more peril than glory). You use glory to buy things like treasure and boons. The other players use your peril to play traps, monsters and banes (teleporting rooms, monster boosts, drop a treasure, etc.) on you. One of the nice aspects of the glory/peril concept is that it acts as a checks and balance on the game. Since a player has a finite amount of peril between his turns, there is a limit to the number of “bad” cards that can be played on that character. Once a character’s peril is at 0 you can’t play cards directly against him (although you might be able to play a card indirectly). The reverse is true for glory, with only a finite about of glory available it might not be possible to take advantage of all the treasure and boon cards in your hand.
GAME PLAY:
A game turn goes something like this:
1. Dungeonlord Phase: Mess up the other characters with monsters, traps and other nastiness. 2. Build Phase: Draw a map card and place it in the dungeon (normally to your advantage). 3. Hero Phase: Move your character around the dungeon and attempt to complete your quests. 4. Discard: You must discard a card but it can be a card in play rather than from your hand. 5. Play advances to the next player, go back to step #1.
During the Hero Phase you move your character from room to room gaining peril and glory and looking for the rooms that will allow you to complete your quests. You move a number of rooms equal to your speed stat. Some obstacles can get in your way. Certain rooms have traps built into them while others have locked or trapped doors. Along the way you might find other characters and decide to use a point of movement to challenge (i.e. attack) them.
There are three forms of attack: melee, magic and speed. You almost never see a speed attack, in fact no character can declare one, but upon occasion it appears on a monster or quests. When you are attacked the monster attacking (i.e. the Dungeonlord) chooses the type of attack. When you roll to oppose the attack you have to use the chosen attack form. A general strategy is to send melee attack monsters against the spell casters and magic attack monsters against the fighters. When your character makes the challenge to attack you determine what type of attack you are making.
Character’s win by completing quests, but most quests take place in specific rooms. If that room has not been drawn from the map deck that quest cannot be completed. A player draws a map card each turn during the build phase but sometimes that is not enough. Players can give up one point of their character’s movement to draw a second map card each turn and increase the chance of getting their room(s). Perhaps the character doesn’t want a particular quest. They are not stuck with it. They can go to the entrance room of the dungeon and pay glory to discard an old quest and draw a new one. These last two rules keep the game flowing so that characters are not left standing around waiting for their quest to become available. If their options are limited they have other recourses they can try.
WHAT YOU GET FOR YOUR HARD EARNED $$$:
The game runs for $19.95 and you get 110 cards and the rules on a double side 10”x19” piece of paper. The game comes in a small cardboard box which has a sample of the art you can expect on the cover (in fact the box cover art is actually mediocre to some of the art on the various cards). Two of the cards can be cut up to produce cardboard figures and counters. The whole package looks about the size of two playing card decks in one package.
The cards have the feel of decent playing cards. They’re flexible but sturdy. I would imagine you could get about twenty to thirty games in before you start noticing any wear and tear. As with most card games if you want to keep the cards in good condition I suggest using card protectors.
While mechanically I have few problems with the rules, I do have some issues with their presentation. The rules come on a double sided 10”x19” piece of paper. The paper is fairly flimsy and mine is already starting to tear at the creases after only five games.
Worse however is the small cramped print and lack of white space. My guess is that the rules are printed at around an 8-font size and single-spaced. Every possible inch of both sides is crammed with writing and diagrams. It has a very cluttered feel and is not easy to navigate when trying to find an answer mid game. In fact the first two games I played we spent a good amount of time searching through the rules for answers. After those two games however the rules were only periodically touched.
It should be noted that some cards, especially in Vault of the Fiends have rules written onto them that really are not covered in the main rules. The best example in Vault of the Fiends is the Activated/Inactivated Map Spaces. These are rooms you enter in which you can activate something like a bridge in another room of the dungeon. While these rules tend to be clearly defined on the appropriate card, occasionally they would throw my group for a loop as we pondered the new idea.
WHAT YOU NEED TO PLAY THE GAME:
You need to supply a number of six sided dice and some simple counters be they glass beads or pennies to track your glory and peril. Occasionally some treasure has charges so you will also need counter for those as well.
THE TWO SETS:
As was stated earlier there are two version of Dungeoneer. The first is Tomb of the Lich Lord. As I understand it this was the original Dungeoneer that was produced by Citizen Games and was re-released by Atlas Games. Tomb of the Lich Lord has a crypt/undead theme in that the map locations are crypt based and many of the monsters are undead. This version of the game is entertaining for characters of level one and two but once a character makes the jump to level three most of the monsters in the game do not pose much of a threat. The same is generally true for many of the other challenges that might confront a level 3 character.
By contrast Vault of the Fiends offers a number of innovations. The first is Activated/Inactivated Map Spaces (noted above) where characters can take actions in one room that affects another. The most memorable is activating/deactivating a bridge over the river of fire. The next innovation appeared slightly in Tomb of the Lich Lord but more so in Vault and that is tipping. Characters can be tipped by certain cards and monsters, which is sort of like being tripping in that they have to spend movement getting up. Lastly is the inclusion of so called “pumpable” monsters where you can spend more of an opponent’s peril to make the monster more powerful. Overall the Vault of the Fiends feels more challenging to the third level character than Tomb of the Lich Lord, which probably makes it the better buy.
As you probably guessed Vault of the Fiends deals a lot with demons, devils and well…fiends. This works nicely with some monsters from Tomb of the Lich Lord, as there were a number of demons and fiends in that set. However Vault of the Fiends does not present any new undead which can make some items and at least one character from Tomb of the Lich Lord slightly less attractive in a mixed game.
Now the whole Dungeoneer line advertises on the back that it’s a standalone game that can be mixed with other Dungeoneer sets. While this might sound like a great idea, don’t do it. Just taking the two sets currently available and mixing them together created a nightmare of a boring game. There were too many map cards and too many quest cards and no one was able to get a quest for a room that was already in play. When someone did get a room in which they could complete their quest everyone who didn’t have anything better to do would make that player’s life hell. After three hours we called it after finally one player died.
Now all that being said I think that taking the two sets and mixing parts of their decks together could be very entertaining so long as you maintain the same card count as you would get in a single pack. Trading in a couple of the “pumpable” monsters from Vault of the Fiends to Tomb of the Lich Lord might overcome the third level problem that was discussed above. Additionally you could probably mix the adventure cards together without the problems noted in the previous paragraph.
Lastly one very nice touch to the two sets is a set icons located in the lower left hand corner of most cards that tells you what set the card originally belonged to. This is incredibly useful for restoring the games after mixing up the cards.
REPLAY FACTOR:
I say each set has a replay factor of about ten to twelve games (two with each class) before it starts to get a little stale. I think that with the two sets and taking a little time to mix the decks up you could get thirty to forty games before staleness set in and hopefully there will be more Dungeoneer sets to come which should increase these numbers. My suggestion for a title would be Catacombs of the Cursed Creatures or Den of Dark Horrors. Yeah they’re cheesy but look at what I have for inspiration.
OVERALL OPINION:
Dungeoneer is a must buy for pretty much anyone who enjoys the fantasy genera or played a dungeon delve RPG. The game is quick (thirty minutes per player), never quite the same twice and the artwork is just plain stupendous. While the rules are definitely a slog to get through, once the game is underway and you know what you’re doing it’s truly entertaining. While you really have to play the game to understand the rules once you’re rolling dice it truly is a distillation of the whole RPG dungeon delve experience.
