Players: 2-5
Time: 60 minutes
Difficulty: 3 (of 10)
The Components
Dungeonville comes with:
- 5 dungeon entrance sheets
- 64 adventurer cards
- 5 dungeon deed cards
- 6 town cards
- 1 seeing stone
- 160 room cards
- 5 pawns
- 75 blood tokens
Dungeon Entrance Sheets: A set of five slightly flimsy cardstock sheets which help to define the playing area. Each has John Kovalic art depicting the location as well as a name and a space to place the appropriate dungeon deck.
Absent from these cards was other useful information, such as what adventurer classes might find their special items in this dungeon.
Cards: The majority of the components in Dungeonville.
Most of the card types are regular card size, printed full-color on glossy, somewhat flimsy cardstock.
The sixty-four adventurer cards each depict an adventurer, his class, his rank (lower is better), and how well he does exploring each of the five dungeon types. Every single card has a unique and enjoyable piece of John Kovalic artwork, which provides very nice variety.
The five dungeon deed cards depict those dungeons and are used to secretly determine which dungeon each player controls.
The six town cards depict six locations in town. Five of them are places to recruit adventurers: the street, the inn, the temple, the guild, and the tavern. The sixth location, the deed house, is only used for games with less than the max players.
The seeing stone simply identifies the first player, but also helpfully lists the turn order.
Overall the stock that these cards are printed on is a little substandard, but the Kovalic art makes them stand out, and in particular the adventurer cards are very nicely laid out & overall attractive and easy to use.
Room Cards. These cards are divided into 5 decks of 32 cards each, 1 deck per dungeon. They're printed at a bit larger than half-normal cardsize, again on glossy but flimsy cardstock.
The back of each card depicts the dungeon in full-color. The fronts of the cards are, unfortunately, disappointing. They're printed black & white, and just depict basic information: either room name, dungeon value, and gold value, or else item name and basic information. There are no graphics and they look pretty plain.
Pawns: Standard plastic pawns in the player colors (red, yellow, blue, green, purple).
Blood Tokens: Plain circular chits printed on light cardboard in the five player colors.
Overall there's a good quantity of components in Dungeonville, but they're generally of low to medium quality, with flimsy cardstock used throughout. Though the dungeon cards are very plain, the adventurer cards contrast that with nice graphic layout and 64 pieces of original John Kovalic artwork.
The John Kovalic artwork saves the otherwise lack-luster components, and it's mainly on that basis that I've given the game a "3" out of "5" for Substance.
The Gameplay
You are an evil dungeonmaster! Your object is to hire bands of adventuers and score blood points, either by slaying other DMs' groups of adventuers with your own, or else by killing those adventurers in your devious dungeon.
Setup: Each player randomly draws one of the dungeon deeds, describing which of the five dungeons he controls (and thus which one he earns points for).
Each player chooses a color and takes the pawn and blood tokens in that color.
The five dungeon decks are shuffled, and each is placed on their appropriate entrance sheet.
The town is laid out with the five hiring buildings, and optionally the deed building if there are less than five players. Finally the adventurer cards are shuffled and one adventurer is placed under each of the five hiring buildings.
Order of Play: On a turn the players jointly engage in the following activities, each time starting from the first player:
- Recruitment
- Reconnaissance
- Combat
- Exploration
- Collection
Recruitment: The players hire their adventuring teams. They do this one at a time, circling the table, until each player has a team of three or more.
The five buildings each have a value, from 40 gold to 0 gold, which is the cost to hire an adventurer there. The adventurers, meanwhile, are always arranged in a specific order. The lowest numbered adventurer is always found at the 40 gold Tavern, while the highest numbered adventurer is always found at the 0 gold street.
A player hires an adventurer by paying the appropriate amount of gold, then taking the adventurer. Afterward a new adventurer is drawn from the deck, and the set of adventurers is reorganized in the buildings, again from lowest to highest value.
If players hire a fourth or more adventurer, they must also throw someone out.There won't necessarily be a lot of opportunity for this since recruitment ends when each player has three or more adventurers, but it'll happen on occasion.
On the first turn only there's a special rule where each player has 40 free gold to spend; afterward the players will be able to spend gold won in dungeons.
The Adventurers. Each adventurer has a number of values.
First is their rank number, which ranges from 1 (the assassin) to 64 (the mule); this is their value when attacking other adventurers, with lower being better.
Second is their classification for exploring each of the five dungeons, which is rated from A to E on a per-dungeon basis. A character with an "A" rating does well in that dungeon, and a player with an "E" rating is very likely to get killed there. An adventurer's dungeon fighting ability is inversely proportionate to his character fighting ability. The assassin, who is a "1" and thus kills every other character has an "E" rating in all five dungeons, which means he almost always dies, while the "64" mule has a set of "A"s. (Most characters have more varied dungeon ratings, such as the "33" thief who's rated "E" in the crypt, "A" in the dragon's den, "C" in the goblin camp, "B" in the ice cave, and "D" in the rathaus.)
Third, each character has a color which can affect what happens to him in character-on-character combat, and fourth, a major class (such as the aforementioned "thief" and "asssassin"), which affects what items he can use.
Reconnaissance. In turn each player takes his pawn and puts it on one of thre five dungeons. This is where his adventuring team will be exploring this turn.
Generally a player won't want to explore his own (secret) dungeon because he can lose points for doing so, but at the same time he doesn't want to give away what his secret dungeon is by exploring everything else.
Combat. Now there are combats at any dungeons where two or more players went.
This is conducted by a "blind ordering" where each player takes three of his adventurers and secretly organizes them in an order of his choice. There's theoretically some strategy here, but as with rock-scissors-papers a random selection is actually the optimal play (on which, more below), so my group basically read it as "shuffle three of your adventurers", which speeds things up.
Then the adventurers are flipped up one at a time, forming three rounds of combat. The lowest numbered character defeats his opponent(s). If the adventurers were the same color (e.g., the brown 6 necromancer and the brown 9 witch), then the loser is recruited to the winner's team. Otherwise the loser is killed and discarded, and the winner gets a blood token from the loser.
If three or more people are all at the same dungeon one simultaneous combat is fought for each round, but the winner can't earn more than one blood token per round.
At the end of combat the loser, being the team who lost the most adventurers, is sent away; only the winner gets to explore the dungeon.
Exploration. Each remaining team of adventurers must now explore the dungeon that they camped out at. They do this, again in order, by turning over cards from the dungeon's room deck.
Some cards are items; they can simply be taken, and if you have the class type that matches with the item (e.g., thief), then you can give the item to that character and get some special ability.
Most cards are rooms. They list a dungeon value from A-E and a gold value from 5 up. The dungeon value lists which adventurers the room klls. If you have one or more adventurers whose value for the dungeon matches the room value, then you must choose one of them to die. The Es are the most common, which means E-rated adventurers often die, while the As are pretty rare.
You must choose at least one room card, but you may take as many as you want, one at a time. There's two catches:
First, you have a carrying capacity, in gold, equal to the rank value of all of your characters. This means that if adventurers die, then you might not be able to carry home all your loot.
Second, every time a character dies you leave behind a blood token on the dungeon. These blood tokens belong to whomever (secretly) owns the dungeon, and thus you're contributing to their victory. (Except that your own blood tokens at your own dungeon are worth negative points.)
Collection: Each player takes home his gold and puts it into his treasury. This money can be used on later turns to buy new adventurers. In games with less than 5 players you can also visit the Deed House for 50 gold, which lets you exchange your dungeon deed for another.
Winning the Game: The game is over when someone has collected 7 blood tokens between his dungeon and his personal tokens (won for killing people in character-to-character combat). However your own blood tokens at your own dungeon are worth -1 point each! If a player has 7 or more points he reveals his dungeon deed and claims victory.
Relationships to Other Games
When I initially glanced at Dungeonville I'd expected it to be a game of dungeon exploration, like Dungeoneer or WizWar. It's not; in fact the fantasy theming, though somewhat evocative thanks to the Kovalic artwork, is also thin. It's a light gloss over the game.
In actuality, Dungeonville is primarily a game of brinkmanship with some aspects of card management and conflict as well as a bit of deduction and bluffing.
The brinkmanship centers around drawing dungeon cards. You gain rewards in the form of gold and items, but you're balancing it against giving victory points to other players. In addition, there's always the chance that you'll lose sufficient adventurers that you no longer can carry all of your loot home. This is all pretty central to the game, and it reminds me of other good brinkmanship games like Can't Stop and Cosmic Wimpout.
The hand management is all about what adventurers you're collecting, for going into what dungeons, and whether you're going to try and make a run at the other players. It's fairly simple, but the extreme differentiation between good dungeoneers and good player-killers allows for interesting variation.
On the whole, Dungeonville is themed like an American game, but the mechanics are much more European, with attention paid to interesting game systems.
The Game Design
With all that said, Dungeonville isn't extremely deep. The strategy is pretty obvious and there's not a lot of variation in paths to victory. You either work toward getting low-number adventurers in order to ambush other players or else you work toward collecting a set of adventurers who are all good at going through the same dungeon. However, as already noted, I think the balance of getting dungeoneers, PKers, or both makes for interesting decisions, particularly if you can surprise the other players with a sudden strategic change.
The brinkmanship works pretty well. At first I didn't think there was much point in drawing more than one card in a dungeon, but it's crucially important to get gold, so that you can have the ability to switch up your party when doing so can give you an advantage over the other players. Thus you really have to think about whether you're willing to draw another card at any time. The fact that you can carry less if some of your adventurers die really adds to this system.
I've mentioned already that the blind ordering of the inter-player fighting really doesn't make a difference, and it doesn't. Game theory shows that random ordering is the best for this type of situation, but it's not a big deal because this is a small element in the overall game.
Finally, the deduction and bluffing is light but extant. You can definitely try and figure out which dungeon a player owns based on where he sends his adventurers, but there's not a lot of game system support for this gameplay, and so out of necessity it's just going to be an aside to your gameplay.
All in all, Dungeonville has a fun fantasy gloss and it has brinkmanship and hand management systems which are interesting and which provide for some original gameplay. On the whole I've given it an average rating of "3" out of "5" for Substance.
Conclusion
Dungeonville is a fantasy-themed game with fair Euro mechanics of brinkmanship and hand management. There's some interesting strategic decisions, but only a couple of main paths to victory in this light game.
