Players: 2-4
Playing Time: 1 hour
Difficulty: 4 (of 10)
The Components
Each deck of dungeoneer comes as either a single 55-card deck, which can be played by two players, or a double deck of 110 cards which can be played by two four players. Dragons of the Forsaken Desert is one of the latter.
The Cards: Each card comes printed on medium-weight cardstock. There's full color artwork on every one by Thomas Denmark. Overall, he produces high-quality fantasy artwork. Most of the cards show Denmark's art very large, which is generally to both the card's and the art's benefits. (It's smaller on the quests and heroes, because they have much more text on them).
Each card also has lots of icons, which are used to good effect in this game. These include some standard icons for glory, peril, treasures, boons, encounters, bane, melee, magic, speed, movement, and life, as well as standard icons for ability tests. The icons are all used consistently throughout the game, and make it that much easier to play. There are a lot of less important symbols too, like the various terrain symbols which appear in a wilderness deck, but a symbol reference clarifies them all.
The main types of cards are: heroes, quests, maps, and adventure. Each has a distinctive look to them, and a distinctive back, so there's no chance of mixing them up. A single card in each 55-card deck displays a set of three characters which you cut out, and then use as standups. I hate to mar my games by cutting things up, but I bit the bullet and cut them out, and they looked pretty nice. Each player also gets a tracker for his peril and glory, which is helpful. It's unfortunately on the back of the reference cards, but we actually didn't need the references too much, so we got by.
Dragons of the Forsaken Desert. This deck was pretty normative for Dungeoneer. Aesthetically the desert isn't a particularly beautiful terrain to depict, and thus the map cards are a bit dull. Some of the individual locales are pretty, but many others are pretty monochromatic, the roads even moreso.
Conversely, the adventure deck has some cool-looking dragons in it, as you'd expect from the product title.
Rules: A folded-up black & white rulebook. It's pretty dense, and I found some of the ordering a bit awkward, but I was able to pick up the game from the rules, and it was a pretty good reference afterward.
Box: A double tuck-box. These are always a pain, sadly.
Overall, Dragons of the Forsaken Desert has pretty average quality components, with entirely beautiful Thomas Denmark artwork and a very good eye for utility. As such I've given it a full "5" out of "5" fur Substance. I might trend that low due to the monochromatic setting, except the map cards are a pretty small percentage of the overall set.
The Gameplay
The object of Dungeoneer: Dragons of the Forsaken Desert is to complete three quests.
Setup: The cards are divided into four decks. Each player is given one hero, along with standup figure, and two quests. A global quest is also placed on the table. The "entrance" map card is placed in the middle of the table, and four passages are placed around it. Each player is dealt five adventure cards. Finally each player is given a tracker card for marker his glory and peril.
Then each player places his figure on the entrance card, and takes the appropriate peril & glory (usually 1/1).
Hero Cards.A hero card depicts who a player is in the game, along with all of his standard stats. These include: the three abilities melee, magic and speed; life; treasure and boon limits; and special ability.
Melee, Magic, and Speed are abilities that increase as a hero goes up in level. For example Delf Loedhi, the Gnome mystic, has values of 0/1/2, which go up to 1/2/3 at second level and 2/3/4 at third. (Most other characters aren't quite tha symmetrical.) Meanwhile for these (heroic level) heroes, life is always 6 and the sum of treasures plus boons is always 5.
Dragons of the Forsaken Desert is a "heroic" level deck, which means it runs from level 1-4. Other decks will be epic (4-7) and legendary (presumably, 7-10). Those characters have more life, better stats, extra special abilities, etc.
Quest Cards. A quest defines a task that a player has to do. They're the same standard formulations that you find in MMORPGs (go to X, pick up and deliver Y kill Z, etc.), but there's nice variety among them. Dungeoneers broadly classifies quests into six types: chance, escort, sacrifice, search, slay, and threat. There's a relatively even spread of all the quest types in Dragons other than search, of which there's just one.
The quests are heavily dependent upon board locations, where you typically have to go somewhere to do something.
Each quest gives various rewards upon completion, including one level. Three of them and you win. However you don't get replacement personal quests when you finish them, so you'll need at least one global quest among your three. (The global quests are, conversely, replaced.)
The entrance map card always has a special power: you can expend glory to replace a personal quest. This can help you cycle bad quest cards.
Map Cards. The game is played out on the map cards. Each one depicts a rectangular space in the dungeon/wilderness. There are four exits, one per side, but some could be locked, blocked, or trapped. Some maps are passageways, which aren't particularly interesting, while most are rooms/locations. Many of these have special powers, and many are related to quests.
Each map cards also has a glory value and a peril value. You accrue these when you enter the space. You'll be able to spend glory for treasures and boons, while your opponents will spend peril for encounters and banes.
Adventure Cards. This is the main deck of cards. Half of them are those good cards, treasures and boons, which you play on yourself with your glory, while the other half are bad cards, encounters and banes, which you play on your opponents with their peril.
Order of Play: Each player takes the following actions on his turn:
- Reset Phase
- Dungeonlord Phase
- Build Phase
- Hero Phase
- Discard/Draw Phase
Reset Phase: Some temporary card effects are reset here.
Dungeonlord Phase: During this phase a player plays his bane and encounter cards. Banes just do generally bad things while encounters are typically monsters that attack another player. Each of these cards has a peril cost. To pay it the active player must take peril from another player's display. If it's a card that directly affects someone, it must be their own peril.
Combat. The most frequent result of the dungeonlord phase is combat, specifically a monster attacking a player who had peril. Each monster has three stats: melee, magic, and speed, but only some of these can be used for attacks. (The others are used for defense.) The attacker chooses a stat, and announces it. The defender can then sometimes play certain response cards. Then each player rolls a die and adds his stat. The player with the higher number "hits".
Each monster has a special result that occurs when they hit with a specific stat, though the base is "inflict one wound". Likewise, player characters standardly inflict one wound, unless they have some item that changes that. Afterward a player with a saved movement point can attack back if he wishes.
There's an additional result of combat. Each hit a monster did gives his opponent a peril, while each hit a player did gives him a glory.
Afterward the monster goes back into the attackers hand (if unhurt), into a face-up set of no more than three cards called his pack (if it's hurt), or is discarded (if its damage taken exceeds its life).
Build Phase: Now a player draws a new map card and places it on the table, connected to the current network of passages and rooms, and in the right orientation.
Hero Phase: Finally, a player gets to take actions. He may play treasure and boon cards for a cost in glory. They're both goods things, but treasures are items and boons are more intrinsic advantages.
He can also spend movement points (which are derived from speed) to do a couple of things: move a space or play a new map card. Movement can be constrained by certain exits or obstacles. Each of them has a speed target number to overcome, and if you fail to roll the total with your speed plus a die roll, you take a bad effect. Exits which affect you when you try and move through them include locks (which can cost you one movement extra) and traps (which can cost you one life). Obstacles which can affect you when you enter a space include pits (which cost one movement) and spikes (which cost one life).
Some quests are automaticly completed when you enter a room, but others (in particular chances and threats) require successes at die rolls, and so you might have to attempt them multiple times before you succeed. The first time you attempt any quest on your turn is free, but after that they cost one movement each.
At the end of your hero phase you can save one movement if you want, to respond to a monster attack (as noted above), or to challenge another character when they move through your space. If you don't use the saved movement by your next turn, you lose it.
Discard/Draw Phase: Finally, you must discard one card: a face-up treasure, a face-up pack monster, or a card in your hand. Then you draw back up to five.
Winning the Game: A player wins the game when he completes three quests.
The Wilderness: Dragons of the Forsaken Desert is a wilderness deck. It works pretty much like the original game with two changes.
First, as already noted, a lot of the map cards have terrains on them. These are things like "desert", "plains" "swamp", "forest", etc. Many other cards key in to these terrains, providing for an additional consideration while you're moving about.
Second, some map cards are "portals". These are entirely cool because they're meant to link to dungeons, which are available as other decks of cards. So, you could play a game with a linked wilderness/dungeon pair of decks. The portal connects the two. This design has possibility beyond the simple linking as it currently provides, to potentially offer the opportunity for a full Dungeoneer campaign game. We'll see how the system develops ...
Variant Rules: There are a bunch of variant rules for Dungeoneer, some in the rulebook, some on Atlas Games' web site. The most notable of these are the variants regarding map construction. The standard methodology is described above. For a variant with less randomness, you hand a map card to your left whenever you draw one that affects one of your quests. For a different variant with less randomness the players can jointly construct the entire map before the game begins, but after quests are dealt. I stubbornly like the idea of slowly exploring the dungeon, but I supect the last variant, which is called "revealed dungeon" actually makes for the best game.
Relationships to Other Games
Dungeoneer: Dragons of the Forsaken Desert is an adventure game. It's pretty type of the genre, where players take on the roles of characters and explore a landscape to gain cool items, get experience, and level up their character. Dungeoneer feels prett similar in depth to the full-size board games in this genre like Runebound and Arkham Horror. There are other card games that feel sort of like adventure games, but none of them have this same depth of play.
This is the second edition of the Dungeoneer game. I previously reviewed the first edition of the game, put out by Citizen Game and I think it's improved a fair amount.
Here's the biggest style improvements: The icons are just a little bit more consistent, and easier to figure out thanks to good, reliable placement. The backs of the cards have been notably differentiated. The rules are considerably cleaner.
Here's the biggest substance improvements: The global quests improve interaction. The rearrangement of the discard and draw phase from beginning of a turn to the end speeds up gameplay. Smaller changes generally seem to be to the benefit of the game.
Dragons of the Forsaken Desert is also one of seven Dungeoneer decks currently available--5 double decks and 2 single decks, or if you prefer 3 dungeons, 3 wilderness, and 1 city. As I mention further below, a lot of the beauty in Dungeoneer is its expandability and variability.
The Game Design
As a game design I find Dungeoneer slightly above average.
- There's interesting tactics, built around the risk assessment of the glory/peril/movement system.
- The mechanics for the characters and the threat (task) resolution system are entirely sound: simple, but allowing for meaningful choices regarding them, exactly the sort of thing you want in an adventure game.
- There is randomness, but it's controllable, particularly if you use some of the map variants.
It's also an enjoyable game to play, particularly if you're fantasy roleplaying fan. The only other adventure game that I've played recently that feels like it models tabletop roleplaying to the same level is Arkham Horror. (Runebound is quirkier, while Worlds of Warcraft models MMORPGs much more than tabletop RPGs.)
On the basis of those things I'd give it a high "3" out of "5" for Substance: slightly above average and a half-step up from my rating of the original edition.
However, Dungeoneer really lives up to its potential through its expansions. Every one adds variability and replayability to the game. With a second deck of the same type (wilderness or dungeon) you can multiply the number of different cards and number of different quests. Or, perhaps more effectively, you could mix a dungeon and a wilderness deck as described above. You could use multiple decks to allow for more players, provided that you figure out some way to keep things going faster (perhaps by using tokens allowing two players to go simultaneously or some such). It looks like the epic adventures, which I'll soon be reviewing in Call of the Lich Lord may open up the possibility of expanded play even more by expanding the levels from 4 to 7. (I'll look into that more in that review.) Not all of these quirky ways to combine Dungeoneer decks are officially supported yet, but the infrastructure is there, and you can play with it in whatever way you want.
On this basis, as a part of a larger game system, I've upped Dungeoner's rating another partial point, and let it eke in a "4" out of "5" for Substance.
Conclusion
Dungeoneer is a well-design adventure game system that will appeal to roleplayers and adventure gamers a lot. Its greatest strength is its superb modularity, and the fact that you can add on or switch up decks to increase your variability and thus replayability. Dragons of the Forsaken Desert is a wilderness adventure, which allows for a full game's play on its own, but can also be cleverly linked to dungeons through portals, highlighting the game's modular design.
