Players: 2-4
Playing Time: 1 hour
Difficulty: 4 (of 10)
If you're already familiar with Dungeoneer, skim for my "Epic" subsections as well as the entirity of the "Relationships to Other Games" section.
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. Call of the Lich Lord 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.
Epic Lich. The big change in the cards in this deck is that they present higher level characters. The characters now each have two special powers, and the additional levels (above 4th) are listed as bonuses rather than straight numbers. This is all set up so that you can use an "epic" character on its own, or instead overlay it with a standard "heroic" character. At epic levels, the heroic character then gains the additional special power shown to the right of the card, plus bonuses to stats as he raises up in levels. It's all set up simply but cleverly.
The cards generally show lots of dungeons and undead beasties. Some players thought there was too much repetition among the monsters, and would have preferred each be unique, but other than that the artwork on the cards is all up to Denmark's usual high standards.
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, Call of the Lich Lord 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.
The Gameplay
The object of Dungeoneer: Call of the Lich Lord 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).
More Epic Lich Setup. There's also a bit of extra setup for the Epich Lich game. There's a special "Kill the Archlich" quest, and a special "event" card that stays out until the Lich is killed, which either allows undead cards to be recycled or ups their power. Finally, the Archlich monster is set to the side; he'll appear in the Throne of Despair room when it shows up.
Epic 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 Tanin Shadefoot the Darkling master Thief has values of 4/2/4. At his next three levels he gets +1 physical, magic, and speed, respectively. Meanwhile for these (epic level) heroes, life is always 12 and the sum of treasures plus boons is always 8.
Call of the Lich Lord is an "epic" level deck, which means it runs from level 4-7. These characters have higher starting stats than the previous heroic characters, but also improve more slowly. They also have twice as much life and more room to carry stuff.
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. Dungeoneer broadly classifies quests into six types: chance, escort, sacrifice, search, slay, and threat. Epic Lich is a sort of blood-thirsty deck, with 5 different slay quests 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.
(Technically these are all epic quests, and epic characters can only improve with epic quests, which makes it hard to mix these cards with "heroic" decks, but more on that later.)
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 attacker's 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 automatically 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.
Epic Lich: As already discussed, the main difference in the gameplay of Call of the Lich Lord is that it's higher power. Characters are better, and so are monsters. In addition, since characters can move faster, both glory and peril accrue a lot faster, and as a result cards get played a lot more fast and furious than in the heroic game.
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've now played all three variants. The pre-construction definitely allows for the most strategic game, while the random draws can be somewhat frustrating if your quest locations don't come up.
Relationships to Other Games
Call of the Lich Lord is one of many Dungeoneer sets. It's also an "Epic" set, and as noted above, that means that it's higher level which practically doesn't have any effect on the gameplay, except things don't to go faster, both on the good and bad thing (which I actually think is a good thing, because the original iteration of Dungeoneer can drag a bit).
A more open question for the "Epic" series is what it ultimately means for Dungeoneer compatibility,since one of the strengths of the system has always been that you can play various sets together. I don't think you can just willy-nilly mix Epic and Heroic sets. Some cards explicitly say they can only be played on "epic level" characters, while many others have sufficiently high peril and glory levels that they wouldn't be that playable in most heroic games. (I suppose supplementing your epic game play with heroic cards is a bit less of an issue, though some of the monsters might just be too weak.) As already noted, epic heroes must have epic quests too.
However, the other option that "Epic" opens up is to play Dungeoneer as a longer, campaign game. I could easily see laying out a wilderness area with entrances to two dungeons, one heroic and one epic, and then let players lose as they try and climb up through six levels. The gameplay would be long, admittedly, but you might be able to figure out how to break the game into parts. You'd also have to keep each of the decks separate which is a bit of a pain, but there's still some neat possibility here, which I think even more shows off how open-ended the Dungeoneer system is.
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.)
Epic Dungoneer has one other advantage, which I've mentioned previously. It seems to go faster and to get to meat of the game quicker, creating a more enjoyable gameplay experience.
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). As noted here, you could also play out a two-part heroic/epic game. 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
Call of the Lich Lord is the newest Dungeoneer expansion, and also the first "Epic" adventure. In general, Epic Dungoneer plays a lot like its less-epic predecessor, except it plays a bit faster and you get to the good stuff a bit quicker, which are both advantages in my book. This new set also opens up the possibility for consecutive adventuring, from heroic to epic level, which isn't officially supported yet, but seems to be an interesting direction of growth for the Dungeoneer game system.
