Dungeon Twister: Prison is a new, polished base game for Christophe Boelinger's successful 2-player Dungeon Twister game (though it could also be used as an expansion to your existing sets, if you've already played the game).

Players: 1-2
Playing Time: 1-1.5 hours

This mega-review incorporates a lot of the "game play" section and some of the "components" section from my original review of the Dungeon Twister Basic Set. It also talks about the new solo play style and finally highlights how the game has changed for extant players.

The Components

Dungeon Twister has always featured beautiful artwork on quality components. This new edition just ups that quality with great new miniatures.

Here's everything that it contains:

The Map: Eight square rooms and the "starting lines" together form the Dungeon Twister map. Each is printed on glossy, thick cardboard. These maps show basic features of a dungeon: walls, portcullises, pits, rotation gears, and (special to this set) arrow slits. The starting lines just sit at one of the edges of the dungeon to mark where you come on (and go off) the map.

The art on these boards--and the art throughout this game--is entirely gorgeous. Though the colors are slightly more subdued in this set than some other Dungeon Twister sets, they still really stand out. They also have a sort of organic look to them that is quite nice looking. As I said, the art & the graphic design throughout the game is nice looking; this is one of those games that when I opened it up, I just stared at it, because it was so pretty.

Quick Reference Screens: Full-color player screens in the two-player colors. They're printed on the same thick cardboard as the map, which makes them amazingly sturdy for a player screen. The main purpose of these is to hide your setup, but they also contain helpful reminders about what every character and every object does.

Cardboard Chits: There are several different types of cardboard chits used for various things in the game. They're all printed on untextured medium-weight cardboard.

Each player gets 14 circular tokens in his color (orange or blue), eight of them depicting characters and six of them depicting items. He also gets five square action chits in his color which he can (helpfully) use to count off actions as he takes him. For the solo game, there are 32 purple character chits (which allow for characters of different "personalities") and 6 purple items.

Finally, there are some number of portcullises, used to mark the onboard portcullises as either broken or open.

The various player chits are all nice enough. They feature most of the important information about each piece (movement and strength for characters, and some important reminders for the items). I wish they had a bit more (particularly, the additional characters icons included on the character cards & quick-ref screen), but the missing information isn't going to be an issue once you've played the game a bit.

The portcullises aren't as attractive as many of the other pieces, but considering the high quality of this set in general, that's largely nitpicking.

Miniatures: One of the exciting features of this Dungeon Twister over the previous edition is that all of the characters are also represented by plastic figures, for use when they actually go forth into the dungeon. These are nicely detailed molds of 8 characters in each of (light) blue and orange. The movement and combat of each of the figures is listed on the back, and though low contrast makes them a bit hard to read, I nevertheless consulted them frequently in play. Each miniature is also cleverly designed so that an item chit (or a wounded character) can fit right under it, allowing you to slide the piece along the board when moving, while carrying the item with you.

Cards: There are a ton of cards in the game, generally all featuring the same high quality art as the rest of the game (though printed on thinner cardstock than I would have liked). Each player gets a set of combat cards, action cards, and jump cards. In addition, there are 8 character cards, each of which fully describes what a character does.

The solo game is largely dependent upon cards to work, so for that you get: 24 role cards for the 24 possible purple characters, 8 room cards to help you place them, and some special "eye of the magi" cards for a solo-game variant.

Rulebook: Two full-color twenty-page rulebooks, each beautifully illustrated and full of examples. The first book, "game rules & tutorial", contains the basic rules for the game. It's laid out mainly as a set of five tutorials. Though it seemed a nice progression that was easy to learn from, I find it less helpful for later reference. The second boo, contains "game rules: solo version"--which features a simple explanation of the solo rules--and "veterans"--which talks about combining sets of Dungeon Twister and has some slightly more advanced rules such as "acrobatic jumps".

Box: Dungeon Twister: Box comes in a mammoth and well-designed box that's intended to fit multiple sets of the game. There are individual slots for miniatures, cardboard chits, and cards, making it easy to store things accurately. Overall, there's enough space for two full sets of the game (meaning that you could store 32 miniatures and (I believe) 16 maps. You could also easily drop 5-6 sets of additional cardboard-chit characters + items into the tray. Though the result is hefty, the resulting organization is very nice.

Overall, the components of Dungeon Twister: Prison are great, with great beauty and good effort toward increasing usability. The only real misstep is the stock for the cards, which the designer has said he plans to fix in the next printing. I've given it a "5" out of "5" for Style.

With that all said, I do think the game is a bit pricey at $70, but you get what you pay for, and the game is very repayable.

The Gameplay

The object of Dungeon Twister is to kill your opponent's characters and get your own out of the dungeon. Beyond that, I'm going to split discussion into three parts: the normal 2-player game; the solo game; and some notes about what's changed in the game.

The 2-Player Gameplay

The following explanation covers the full set of 2-player rules; in the rulebook the tutorial simplifies some things before getting to the full rules.

Setup: The game begins with the eight Dungeon Twister boards being shuffled and laid face-down in a 4x2 grid. Each player then places his starting line at one of the ends of the map.

Next each player selects four of his eight characters and puts them face-down on his starting line; they're his initial force.

Finally, players take turns placing their remaining four characters and their six objects face-down on the map boards. These are items and peoples which will be activated later in the game. There's a limit to how many chits can be put on any board: two on the outermost boards and three on the innermost. In the end the 20 chits (10 per player) will thus be allocated relatively evenly among the eight boards.

Characters. These are the heart of the game, because you win victory points by either getting your characters out of the dungeon or killing those belonging to your opponents. Each player has the same set of 8 characters, which each have a special power:

• Backstabber. Can open or close a portcullis for 1 Action Point (AP). Gains extra combat value when fighting in group combat.
• Banshee. Can repulse a character one space for 2 AP.
• Cleric. Can heal wounded characters.
• Colossus. Can break portcullises for 1 AP. Characters with a combat value of 1 or less can slip past them.
• Mekanork. Can rotate boards in either direction.
• Naga. Can slip through arrow slits.
• Telepath. Can choose a combat card for an opponent in one-on-one close combat.
• Wizard. Levitates. Can move over pits or past enemies.

Each character also has a Speed movement rating (from 2 for the slow colossus to 6 for the speedy naga) and a Strength combat rating (from 0 for the telepath to 5 for the colossus).

Objects. Each player has 6 items which are placed on the board, but can later be recovered for your use. You can use your opponent's items too, if you happen to grab them. The items are:

• Bow. Allows a ranged combat attack of strength 1.
• Key. Lock or unlock a portcullis for 1 AP.
• Fireball Wand. Costs 1 AP to use, and may only be used by the Wizard, but kills any one character in Line of Sight. One use.
• Large Shield. Protects from ranged combat.
• Rope. Allows a character to move over pits or else can be left on a pit to allow free movement.
• Telescoping Spear. Allows a close combat attack from two spaces away.

The Map. The map is also a pretty major element in the game. As noted, it's a 4x2 grid of rooms, each of which contains 5x5 spaces. The maps are mostly open spaces with walls. Walls are often aligned in between maps in such a way that you can't easily move from one to the other. There are a few special features on maps:

• Arrow Slits. Holes in walls useful for nagas, telescoping spears, and ranged combat.
• Pits. May only be crossed by the wizard or someone with a rope. Alternatively a rope may be left on a pit to allow free crossing.
• Portcullis. Barriers between squares that can only be opened by a backstabber, a colossus, or someone with a key.
• Rotation Gears. A character on this space can twist the room either 90 degrees clockwise, or counterclockwise, as shown on the map, for 1 AP. In addition all maps come in color-coded pairs, and if you're standing on one of the pair you can also rotate the linked room. The Mekanork can twist either room in either direction if he's at the gear, regardless of the depicted arrows.

Order of Play: On a turn a player gets to spend one of his four action cards, which gives him either 2, 3, 4, or 5 action points. Once a player has spent one of his cards, it can't be spent again until all of his cards have been used.

With APs, a player can have various face-up, revealed chracters take various actions. (Those face-down characters placed at the beginning of the game can't do anything until their room is revealed.) A player could choose to spend all of his actions on one character, split them up between characters, or some combination thereof. The same character could take different actions or the same action multiple times. The possible uses for action points are:

• Reveal a Room
• Rotate a Room
• Move One Character
• Initiate Combat
• Use a Character's Special Ability
• Use an Object
• Jump

Each action costs 1 AP for one use. A general rule for the game is that you have to complete an action before you start a new one. Thus if, for example, a character does a partial movement, then opens a portcullis, his movement action must be done, even though he may have wasted some of his move points, before he could begin a new action (opening the portcullis).

Reveal a Room. A character may flip up a face-down room that he is adjacent to. The active player then places all characters that were on the room and all of his opponent's items. His opponent then places all of the active player's items.

Rotate a Room. A character may rotate his room or the other similarly colored room one-quarter turn in the appropriate direction if he is standing on the rotation gear.

Move One Character. A character may move up to his movement in spaces. He can't move over pit, through closed portcullises, or through unwounded enemy characters. He can't stop in a space with an enemy character, with an unwounded friendly character, or where he'd increase the total object count in that space to more than two.

A character can freely pick up and drop items or wounded characters during his turn, but may never carry more than one object at a time.

Initiate Combat. A character may initiate combat if he is adjacent to an enemy. All unwounded characters in the same clump who are adjacent to at least one enemy become involved in the combat. Each player now adds up the combat value of his unwounded characters in the conflict and then secretly adds a combat card (from +0 to +6). Whomever has the higher total wins. All unwounded losing characters are wounded, and wounded losing characters are killed. (Once a character is wounded it can't move or initiate any actions; it needs the cleric to heal it. A wounded character can also be carried around, but doesn't score any VPs if he's carried out of the dungeon.)

Combat cards are lost once used, except for that +0, so they have to be used carefully.

A character who was wounded on this turn can't be attacked again in the same turn.

Use a Character's Special Ability. Some characters such as the cleric, the banshee, the colossus, and the backstabber have special abilities that cost an AP to use.

Use an Object. Some objects, such as the fireball wand and key cost an AP to use.

Jump. Each player has three Jump cards. One may be expended for one AP to get a character over a pit.

Winning the Game: The game ends when a player earns 5 Victory Points. They can be earned as follows:

• 1 VP per own character that escapes by crossing the dungeon and stepping onto the opponent's starting line.
• 1 VP per enemy character that you killed.

The Solo Gameplay

The solo gameplay of Dungeon Twister mostly works like 2-player Dungeon Twister but with your opponent being played by a set of active characters (called NPCs).

There are a few major changes in setup:

NPCs: Rather than just matching your 8 characters, your artificial opponent instead gets a random selection of 8 "NPCs". These are drawn from a set that includes 4 NPCs for each of the 8 classes; each has its own unique behavior (and, sometimes, unique powers). Since NPCs are drawn randomly, your opponent may have multiple NPCs of one class and none of another.

Board Setup: You choose your 4 starting line characters as normal, but your remaining 4 characters, all 8 NPCs, your 6 items, and your opponents' 6 items are tossed into a cloth bag. They'll be drawn randomly when rooms are revealed.

Then you have a few changes in your own gameplay:

Room Revelation: When a room is revealed, 3 counters (which might be characters or items for either player) are drawn out of the bag. Dice are rolled to randomly place each. If one "6" is rolled you'll get some control over the counter's placement and if two "6"s are rolled, the counter is removed from the game.

Reinforcements: When certain cards are played--including some combat cards, jump cards, and action cards--the game gets a "reinforcement". A new NPC (drawn from the set of unused NPCs) randomly appears on one of the face-up boards. The game has several difficulty levels that you can play, represented by icons on the cards. The higher the difficulty, the more often reinforcements appear.

Once your turn is over, and the NPCs takes their turns, things look mostly similar to standard Dungeon Twister, but not exactly:

Character Actions: Here's the biggie: every NPC on the board gets to go. That's not as intimidating as it sounds, because they may or may not do useful things. Basically, each character has an ordered list of potential actions, like "reveal a room", "combat", "heal a character", etc. They also have an ordered list of characters and an ordered list of items that they might interact with in conjunction with those actions.

Thus, for example, Ley-Vite the Warmonger would prefer to "Take a Fireball Wand" over "Take a Large Shield" and he'd like to "Combat another Wizard" more than "Combat a Telepath". In addition, he'd prefer to do any of these rather than "exit"--and "rotate room" is a last ditch for him.

You arrange the NPCs randomly each turn, and then have each one run done his list of preferences. Each preference also has an AP value next to it (from 2AP to 5AP). You go down the list until you can find an action for him to do in the set amount of actions within the allotted APs. If you can't find anything, then you fall back to a "default" action and you do as much of it as you can. Thus, for example, Ley-Vite's default action is "Combat". If he can't fully accomplish anything, he'll get as close as he can to someone to thump.

In my first play-test game of the solo rules, I made the mistake of thinking of the NPCs as "artificial intelligences". They're not, meaning that the NPCs may often not do smart things. In my first game I had two NPCs fumbling around in a closed up room and getting in each others' way, not getting out, despite the fact that they could have if they'd been more intelligent. But, such is the way of the NPCs. Think of them instead as automata--little Sims who are doing in-character things that may or may not be helpful--and you'll enjoy the experience more.

As already noted, a few of the NPCs have special powers. The only other thing that differentiates them from normal Dungeon Twister play is that they have one special movement rule:

Special NPC Movement: NPCs can always conduct a Jump for 1 AP. It's a very important rule that keeps them from getting stuck all the time, and it seems balanced.

The object of the solo game is, as usual, to get 5 VPs before your opponent does, by exiting your characters and killing your opponent's characters (the NPCs).

Changes from the Original Dungeon Twister

Though Dungeon Twister: Prison is a new base game set for Dungeon Twister, it's 100% compatible with the original game. The rules have been cleaned up (and organized as a tutorial), but the only "changes" that I've seen seem to be situations where I misinterpreted the rules originally. The only one of note is that "line of sight" has been clarified to mean "no diagonals", which is good, because I hate trying to figure out line of sight with diagonals in most games. Though I now assume that was the intention in the original game, it wasn't easy to interpret from the original rules.

Everything else in Prison is just an expansion to the original game, so you'll see: new characters, new items, new maps, and of course the entirely new solo rules.

Unfortunately the solo rules can't be easily used with other sets at this time, though there are different problems for different elements in the expansions. You can't use characters from other sets because you don't have the behavioral NPCs cards--which is a major issue that can't be solved. Items would be less useful because they might not be on the cards of existing characters; I suppose you could create new item preference lists if need be, but it'd be inelegant. You can't use rooms because you don't have cards to randomize them, but this is really a technicality.

So, at the moment you could probably swap in other pairs of rooms if you didn't mind losing some of the simple beauty of the current game system, but for everything else, Ludically would have to release a box of cards and new NPC chits; hopefully they will.

The Game Design

Dungeon Twister hasn't changed its core rules from the previous game, so let me reprint my thoughts on the base game before going on to the solo game ...

The 2-Player Game Design

Dungeon Twister is a deeply tactical game. However, it also has a fair allocation of good strategy as well. Unlike a lot of tactical games, you can set yourself up for future moves, and think about long-term issues, not just how to minimax an individual turn. It's also a relatively speedy tactical game. The full game can last 1-1.5 hours, a fair amount more than the 15-60 minutes quoted on the box, but the game never seems to suffer from too much downtime, because you've only got one opponent, and you're always interested in what he's doing. Beyond that it's got good theming, that really helps make the game come alive. It's also got some interesting balance, as the more VPs you get by exiting the dungeon, the weaker your on-board position becomes, and thus the more you have to struggle for those last few.

On the downside, I'd say that Dungeon Twister is slightly complex; by this I largely mean that there are a fair number of fiddly rules that can be a bit of a pain for a first-time player to keep track of, though by a second game I felt very confident with them. I also think that the game can be a little hard on a first-time player, as a bad initial setup can really mess up your game (though the set of characters in Prison seems a bit more forgiving than those in the original Base Game).

Overall, I'll have to admit that Dungeon Twister combines some of my favorite elements in a game, including fantasy theming and tactical/puzzle-solving gameplay. However, i also think that it does a superb job of it. This is, bar none, my favorite tactical game that I've played in years. I think it remains more interesting and constantly surprising than almost anything else in the genre, and my only real regret is that it only supports two players. (Though there's a 3-4 Player supplement that'll solve the problem for you.) As a result Dungeon Twister earns a full "5" out of "5" Substance rating for me.

The Solo Game Design

So what about if you're considering getting Prison partially or largely for the solo game? The good news is that I think that it maintains much of the joy found in the 2-player game.

The NPC mechanism resolving around favored actions, characters, and items is really clever. It keeps your opponents' characters moving in a way that's frequently surprising and sometimes gut-wrenching. I mean, sure, you could try to figure out what your opponents might do. I wouldn't think that'd be much fun, but even if you did, it'd sort of be a shot in the dark since you don't know what order your opponents' characters are going in, and that can really change things.

(Among the surprising NPCs in my game were: a wizard who grabbed a fireball wand then ran back and zapped my wizard with it; a naga who revealed half the maps of the board; and a cleric who ran in front of my colossus just before a banshee would have repulsed him into a pit, saving his life--and probably my game.)

I'll offer a few warnings.

First, as I already said, realize that the NPCs are automata, not artificial intelligences. They'll sometimes get in each others' ways, sometimes do really inefficient things, and sometimes just sit there. That's the nature of the beast, and you should learn to revel in it, especially at the higher difficulty levels where those inefficiencies are all that's keeping you from getting totally overrun.

Second, be aware that figuring out all those NPC actions is a little fiddly. I played three playtest games, and on my third one I was still looking at the NPC rules to remind myself of what NPCs did when they successfully completed different actions (for some action types they'd try and repeat the same action with a different target, with others they'd take a different action, and with others they'd just finish their turn). However, I'm sure that there will be a quick-reference sheet available on the 'net very soon that clearly offers these reminders. Beyond that, it can be a little exhausting moving through a long list of NPCs, turn after turn. However, I'm also sure here that after several more games everything would become much more obvious and automatic (and in fact that was already happening after my three games). So, generally, this fiddliness warning is only going to apply to your first several solo games.  (However, in any case, expect the NPC turns to often take as long as yours, as you have to walk through several possibilities for each character, to see which moves they can make with how many APs; it's really not unlike your own decision making.)

You can read about some of my original concerns with the solo game and how my three play tests went if you want more information. Among other things you'll see that I didn't think the solo game got that challenging until difficulty level 3. Nonetheless, you'll probably still want to play the earlier levels as you're learning the system.

After having spent 3 or 4 hours on it, I'm fairly confident that the solo game is a good implementation of the Dungeon Twister game that will play quite well for those looking for solitaire fun. If I were rating it separately I'd give it either a "4" or "5" for Substance--but as you've already seen I've given the full Dungeon Twister package a "5" and having a good solo game just adds to an already great package.

Conclusion

In its previous edition, Dungeon Twister was a great tactical 2-player game with tons of fun fantasy color. This new edition has plastic miniatures for all 16 pieces, a huge storage area that can be used for at least the next release, and some good solo rules that can let you play surprising and chaotic games against NPC automata. The price is a little steep for an entry-lvel product, but if it sounds like your type of thing, you should pick it up nonetheless, as it'll remain very replayable.