Players: 2-4
Playing Time: 2-3 hours
Components
Dungeon Lords comes packed chock-full of dungeony goodness. It includes ...
Game Boards: This game goes all out including a plethora of gameboards to help you organize and play the game. This includes 1 progress board, 1 central board, 1 distant lands board, and 4 player boards, all printed on medium-weight linen-textured cardboard.
The central board is a two-panel board that has three main purposes: it keeps track of each player's "evil" level (on an evilometer!); it has spaces to hold various tokens, figures, and cards; and it depicts the 24 actions that are available each round.
The progress board is a small two-panel board that shows you all the things that happen during a year of play and lets you move a marker along that seasonal track. Its flip side helps you keep track of actions during the combat rounds and also has spaces to calculate your final score.
The distant lands board solely exists to hold pieces currently out of play. It's really a nice addition because (together with the places designed to hold stuff on other boards), it keeps the huge number of counters is this game under good control.
Finally the player boards are two-pnael boards, each of which holds the stuff owned by a single player--including the exact layout of his dungeon. Nice use has also been made of the backs of the board: one panel is used as a game mechanic when less than four players are playing; and the other panel contains a simple combat "puzzle"--allowing first-time players to move through four of these puzzles to really understand how the combat system works.
Besides being highly utilitarian, the various game boards are also well laid out and contain very attractive fantasy artwork.
Cards: Several decks of cards are used for traps, for player actions, for combat spells, as player aids, and as part of an advanced ruleset. They're all half-sized untextured cards of medium weight. The action cards use simple icons that clearly match with the central board. Everything else is pretty text heavy, but still has nice, small pictures that help keeping the cards look good. The cards also use bright, primary colors on their backs to make it pretty easy to tell the decks of cards apart at a glance.
Tiles & Other Cardboard Bits: Numerous other bits are printed on linen-textured cardboard. These include dungeon corridors, dungeon rooms, event tiles, and adventurers. Again, they're all attractive and easy to use.
I did have some problems with the die-cutting of one of my two sheets of cardboard bits; I have no idea how common that is.
Wood Bits: Still other components are produced as wood (and I assume there are so many different types of components because it helps to differentiate between the tons of different components). These includes golden coin discs, green food cubes, and some special minion-figures.
There's also a large first-player marker with a little sticker to go on it, which is a nice touch.
Plastic Bits: And finally, we come to the plastic bits. These include a bunch of red wound cubes, which are nice because they're evocative of blood, and a pile of really cute imp figures.
Rules: A dense, 24-page full-color rulebook. It makes very good use of examples and pictures to help you understand the rules and it also makes good use of sarcastic asides by a pair of commentators to help you get through them. It's attractive and well-produced.
I have no doubt that Dungeon Lords earns a full "5" out of "5" for Style. It's full of great, well-produced components, somewhat in excess of what I'd expect for the price. They're also generally attractive and good effort has been made to make them more usable. That's to say nothing of the extra effort that was made to use these same components to help organize the game and to help teach it.
All that doesn't even touch upon the theme, which I think is great. Dungeon Lords is a game of building up dungeons to capture foolish adventurers, and it does a great job of getting that fun and colorful idea across.
The Gameplay
The object of Dungeon Lords is to earn the most points by capturing adventurers, building great dungeon rooms, and keeping those dungeon rooms clear of those adventurers.
Setup: Bucketloads of bits are organized and placed on various boards. Most importantly, each player receives a board with three corridors in his dungeon, three gold, three food, and three imps. He also receives three minions, which are generally used to keep track of what you're doing.
Order of Play: The order of play is somewhat complex. Two "years" are played, each with four seasons of play (from winter to fall). After each year of play, there is a series of combat rounds. The four seasons of play within each round are largely the same, consisting of the following phases:
- New round phase
- Orders phase
- Production phase
- Event phase
- Adventurers phase
Seasons: Orders Phase: Now each player must decide which orders to give to his three minions. This is essentially a worker-placement phase. Selection of where these workers go is determined secretly through the play of cards, then they're all revealed simultaneously.
Here's what the general categories for worker placement are:
- Get Food. Get food at a cost in gold or evilness.
- Improve Reputation. Decrease evilness, possibly with a cost in gold.
- Dig Tunnels. Add tunnels to dungeon by using imps.
- Mine Good. Take gold out of tunnels by using imps.
- Recruit Imps. Get imps at a cost in food and possibly gold.
- Buy Traps. Take trap card(s), probably with a cost in gold.
- Hire Monster. Hire an available monster for its listed cost, plus possibly more gold.
- Build Room. Turn a corridor into an available dungeon room, probably at a cost in gold.
For example, the "Buy Traps" order gives the following three options:
- Buy a trap for 1 gold
- Get a trap for free
- Buy a trap for 2 gold
After all the players have selected their action cards, then they reveal them, and the minions are placed one at a time, in order, going clockwise from the first-player. Only now does each player get to discover what he can do and at what cost!
Then players take actions, using an order laid out on the central board.
Seasons: Production Phase: Afterward any remaining (or new) imps can be used in dungeon rooms to produce various goodies. This usually requirest 2-3 imps to get something.
Then each player retrieves his orders. However, there's a catch here too: two of each players' orders (typically the last two played) become unavailable for use next round!
Seasons: Events Phase: In the spring through fall only, an event occurs (as was revealed at the start of the previous season). There are two possible events: pay day requires each player to repay for his monsters or gain evilness; and taxes requires each player to pay gold for his dungeon or lose victory points.
Seasons: Adventurers Phase: So, why don't you want to be the most evil? This is revealed in the adventurer's phase, which occurs at the end of spring through fall. One of the four adventurers is assigned to each player's dungeon. The most evil player gets the toughest adventurer, the second most evil player gets the second toughest, etc. Worse, if you are really evil, you can get a paladin assigned to your dungeon, and he's tough!
(These adventures also vary a bit: there are tough fighters, spell-casting mages, healing clerics, and trap-finding rogues.)
Combat Rounds: After four seasons have been spent building up resources, constructing your dungeon, and collecting adventurers, a series of combat rounds is fought.
Each player will fight for up to four rounds against the three adventurers (plus, possibly, a paladin) who have invaded his dungeon.
Here's the phases of the combat rounds:
- Planning Phase
- Revealing Spell Card Phase
- Battle Phase
- Trap Step
- Fast Spells Step
- Monsters Step
- Slow Spells Step
- Healing Step
- Conquering Step
Planning Phase: Each round of combat begins with the player making three decisions: where the battle is to be fought in his dungeon; what trap he'll use; and what monsters he'll use. They're all subject to various limitations, which I won't try and detail, plus there's some other resource management to consider: traps are free in corridors, but must be set with 1 gold in rooms, and in either case they go away after use; while monsters can only be used once each year.
Revealing Spell Card Phase: There is a secret spell card set aside for each round of combat. It's now revealed. This tells what spell the spellcasters get to cast (maybe) and also how much it will cost to conquer the room at the end.
Battle Phase: Now the dungeon lord tries to off the adventurers while they try to conquer the location they're currently in. All of the steps have very specific rules for what order things like damage and healing go in, but the following roughly outlines what's done.
Trap Step. Traps go off. They might do damage to one or more adventurers, but rogues can reduce the damage.
Fast Spells Step. If the spell revealed was a fast spell, it goes off now. Each group of adventurers determines whether they can cast the spell by adding up the spell-casting capacity of the spell-casters and comparing it to the combat round number.
Monsters Step. Then, the monsters go off. Each monster has a specific attack which can hurt one or more adventurers. It just goes back to its lair after used, for the next year.
Healing Step. If any monsters attacked, the clerics in the party now heal people.
Conquering Step. Finally, the party takes a number of wounds to conquer the tile they're on. If they're still alive at the end, they do so. The dungeon lord will now lose points at the end of the game for that conquered tile, and if it was a room, they don't get to use its power any more.
Ending the Battle Phase: The battle phase ends either after four rounds of combat for each player or after each player has beaten and imprisoned all his adventurers.
Going into Year Two: Year two works much like year one, except some things are better, you get more choice when looking at traps, and the room supply moves away from production rooms toward victory rooms and combat-improvement rooms.
Ending the Game: After the end of the second year, each player totes up all his points. This is based on: unconquered rooms; monsters; victory rooms; and imprisoned adventurers. Players lose points for conquered locations and for not paying taxes. Finally there are a bunch of "titles" which give bonuses for the player who built the most tunnels, had the most imps, etc. Fortunately, this is all summarized on those aforementioned reference cards, so you can track what you're working on during play.
The dungeon lord with the most points wins!
Relationships to Other Games
Dungeon Lords is ultimately a resource-management and worker-placement game, which means that it traces roots back to Caylus. However, Dungeon Lords is rather unique in the category due to its simultaneous selection and the allowance for multiple yet slightly differing placements.
Perhaps more notably, Dungeon Lords is a game by Czech designer Vlaada Chvatil. He's done multiple highly thematic games, most of them either science-fiction or fantasy games. I've previously reviewed Prophecy and Through the Ages. His other games include Galaxy Trucker and Space Alert. Thus far I've found all of his games very unique and very good.
The Game Design
As I already noted, Dungeon Lords has a rather innovative worker-placement system. It's the core of the game, and I think it offers a lot to like. You have to make up some very hard decisions, not just about what to do, but also what order to do them in, to try and maximize your turn.
There is opportunity to get totally hosed if, for example, you plan to get some gold early in a round that you don't end up going. But, that's somewhat balanced out by the fact that you can see which actions are available to which players. You thus have a lot of information to use to make your decisions. You can then take the safe route where you can't possibly get hosed ... or you can go in for some brinkmanship that offers big wins or big losses.
The various resource management elements of the game--involving especially food, gold, and the evilometer--all work fine. They drive some of the hard decisions in worker placement.
However, it's the combat system which is, I think, the other notable element of the game. The fact that there's considerable opportunity for tactical play is made obvious by the "combat puzzles" laid out in the rulebook. There are real opportunities to make clever use of your monsters and traps to optimize your combat abilities.
When you put that those three major elements together you get a pretty intriguing game. My only warnings are that it's a bit long (at 2-3 hours, longer than most Eurogames, and also I think a bit longer than it needs) and that it's a bit complex (though by the time I played a full game I felt like I knew how all the pieces worked, even if the relationship between them was still somewhat opaque).
Putting that altogether, I've given Dungeon Lords a high "4" out of "5" for Substance. It's a well-designed and interesting game.
Conclusion
Dungeon Lords is a well-themed, well-designed game that should appeal to fantasy fans who want to a mirror image of a dungeon crawl played out in a board game. It's a lot of fun to build your dungeon and to squish adventurers who try to invade it, but there's also some serious strategy and tactical depth to the game, making it one of the best in the "dungeon crawl" board game category.
