Players: 2-4
Playing Time: 1-2 hours
Difficulty: 3 (of 10)
The Components
Dungeoneer comes in a fairly small card box. The box contains approximately 120 cards total, all printed in full-color on average card stock with rounded corners.
The majority of the deck is broken into two broad categories--map and adventures--each of which continues to be drawn through the game.
Map cards form your dungeon. They include a picture of the locale, a description of its special powers, marks denoting potential exits (on the four edges), and glory and peril values for each room. The artwork is very nice, and I personally wish there was more picture and less text; it would make the game more evocative, and also easier to play from across the table (where currently it's hard to make out the text of each room if it's not near to you). A few of the rooms are actually corridors, which I feel don't really match the look and feel of the rest of the game, since they show top-down views while the rest of the rooms show perspective shots. A minor nitpick.
The Adventure cards form the vast majority of the cards included in Dungeoneer. Players draw them throughout the game, spending glory and peril to play them, as is described in The Gameplay below. The cards include skills and items, which you can play on your own character, and also banes and encounters which you can play against others. The graphics on these cards take up something like 80% of the card, which is great, and makes them very nice to look at.
Unfortunately the Adventure and Map cards have fairly similar backs: black to gray pictures with white and red text, and thus it's easy to grab the wrong one during game play. More differentiation between these two cards backs would have been useful. (Quest cards, described in a bit, suffer from the same problem, but they're almost never drawn during play, and thus can be set aside.)
Two other card types exist: Character cards and Quest cards. For the most part these are dealt out at start and then set aside.
Everything centers around Character cards selected by each player during setup. There are 4 of these, each with a small picture of the character and a variety of information on the character's stats and special power. These are very well-done information sheets that help dramatically differentiate characters in a way that's easy to understand and remember. One playtest player remarked that he would have liked to see these character cards larger, perhaps similar to the double-card-sized Investigator cards produced as part of Mythos. That might help improve the play area for this game, but the current Character cards work fine too.
The Quest cards describe what each player needs to do in order to gain levels. Each one has a small picture and text describing the quest and the rewards.
All of these cards together share a couple of common features which are very nice. First, they all include artwork by Thomas Denmark which is, as already noted, top rate. It's very nice and genre appropriate and vastly surpassed my expectations for what type of artwork would be included in a non-CCG of this type. The game also makes very good use of icons to denote a variety of important stats: glory and peril; melee, magic, and move; life; etc. These icons are used consistently throughout the game and make it much easier to understand cards at a glance than a more text-heavy approach.
The set of cards included with Dungeoneer is finished off with four special cards.
One rules card includes a rule summary on one side and icon descriptions on the other. I'm always very pleased when a card game includes this sort of quickref, and the icon card is particularly useful.
The other three cards are all Component cards. One include little fold-ups for each of the four characters. The other two cards include glory, peril, and level counters. The idea is that you cut each of these up to produce tokens and markers to use in the game.
If you use the component cards, you'll probably find them a little subpar, but they're understandable given Citizen Game's decision to package this as a card game. As the rules suggest, however, you can use alternative components if you wish. Miniatures can be used for character tokens, and glass stones can be used to mark peril, glory, and a few other things within the game. We used stones & miniatures within our playtest, and they added a lot to the game.
I should note that you'll also need some six-sided dice, not included in the game.
Finally the game components are completed by with a rules sheet which is folded up to fit in the card box. Its' black & white, the equivalent of about four printed pages, with lots of nicely marked-up card illustrations included to make its rules clear.
Of all the components in Dungeoneer, the rules are the only thing that I had serious problems with. They're badly organized, and also don't do a good job of either highlighting the core rules or explaining many of the special cases that might arise. We were constantly flipping through them when we played and had to make up answers for many of our questions, because we never found the answers we needed.
Just for purpose of example, some of the questions that came up during our play (and weren't answered), included:
- Can you play Banes on yourself?
- Does the Thief get to add his movement increase before or after a die roll?
- When you successfully attack an opponent with a monster, do you give one peril to yourself or to someone else? (The rules include both answers.)
- Can Treasures be played at any time, as with Boons?
- What happens when a character dies?
We generally were able to come up with consensus answers without bloodshed, but the flip through the rulesbook, which tends to split the same topics among multiple sections, was often frustrating. Future games will be better, but it's somewhat sad to see an enjoyable game pulled down by a so-so rulebook.
Overall, the components for Dungeoneer are very nice. I'm not terribly thrilled by the component cards, but as I said very much understand the reasoning, and agree that it's easy to replace them with your own pieces. However, the rulebook as it currently stands takes away some from the Style of the game. I thus give it a "4" out of "5" with the caveat that a totally rewritten rulebook would probably boost that to a full "5". As I said already, the Denmark art is very nice, and an excellent cornerstone for the game.
The Gameplay
The gameplay in Dungeoneer all starts off with your character. As already mentioned, these characters are displayed on a card with a nice picture and lots of iconic stats.
The core stats are Melee, Magic, and Move, which affect the way that you interact with the various in-game challenges and which increase as you move up from level 1 to 3. For example, Roderik Talus, the Highland Human Paladin, has the following stats at levels 1, 2, and 3.
Melee: 1 / 2 / 3
Magic: 0 / 1 / 2
Move: 2 / 3 / 4
Below that are: stats for Life, which starts at 6 for all characters; Treasure capacity, which limits the number of treasure cards which can be held; and Boon capacity, which limits the number of boons that may be held. Each character is completed with a special power. For example Roderik can heal.
Each character also comes with three quests. Each of these requires a task to be done in the dungeon, usually a location to be visited, maybe a monster to be fought, and maybe a second location to be visited. Each quest also has benefits which are accrued upon completion, always a level, and typically some glory and healing.
Once each player has a character and quests, they begin play, each taking their turn in turn and running through a number of phases:
- Discard & Draw
- Encounter
- Build Dungeon
- Move
Discard & Draw is when a player must throw out one of his cards and then draw up to 5.
Encounter is the most peculiar phase in the game. You get to use bad cards in your hand to attack your opponents. This could be monsters or traps that your opponents encounter, spells that are cast, or a few other things. You're sort of playing the role of the dungeon master here, giving your opponents trouble.
Encounter cards are paid for with peril tokens held by the other players, which they earned while moving around the dungeon, as noted below.
Monsters are fought either with a character's melee or magic. Traps are overcome with his move; it all fits together quite nicely, actually.
Build Dungeon is the phase where a player daws a new map card and places it on the board to expand the dungeon.
Each room has four exits, some of which are blocked, some of which are open doors, and some of which are locked or trapped doors which must be overcome by Move.
Each room also has glory and peril numbers: when you enter it you thus gain somewhere between 1-6 peril tokens and somewhere between 1-6 glory tokens. Peril tokens, as already noted, are used by other players to pay for encounters. Glory tokens are used by you to use certain character powers and to pay for boon and treasure cards.
Most rooms also have special powers, which could include traps, monsters, or just "stuff you can do".
And finally specific quests tend to refer to specific rooms.
Move is the final phase, where you get to, yes, Move your character around. You collect glory & peril as you go, sometimes fight quest monsters, and generally try and finish up those quests. You can even challenge other characters if you want. As a player moves, he also accumulates those aforementioned glory and peril tokens. This is presumably also the phase where Treasure cards can be played (though the rules aren't entirely clear).
Eventually, a player is able to accomplish all three of his quests by moving around the dungeon and engaging in adventures ... and thus wins the game.
Relationships to Other Games
Dungeoneer is a totally standalone game, but it does bear some resemblences to other games out there.
It reminds me the most of Chaosium's Arkham Horror, because it similarly translates a roleplaying genre to a card game in a fairly successful and serious manner. Chaosium's Mythos can be seen in this design for similar reasons, especially since they both involve moving about through locations and doing stuff.
There have been a number of fantasy/D&D strategy games that have preceded this one as well. Steve Jackson's Munchkin is a card game, which I also previously reviewed. Orcs at the Gate is a strategic board game. And then there's Hack! which I've never played. The main difference between those games and this one is that they center around humorous satire of the D&D genre, while this one takes it more seriously.
Oddly the games that took this genre seriously all seem to be out of print, and from the era of board games that preceded the card game explosion. TSR's very old Dungeon! game is the one that's closest in the genre, but I haven't seen a copy in ages ... I suspect there's some resemblence to the old HeroQuest, though I've only played that once and can barely remember it.
The Game Design
Overall, the game has quite a bit of interesting design. Here's some of the best parts:
Good Risk Assessment System: Since the playing of bad encounters on players is directly based on how much peril said players have accumulated, each player can make a solid risk assessment for the future dangers of moving about.
Good Balance: The use of that whole player-encounter system also helps the overall balance of the game, because players have considerable ability to slow down other players who are starting to get ahead in the game. The fact that all quests are faceup helps this too.
Interesting Expansion of Pipe Laying Design: In some ways, this game is based on the old pipe-laying games (or their modern incarnations like Carcassonne); in this case the pipes are the routes in your dungeon. Using those "pipes" as the basis for game movement is an interesting design that's fairly rare.
Good Supplementability: It's very easy to see how this game can be expanded to very good affect, increasing the replayability enormously. New characters, new quests, new dungeons, new encounters, and all the rest would be very easy to add, and could provide considerable texture to the game.
Randomness at a Good Level: There is a lot of randomness in this game, because you're drawing from a large, arbitrary deck of cards. However, a number of mechanisms help control it, among them the requirement to throw out a card every turn and the ability to toss out quests that are bad (on the Discard & Draw phase).
Most of my complaints about the game design are at the pure nuisance level:
Long Turns: This is my worst criticism (and not terrible). There is so much to do during each players' turn--decide what to discard; draw and read new cards; play up to 5 encounters on other players; draw and place a map; move and have fights; complete quests; etc.--that it can be quite a long time between your turns. I'd guess 5-15 minutes. You have some interactivity during that time, but it's entirely negative, with you defending yourself against encounters, and thus the time can really seem to stretch out.
Card Draw Placement Bad: I usually have an issue with games where you draw cards at the beginning of your turn, rather than the end, because it forces you to sit and think about your turn while everyone's waiting. Dungeoneer does this, and you can draw quite a few cards.
A Few Unbalanced Cards: Overall the cards seem remarkably well balanced, given how many they are and how many different levels they can interact at. However there are a handful of monsters which can remove levels which seem to me to be unbalanced. There aren't enough of them to even out the variance, and they can also create setback end-game problems which can drag things out and partially randomize the winner.
Component Tracking Tiresome: Although I love the idea of gaining peril and glory as you move around, and then using those to buy cards, the actual scooping up of piles of each token during each move can get a bit tiresome, especially at the end of the game when you can move more because you're a higher level. This is something that would work better in a computer game where you have a computer to take care of these nuances.
Overall Dungeoneer is fun to play, with some good points and some bad points. I think I'd overall rate the Substance as an average of "3", with the comment that it's a fun diversion after or instead of a game of D&D.
Conclusion
I often classify the games I review based on the criteria I laid out in my article on gameplay. However, Dungeoneer really doesn't fit any of my traditional classifications because it's to a certain extent a strategy version of an RPG. It includes to various degrees most of my "gameplay" activities: token interaction, environment interaction, marker collection, movement, and exploration.
So the best I can do is point you to my list of somewhat related games above, and say that if you like fantasy RPGs and/or liked games like Mythos and Arkham Horror, you might find this fun as well.
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