Dungeon (2014)

Anne & I played a few rounds of the reissued Dungeon game this weekend.  One reason I picked it up at the game shop was the price: it was only $19.99 when all the bigger, fancier games I looked at were $30-40 or more.  And I remembered the original from about 1982, and heard there was a new version.  

I saw that it said "from 1-8 players" and I'm always interested in how games contort their rules to support solo play.  I ran two solo rounds a few nights before, and felt it was a bit plain.  There were three different solo options: "Treasure Hunt" (draw a level 1 treasure card and put it back int the stack, see if you can find it before you get crushed twice) and "Timed Game" (try to win in 30 minutes or beat you previous best time), neither felt like much of an attempt at solo play.   But in the last solo option was "Become the Hunted": it was fun having a Level 6 thing pursuing me from the depths, always moving five spaces, moving through secret doors, not stopping to fight anything ... and when it finally did catch me I couldn't even hit it.  That game ends too quickly, maybe they should only move 4 spaces per turn?

With two people, it was more fun.  On level one and two you need a lot of low 2d6 rolls to beat the monsters, but hey, anyone can fail to roll even a lowly 5.  The mechanic of dropping things by tucking the cards under one of the 1 through 12 slots at the bottom of the board and putting the matching number chit in the room really worked.  You can eyeball what's in those slots and try to get to those locations to pick up the dropped loot.  

Anne played game two as a Wizard, which had the interesting option of spending spells as a ranged attack (you don't roll for a reprisal if the shot fails), or they can attack normally at melee range with the usual penalty roll on failure.  Comically, most of those few times she did use spells, they required higher rolls than if she had attacked normally; including one time she picked the lightning bolt but it was a troll that was immune to lightning bolts.  That happens plenty of times in the full D&D game as you learn about new creatures, so it felt right to me.  

Higher level encounters need higher rolls to beat but also give much higher rewards.  I'm not sure that the wizard needing 30K gold as their winning condition was fully balanced, when most other classes needed just 10K.  But it was fun clearing rooms and gathering stuff.  We used black and white markers instead of the little tombstones, so we could see who cleared which rooms. 

I would like to see a few more bonus weapons for the other classes to use -- without them, there's not much hope for a fighter in level 4-6, and it would just add more color and more chances without needing to go full Munchkin or anything.

I wasn't sure how this game was going to go over -- it depends on the players -- but Anne really got into it and there was a fun moment where we were both standing over the map looking down on what was going on, which reminded me of classic wargaming moments of the past.  ;-)