Dungeoneer: Tomb of the Lich Lord was one of prizes that we walked away with from the tournament sponsored by Han last year but we’ve only recently got around to playing it. To tell the truth, even reading the rules sheet that’s included in the game left a bad impression. It’s incredible how convoluted and poorly explained the rules are for such a relatively simple game. The game also doesn’t come with all the required components and we had to buy six-sided dice specifically for this purpose. We used the wooden bits from Agricola to stand in for the various tokens needed and miniatures from Battlelore to represent our heroes.
This is basically a dungeon crawling game implemented entirely with cards. You have the usual cards representing monsters, heroes, skills, items and even the rooms and passages that make up the dungeon. Instead of having one player taking on a DM-like role and the other players being the heroes, in Dungeoneer, each player has his own hero but also acts as the Dungeon Master during other players’ turns. This uses a system similar to to the one I’ve already seen in Marvel Heroes. Here, each player collects Glory and Peril whenever his hero moves through a map space. The Glory is spent by the player himself to play items and skills (called Boons) from his hand while his Peril can be spent by all other players to play monsters, traps and other threats against his hero.
Combat is very simple. Fights are either melee, magic or speed-based and both heroes and monsters have corresponding statistics in all three areas. The active player and the player acting as the DM who controls the current monster each rolls one six-sided die and adds the corresponding statistic to the value they get. The highest roll wins and succeeds in damaging the opponent. Some monsters have text on their cards indicating what happens when they succeed with a particular mode of attack. Monsters who win a fight don’t get to stay around however so there’s no need to keep track of their location. Their owner has the option of placing them in a pack, which is like an extension of his hand, but must still pay the full Peril cost whenever he wants that monster to attack a hero.
The objective of the game is to be the first hero to complete three quests. Each hero starts with two quest cards which only he can complete and there’s also a public quest card at all times which any hero may attempt. The easiest quests to try for, particularly when you start out, are the escort quests, in which you must travel to a specific spot in the dungeon, pick something up, and then deliver it to another location. Harder quests require you to travel to a specific spot to kill a monster detailed on the quest card. Other quests are simply dice rolling challenges at a named location. Heroes gain a level whenever they complete a quest with corresponding bonuses to their statistics as detailed on their hero cards.
You’ll note that one thing all these quests have in common are that they name one or more specific locations in the dungeon. However, according to the official rules, the dungeon is built piece by piece by drawing and placing map cards every turn. This means that until a map card related to one of the active quests pop up, players will do nothing but loiter in the starting area and use all of their movement points to draw more map cards. The rules sheet includes variant rules for building the whole dungeon before starting the game, and I think that would indeed work much better, but it’s still sad that default rules are so silly.
The other aspects of the game are hardly any better. I soon realized that by far the most important asset is to be able to move around the dungeon quickly. Items that allow the hero to teleport or to move map cards are instant game winners. Since gaining levels also increases your movement, this has a snowballing effect so the first player to complete a quest has a significant leg up on his opponents. To add to the randomness of the dice-based combat and the luck of the draw when it comes to adventure cards, there’s also some disparity between the difficulty levels of the various quest cards.
Anyway, as much as I like the cleverness of implementing a dungeon crawl with nothing but a deck of cards, I can’t see any reason to play this game at all. There’s no strategy at all as everything is very much based on luck and there’s no real choice about what to do as it’s so obvious. The only good thing to be said about it is that the art on the cards are quite good and the card names are suitably evocative of the fantasy theme.
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