1445: From the Game Shelf: Dungeonquest

[As promised, here is the first instalment in a series of posts exploring my collection of board games. I’m not making any promises as to how regular these will be since they’re a fair amount of work to put together, but ideally I’d like to cover everything on my shelf and hopefully provide a few of you with some ideas as to what games you might want to try with your friends sometime. Here we go with the game that happened to be in the top-left corner of the shelf, Dungeonquest.]

Dungeonquest (’80s Version)

Publisher: Games Workshop
Designer: Dan Glimne and Jakob Bonds
Released: 1987
Players: 1-4
Recommended ages: 12+
Play Time: 1 hour

Theme: Fantasy
Mechanics: Tile-laying, exploration, press-your-luck, player elimination
Co-Op or Competitive: Competitive, asymmetrical player abilities
Randomness: Very high
Luck factor: Very high
Strategy: Minimal
Interaction: Moderate

Dungeonquest is a simplistic dungeon crawler originally from Games Workshop back when they still made board games. It is a dungeon crawler in the purest sense of the word, though it bears little relation to Games Workshop’s other well-known dungeon-centric games such as Hero Quest, its Advanced counterpart and the later Warhammer Quest aside from a heavy focus on random generation and a necessary reliance on luck. The version I’m exploring here is from the late ’80s; Fantasy Flight Games have since revamped the game to a considerable degree and set it in their “Terrinoth” campaign setting along with tweaking, improving and outright changing a number of the mechanics described here.

In Dungeonquest, you take on the role of one of four different heroes who are attempting to raid the ruins of Dragonfire Castle. As you might expect, Dragonfire Castle plays host to a dragon — and as every good adventurer knows, where there’s a dragon, there’s treasure. As such, your aim is to get in to Dragonfire Castle, pinch as much loot from the dragon as you can and get out again without getting horribly killed by something or other.

It is, of course, not that simple, and more often than not you will find yourself getting horribly killed by something or other.

How it Plays

The basic mechanics of Dungeonquest involve drawing a face-down tile and placing it off one of the entrances to the room you’re in, then moving into it. According to the type of room drawn, various things might happen. Normal rooms have nothing special about them, but may be searched. They also force you to draw a Room card, which may force you into combat against a monster. Certain Room cards allow you to draw other cards relating to looting corpses or crypts for treasure — but there’s no guarantee you’ll find anything, and there’s a chance you’ll end up hurting yourself in the process.

Combat is resolved through a rock-paper-scissors contest against another player — you and your opponent each have a choice of three moves, and the combination of your two respective choices will determine who gets hit and how much damage they take according to a chart on the board. Depending on the group you play with, this will either end up being completely random or a brain-frying battle of wits.

Special rooms vary from a bottomless pit — which you must pass an Agility test using the dice to survive, else forfeit the game — to rotating rooms that immediately spin through 180 degrees once you enter, potentially trapping you in a dead end.

The aim of the game is to make your way to the dragon’s lair at the centre of the board — not necessarily as easy as it looks, depending on the room tiles you draw and the merry path they lead you — and steal its treasure. Acquiring treasure is a press-your-luck challenge in which you take treasure tokens and then draw dragon cards, hoping that the one you draw doesn’t depict the dragon awakening. The longer you stay gathering loot, the fewer cards there are to draw and consequently the greater chance you’ll be roasted alive.

Once you’ve stolen the treasure, in order to be credited for it and potentially win, you have to get back out of the dungeon before the turn timer expires. This makes for a minimal amount of strategy — in other words, determining how many turns’ grace period you have before you need to start heading homewards. Alternatively, you can risk trying to escape via an alternative route. Both options usually end in failure.

The winner of the game is whoever is not dead when all players have either escaped or died, and who has most treasure out of the survivors. Since it’s rare for anyone to survive, you may wish to implement a house rule determining who the winner is in case of everyone being dead.

Bits and Pieces

As you might expect from a Games Workshop game, Dungeonquest features some high-quality miniatures to depict the heroes, but these are by far the best quality components in the game.

The board itself is made up of six interlocking pieces, and its rather thin nature makes it somewhat prone to warping. This is a bit of a problem considering the number of things you need to lay on top of it over the course of a typical game.

The cards, which sport some gloriously ’80s fantasy artwork, are made of thin, flimsy cardboard and are all a little too small to be comfortable. Each deck is its own distinctive shape, too, and while it is thematically rather fun to draw “crypt” cards from a coffin-shaped deck, this makes storage of the cards a little awkward, particularly given the lack of an insert in the box. This is a game in which all its components absolutely need to be bagged and stored separately from one another if you don’t want to spend longer setting up than playing.

Is it Fun?

Dungeonquest is not a game to be taken seriously. There’s no persistent progression of characters — they don’t survive long enough for that — and there’s nothing to do with the treasure save winning the game. Its highly luck-based nature makes it impossible to devise strategies for, so it’s more a game for groups that don’t mind a high amount of randomness — and groups that don’t mind losing.

It’s also not very well balanced. Certain characters have a significantly higher chance of survival than others — there’s one for whom a bottomless pit tile is almost-guaranteed unavoidable death, for example, and others who have a tough job surviving the amount of damage the average player takes on a run into the castle.

The game makes for good stories when everything goes wrong if nothing else, and it’s undoubtedly fun from a “one disaster after another” perspective, but for those players who want to get their teeth into something a little meatier or more strategic, it’s probably one to pass by.

So yes, it is fun; it’s just not something you’ll probably want to play week after week. It’s an enjoyable game for a drunken beer-and-pretzels sort of evening; just be sure to have something with a bit more depth up your sleeve to play afterwards. Or perhaps before!