One A Day, Day 46: Dungeon Lords

One of the group of friends I semi-regularly play board games with shared a new acquisition tonight – a game called Dungeon Lords. It’s a fairly lengthy game to play, but it’s bursting with character and fun, despite it being a self-confessed game for “hardcore gamers”.

Dungeon Lords casts you in the role of one of the titular evil overlords. It’s your job to build a dungeon, populate it with monsters and traps and then settle down to watch the heroes try their hand at fighting their way through it. If it sounds like Bullfrog’s ageing PC game Dungeon Keeper to you, you’d be about right.

The game is split into two phases, each of which you play through twice. The premise is that you have two years to prove yourself as a Dungeon Lord and acquire your Dungeon License. To do this, you spend each year building and populating your dungeon, followed by a period of defending it against a party of adventurers who have gathered to face your challenges. In the second year, the adventurers are tougher, but you have slightly different options at your disposal for building.

Gameplay is based on players simultaneously choosing actions by laying cards face down. Two of your possible actions per round are laid face up as “forbidden” actions that you can’t do. At the end of each turn, two of your actions that you took become next turn’s “forbidden” actions, meaning a degree of forward planning is required for success. The actions allow you to do a number of things – collect resources, manage your reputation, hire imps (who are used for building the dungeon, mining gold and staffing the various rooms in the dungeon), hiring monsters or building rooms. All of these things are important – resources are needed to extend your dungeon and hire creatures, your reputation affects how powerful the adventurers who attack you are (a more evil reputation leads to tougher adversaries, leading up to an almost-invincible paladin as the ultimate challenge) and everything has the potential to score you points.

Once actions have been chosen, they are resolved in turn order. Up to three players can take the same action in a round, but the precise nature of the action varies slightly depending on who gets there first. Sometimes it’s the cost of things that vary according to turn order, sometimes it’s how effective the action is. It’s an interesting system that forces you to consider what your opponents are likely to do carefully, as well as prioritising your own needs for victory.

Eventually, you’ll have a “working” dungeon featuring a collection of corridors and rooms, and some monsters and traps to put in them. At that point, combat starts. Adventurers attack you as a traditional RPG party, with a tanking warrior at the front and rogues, wizards and priests at the back. Each type of adventurer has a particular special ability – warriors always go at the front, rogues reduce damage from traps, wizards can cast rather inconvenient spells and priests can heal the damage you’ve caused to the party. It’s up to you to carefully use the monsters and traps you’ve collected to try and slow their progress through your dungeon. It’s pretty much impossible to halt their progress altogether, but it is possible, with careful planning, to minimise the damage they cause. The game has some excellent tutorial scenarios to play through that are more like logic puzzles, and these give you an opportunity to see the sort of tactics you should be considering in the game proper.

Similar to farming sim Agricola, Dungeon Lords is a game where you mostly focus on your own efforts, but have to pay attention to what others are doing. There’s no direct interaction with other players, but your own actions can indirectly influence their success. For example, carefully managing your reputation to ensure you always get weak adventurers attacking can cause other players to take a beating. After one game, it’s clear that there are a lot of tactical considerations to learn.

It’s a really interesting game, and I’m looking forward to giving it another shot. It took a good few hours to play, but it didn’t drag – while actions are resolved one player at a time, there’s not much downtime before someone else gets a chance to do something. Plus the theme of the game coupled with the excellent artwork gives it a huge amount of character, encouraging a bit of improvisatory storytelling about what’s going on in the players’ respective dungeons. Check it out if you’re looking for something a little bit different.