DUNGEON ROLL (2013)

PLAYERS	TIME	DESIGNER	PUBLISHER
1-4	15-30 mins	Chris Darden	Tasty Minstrel Games

In this dice rolling, push your luck game, players take their adventuring party and dare to go deeper underground in the hope of bringing back glory and fame.

At the start of each of your three delves you’ll roll dice to give you a party of Adventurers. Then you roll a monster dice to correspond to the level of the dungeon. For example, for the first level you’ll roll a single dice.

An adventurer can kill a single monster, but each member of your party is stronger against a specific enemy type. So, a single fighter dice will kill all Goblins that round.

Of course, it’s not that simple, because each member of the party that you use then goes into the graveyard. This means the further down you go, the weaker your adventuring party gets.

Which is where the push your luck comes in. Before you roll monsters for a new level, you can decide to chicken out and head back to town with everything you’ve collected thus far. It’s the collected XP from three delves that gets you your score. Lose all your dice on a dungeon level and you’ll get nothing for that delve.

There are other things to throw into the mix like starting with a Hero card with a mildly useful ability or the fear that you’ll bring the wrath of the Dragon upon you. And there’s potions to quaff and chests to open.

And that’s DUNGEON ROLL in a nutshell.

When I started to discover games for one, the novelty of the chest shaped box and the cool looking dice had me braving many a dungeon.

But recently the game has fallen a little flat. When monster dice begin to outnumber my adventurers (which doesn’t take long) it’s almost a no brainer to head back to town. And it needs a couple of very lucky roles where the monsters are all one type to really get further efficiently.

DUNGEON ROLL isn’t a bad game, just one that doesn’t have longevity. It feels like luck is in the driving seat and I’m just there to watch.