DungeonQuest is a game where just a few years ago I would have echoed a lot of the criticisms that people have placed at the games feet but what I have realized is that this game delivers just about everything that I want from a quick dungeon crawl game. The game is random, almost to a fault, but that same randomness makes the game endearing and charming. Played with the right group of people with the proper amount of beer pumping in their veins this game is tough to beat in terms of pure fun.

Players take the role of one of four preset adventurers set with the task of diving deep into underground catacombs to raid the Dragon’s Stash and try to make it out alive before night fall all the real baddies come out. Players start the game in one of four corners of a gridded board and draw random tile counters which can be rooms, traps, cave-ins, a portcullis closing behind you and other dastardly things all to hinder, actually flat out kill, the adventurers. As players work towards the center of the dungeon, it starts to develop with all the twists and turns you’d expect.

Once a player settles a room they draw an aptly named “Room Card”. This card could contain a further trap, a monster, the corpse of a previous adventurer as well as other events, or it could just be a blank room. Some of the cards will have you draw from another deck. For example if you decide to loot the corpse you come across you can find other items or nothing. So like I mentioned the game is random and has you drawing cards all over the place and rolling dice to determine the outcome of events. This randomness creates wild swings in playtime, but none of which last more than an hour. More often than not, your adventurers will meet his untimely end (if I recall correctly the rulebook states you should expect to die about 70% of the time). But the goal of the game is to make it out of the dungeon with the most treasure.

One of the shortest, but also the most memorable games I played had my opponent falling into a pit to his death two tiles in. I proceeded to find a sack of gold with thirty gold pieces and ran out for the quick and easy win. Considering a good stash to run out with is 500-1000, it was a pretty hollow victory (but a victory none-the-less) but that quick victory allowed us to kick off another game very quickly as time was starting to run short that evening.

Thinking about this game though I really do think that it is the best dungeon crawl I have played. Typical dungeon crawl games in my opinion have two issues. The first one is not wanting to see your character die. Many games are expected to have a role playing/character development type aspect to the game to give the players a reason to be fighting off these monsters and seeking hard to find artifacts and in time players develop a bond with this person they’ve been leveling up and gathering goodies for. In this game, you expect your character to die and if he doesn’t that in itself is a victory.

The second problem I feel dungeon crawls run into is too often the dungeon-master is just there to shepherd the adventurers through the dungeon, present them with challenges, but not make it too hard where the death of a character is at risk. So between these two what happens is you develop a game that lacks competition. Descent by Fantasy Flight Games looked to add that competition between the players and DM, but in my opinion that game starts to bog down and doesn’t have the pacing that I want from a dungeon crawl which is something quick and leaves a lot of dead monsters at my feet.

So what develops is a disconnect of competition between the players. With this game though, the DM’ing is handled by the game and cards and players are expected to die. So a competition exists to not only make it to the Dragon’s Stash but what also develops is the basic competition of survival in a very harsh environment.

There is a slight downside the Dungeon Quest though. A game that has a DM, provided the DM is good, can create a very colorful narrative with lots of description and can create a lovely ambiance for the game. There is not a lot of descriptive text on the cards with the extent being “Trap - Arrows! Roll a D6-Luck in Damage”. Personally though that is all that I need as I’m not a roleplayer, but one thing that I’ve been thinking about is for players who really dig and enjoy that narrative and there is a quick fix that can be done - Have an opponent draw and read your card to you and embellish what is happening. Instead of drawing a card that says “Crypt - Draw Crypt Card” a creative person can embellish it with text like “As you walk into the room a beam of light from a strategically positioned window shines down onto a stone tomb. Engraved along the side is a relief detailing a battle long since forgotten to this land. Etched onto the ornate lid is a Coat of Arms and below it the name that you recognize as a street in your hometown not to far from here. Do you want to open the tomb?” A simple little modification that can make what is a random and chaotic game that much more colorful and memorable.

There are rumors that Fantasy Flight Games will be reprinting this and I beg and plead that they not change a single thing about the game. It is just about perfect as originally printed with charming early 90’s graphics and gameplay. With the exception of combat. The way combat is handled is each person is given three tokens which say either “Slash” “Mighty Blow” “Jump Aside”. Each player picks one and places it face down. They’re then turned face up, a small matrix consulted and damage dealt. It feels like a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors and to me is lacking. If FFG does do a re-release, I wouldn’t mind seeing a change to the combat system, but with that said, if it came down to a complete overhaul or a reprint as originally printed, I’d take the straight reprint because this game is near perfect as is.

Overall this has become one of my favorite games to play. It is short at 30-60 minutes (and if everyone has a quick death can be as short as 5 or 10), easy to teach and though not really interactive between players still interactive in the race to get to the center and back while keeping your skin. For me it is the perfect vehicle for people to get together, share a few brews and a few laughs. For me DungeonQuest shouldn’t be the focus of that night but the focus should be on the company you keep that just happen to be gathering to play a boardgame.

Rating: 4.75 out of 5

‘Til Next Time - Happy Gaming
LvT

Filed under: Dungeonquest, Games - Board Games by LordVonTush