F@#$ Dungeon Lords

Dungeon Lords

Vlaada Chvátil has some tendencies I've noticed in several games.

First, lots of humor.
Second, simultaneous play.
Third, two main phases to the game.
Fourth, steep steep learning curves.


So, Dungeon Lords fits in for 1, 3 & 4, but it doesn't play simultaneously like Space Alert or Galaxy Trucker.


Plot:  An irreverent twist of a dungeon crawl!  You're the ruler of this cave/dungeon/castle/whatever, simply defending yourself from a scrappy group of adventurers who have set aside their differences to work together for a common cause.

Thematically it works quite well, especially with the irreverent tone and D&D inspired jokes.  It reminds me a bit of Villains by Necessity.  Eve Forward's book turned tropes on it's head, by making the stereotypical villains the protagonists in a world were Good triumphed over Evil one too many times, throwing the world catastrophically out of balance.

I digress.  I bring up VbN, because it was also really really funny.

Mechanics:

Woo boy.  Where to start?

Ok, the game round is called a year.  All year you plan and recruit and plot and intimidate locals and so on, waiting for the adventuring party to stumble upon your lair.

A year has 4 seasons; you build in spring, summer and fall, and fight in the winter.  Fall, spring and summer are your build phase, and winter is your resolution.

So here's the board.

so those varying colored rectangular trios?  That's where you play you minions

First row:  Get food, adjust your evil reputation, dig tunnels, and mine for gold.

Second row:  Get imps, get traps, get monsters, add a room to your dungeon.

So you get 3 minions per season, and it's worker placement.  You place a minion in the top most available slot, then when every has played all their minions you resolve what they do.

BUT WAIT!  You announce your intentions of playing a minion with a action card (secret until everyone has chosen), but two of your choices are always blocked.  There's really no easy words to describe how this works, so through the magic of MS PAINT....

so the red circle highlights the action cards you can't play (recruit monsters and adjust reputation).  The entire table knows you're locked out and won't be playing there.

Now this is important, because there's only 3 spots per action type and it's a 4 player game.

Again, this is important.  Because figuring out what your friends are gonna do is pretty much the game, so knowing that Blue is locked out of monsters and reputation means that no matter what, you can safely play on monsters and reputation.

This changes turn to turn...

The hot pink circle is where you arrange your moves to be made.  Resolve them Left to Right.  Slot 1, you bring back to your hand, and slots 2  & 3 move up to the locked area, replacing the previous locked actions.

So you may be asking yourself, well, why wouldn't I just keep playing recruit monsters (or whatever) in slot 1 so I can play that every turn?  

And I'm very glad you asked that.

In general, it's better to not be the first one into the action area.  They're all balanced differently, but slots 2 and 3 will either get you MOAR stuff, gets you a better selection, or is overall less risky.

So the actions:

Get Food:  Some monsters need food to recruit them.  Also once you recruit them, they will require upkeep, which would be more food.  It's also used to recruit imps and a couple traps need food.

Better Your Evil Repuation:  Some monsters make you moar evil by recruiting them and the better Get Food plays cost you an evil.  Reputation matters for two reasons.  At the end of the year when the adventurers line up to invade your lair, the tougher ones go to the moar evil person.  Also if you pass a certain threshold, a Paladin notices you and leads the party.  Paladins are the biggest, meanest father rapers of them all!

Oh yeah, sometimes you can peak at "spell card" when you play here.  Spell cards are combat events that probably hose you if they happen.

Dig Tunnels:  Expand your underground lair by assigning imps to dig some tunnels.  There's rules on how you can make additions, but this is already going to be a long ass post.  Read the f@#$ing rules if you're that curious.

Mine Gold:  Send some imps to mine gold in your tunnels.   You spend gold in a lot of ways, but your biggest expenses will be rooms, traps and taxes.  Rooms and Taxes are explained down a couple paragraphs, but taxes occur twice a game.  Failure to pay all you owe earns you -3 VP.  A winning score is less than 30, so taxes are kind of a deal.

Get Imps:   Besides digging tunnels and mining gold, imps also work a room in your dungeon.  Explained further with rooms.

Get Traps:  AT LAST!  We arrive at something that actually thwarts those meddling kids and that stupid dog too!  You acquire traps here, there's like a dozen of them that do various kinds of mayhem.

Get Monsters:  Pay their purchase cost which is food and/or evil year 1, and exponentially moar complex year 2.

Get A Room:  This one is tricky.  You resolve in 3-2-1 order, or last to place their minion there gets first choice.

Slot 3, pay a gold and buy a room.
Slot 2, pay a gold and buy a room.
Slot 1, get a room for free.

But, there's only ever two rooms.  So getting into slot 1 is a risk.  If it pays off, FREE ROOM!  If not, WASTED ACTION.

In year 1, all rooms are some kind of extra benefit you spend imps to activate.  Spend 3 imps and get [1 resource] is pretty typical.

In year 2, rooms will either give you end game VP's or some benefit for fighting in them.

There's also a couple of paragraphs on where you can and cannot play rooms, much like tunnels.

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So you play 3 minions on those slots 3 times before the adventurers come.  In between seasons some book keeping type stuff happens.

- some adventurers queue up to fight everyone.
- previously queued adventurers get assigned to each player
- you can spend unplayed imps on rooms
- taxes and pay day.  You pay taxes on your dungeon and upkeep on recruited monsters.  Bad things happen if you don't.
- maybe something else that I'm overlooking.  tee hee.

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Winter is Coming.

Combat is one big hot mess.  I'm not going to explain all the details here.

Every monster has abilities documented with a shorthand code.  Like a standard attack only hits the guy in front.  But some monsters can attack anywhere.  That gets a special symbol.  Some monsters attack everyone.  That's another symbol.

I've only played twice, but I'm intimately familiar with Race for the Galaxy, so sometime in the distant future, this short hand will make sense to me.

Each adventurer also has an ability.  Rogues lessen damage from traps, mages set the spells off you failed to peak at when you had a chance (see about 9 paragraphs above...), clerics heal damage from traps and monsters, fighters shove their way in front, and paladins do all of the above.

Again, this is overwhelming, but I've played RftG enough to teach it comfortably.  I will overcome!

So there's two places to fight.  Tunnels and Rooms.

Tunnels you get 1 trap and 1 monster.
Rooms you get 2 monsters and 1 trap, but you have to pay a gold to use the trap.

The combat timeline goes like this:

1. Traps go off, assign damage, lessening it if there's a rogue in the party.  
2. Check for a fast magic spell.  It's a symbol on the event card you didn't look at when you had a chance.  If it's fast magic and are facing the proper amount of magi, it occurs and bad things happen.
3. Monsters Attack.
4. Check for slow magic.  It's a different symbol on the event card you didn't bother to look at when you had a chance.
5. Cleric's heal damage done this round.  Couple caveats.  If you kill an adventurer, he can't get healed.  Also Clerics can't heal legacy damage.  Anything that makes it through the round sticks for ever.
6. Fatigue and conquer.  So remember that event card?  It has a fatigue rating on it.  Assign damage based on that.  If there are any surviving heroes, they conquer that area of your dungeon, rendering it useless.
7. Repeat for 4 rounds of this fun.  Well not if you TPK.  Then you can skip rounds

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Scoring

This is another points salad game.  Literally everything you do effects your final score.

You get points for defeating adventurers and paladins.  Regular adventurer is 2 points and a paladin is 5.

You get points for having unconquered rooms (not tunnels.)

Some unconquered rooms get you additional VPs.

Then there's series of ~8 things that can earn you additional points.  Like most tunnels, most rooms, most imps, most monsters, etc etc.

You get docked points for having conquered areas in your dungeon and failing to pay your taxes.

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Tactics?

Ok I've played twice and won once, but that win required two trips into the way back machine and a couple crazy lucky room draws.  I'm still pretty much Zoolander at this game.

but...

Pay really really close attention to the locked out cards.  Have a really good reason to risk being action blocked.  One, maybe two wasted actions can be overcome, but too many more than that and the adventurers are gonna woop you.  It's way way better to settle for something sub-optimal than get denied.

If you are forced into a choice between paying taxes and not getting a monster or using a really good trap, well you're probably screwed anyways.  But get the monster/trap.  Stopping the adventuring party will be worth more than the -3.

Done correctly, fighting the paladin is a viable strategy.

The tunnel room might be unbalanced.  It's cheap and directly effects 3 VP items.  Unconquered rooms, tunnel king, and room king.  There's probably a trade off with taxes, taxes are based on how big your dungeon is.  But in both games I've played, the guy who had this room won.


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Review:

So far so good.  I think there's plenty of good choices to keep it interesting for quite a while.  Sure it can go stale with me like the twice mentioned Race for the Galaxy, but I think we'll get plenty of replay out of this game.

That's the news and I am outta here.