that rare euro with a hearty theme, the next big thing after Caylus to inject some new life and excitement into a tired mechanism
(joefling34)
RULES OVERVIEW Dungeon Lords is a worker placement game with two interesting twists: resolution phases and hidden action selection. A game of Dungeon Lords consists of two years, each of which consists of 4 rounds of worker placement followed by a round of combat resolution. In the worker placement rounds, the players try to build the best dungeon possible. In the combat resolution round, or what I like to call the "scoring" phase, the players try to fight off the pesky adventurers using the pet monsters and ingenious traps they have set up their dungeons with.
During combat round, 3 adventurers will brave a player's dungeon for 4 turns of combat or fewer should they be dispensed of before that. Each adventurer comes with two stats. The number on the upper left corner shows how many hitpoints the character has. The symbols (trap, mana, heart, or arrow) on the bottom shows each character's special ability. A spell card is flipped for each round of combat, with text detailing the spell that can be potentially casted by the adventurers, and a fatigue number (more on these later). Each turn of combat consists of the following events (when applicable) in order: trap attack, fast spell, monster attack, slow spell, healing, fatigue, and conquest. During trap attack, apply the text on the trap card, which usually involves dealing damage to some or all of the adventurers. However, if there are any Rogues (characters with trap symbols), reduce the number of damage by the total number of trap symbols on all the Rogues combined. If any character is killed by the trap/s (damage taken equals his hitpoints), remove him before proceding to the next event. Next, if the spell card shows a fast spell, the adventurers cast it now if the Clerics have enough mana to cast it. Next, the monster does his attack and deals any applicable damage. Any adventurers that is killed gets removed immediately. Next, if the spell card is a slow spell, the adventurers cast it now if the Clerics have enough mana to cast it. Next, if and only if a monster has attacked the adventurers, then any Priests will heal damage equal the total number of hearts showing. Next, the amount of fatigue shown on the spell card is applied in damage to the frontmost adventurer, with any excess "spilling" over to the next adventurer in line. Finally, if there are any adventurers still surviving, a dungeon tile is conquered (indicated by flipping it over to the light side), and the player proceeds to the next turn of combat.
The combat round presents the players with some solo-puzzle-like problems, but it is mostly just a resolution phase to determine how well the players have built their dungeons. The core of the game is in the worker placement rounds during which the actual building of the dungeon takes place. The actions available for dungeon building are:
main worker placement board (kreten)
gather food: pay gold for food, pay evil for food, pay evil for food and gold publicity: gain nice and peek at spell card, gain nice, pay gold for nice and peek at spell card dig tunnel: use imps to dig tunnels mine gold: use imps to mine gold from unconquered tunnels imp growth: pay food for imp, pay food for imp, pay food and gold for imp buy trap: pay gold for trap, gain one trap for free, pay gold for trap hire monster: pay cost of monster to hire (plus one extra food if first to hire) build room: pay gold to build room on a tunnel (in addition to points, rooms give some powers)
However, unlike the traditional worker placement game, players secretly select 3 actions and reveal them simultaneously. Then going around in turn order, players place a minion on the first action they have selected, then repeat the process for the second and third actions. When placing one's minion, the player puts it on the first open slot(counting from top down). If all three slots for the corresponding action have been occupied, then the player is out of luck and his action is wasted.
After the minions have been placed, the actions are executed in the same order as they are listed above. Within the same action, the slot with the shorter "bar" is executed first. When all the actions have been executed, players take back their minions and prepare for the next round of worker placement. However, the actions they used as their second and third selections become locked and unable to use for the next round.
In between worker placement rounds, sometimes other events happen, such as paying taxes (gold), paying monsters already hired in one's dungeon, attracting a new adventurer to one's dungeon, etc. When attracting new adventurers, the player with the best (nicest) publicity gets the easiest adventurer, and so on. Also, the warrior (with the arrow) automatically goes to the front of the party on a player's board to act as a meatshield.
order-of-play board (kreten)
At the end of the game, players score their dungeons as follows:
scoring
As expected, the faster the adventurers are taken care of during the combat phase, the better the dungeon will score. For each round that the adventurers remain alive, they conquer a dungeon tile which gives the player -2 points. For every adventurer killed/imprisoned (players have at most 4 turns to do so), the player gets +2 points.
The other main source of points is rooms. Players get +2 points for each unconquered room.
In addition, players also get +1 point per monster, and points from various titles (majorities).
WHAT AGRICOLA SHOULD HAVE BEEN Both Agricola and Dungeon Lords are theme-heavy worker placement games. Agricola has been lauded for combining thematic immersion with excellent euro gameplay. However it provides me with neither. It is the definition of a run-of-the-mill euro spreadsheet--boring of theme, drab of gameplay. Dungeon Lords, on the other hand, delivers both in theme and gameplay. The theme in Dungeon Lords is dungeon raiding. Ere we go on, allow me to describe what dungeon raiding means to me.
Maybe I don't know what I am talking about, but dungeon raiding makes me think of RPG-style characters hacking away at monsters, of which the PC-gaming equivalent would be MMORPGs (massive multiplayer online role playing games) such as WoW (World of Warcraft), etc. I've seen these games played on computers, and it looks like this: powerful characters with buffed up weapons and set combos hacking away at creeps that don't stand a chance. Occasionally, they will group together with characters of other classes and take on a super monster, spam their combo spells, and after some minutes of hacking the monster would eventually fall and deliver some loot. To me that is the lamest excuse for an excercise ever. Where is the challenge? Where is the skill? The results are set; the execution is mindless. There is cowardice in their optimization to make everything fool-proof (or stupidity if they didn't), and there is cowardice in their victims' complete helplessness and inability to react. It is the gaming version of shrimp fishing, a geek's variant on seal clubbing. Granted not nearly as abominable, but almost as cowardly. If you want a real opponent, one that challenges you to make intelligent decisions on the go, a sport with moves and counter-moves, skill and strategy, play tennis, or football, or Starcraft.
real men play football
cowards fish shrimps
or club helpless seal pups
And true to this theme of cowardice, Dungeon Lords has cowards and plenty of them; except that this time the tables are turned and the criminals brought to justice (life imprisonment without possibility of parole). And just like the typical phony RPG hero, these cowards come tricked up with cowardly specialties--warriors tank, priests heal, rogues deactivate traps, and mages cast spells--and the more pesky bands come in more cowardly effective combinations. A cowardly priest hiding behind a burly warrior, indefinitely healing the damage the latter absorbs, and a rogue behind these two to block any damage from the traps--the perfect picture of three cowardly men hugging each other in cowardly optimization.
But no! This time when the phony heroes come to terrorize our peaceful dungeons will be their last, and instead of helpless seal pups and shrimps in a pool they will face an adversary intelligent and cunning. Lo and behold! The dungeon lords have their efficient counters too. Dragons for the priests, golems for the rogues, and demons for the warriors. An underground network of bustling activity, productive rooms, and thriving economy will work laboriously to defend itself of these light-side-terrorists.
Not only are the game mechanisms true to its theme, the artwork and indeed the whole game itself presents the theme in an accurate but playful manner without taking itself too seriously. Dungeon Lords carries out its theme with lots of heart; Agricola is true to its theme in its tediousness.
Blond imps always have more fun (cobalto)
Best friends always together (cobalto)
I guess baby imps have to come from somewhere (cobalto)
But thematic immersion alone does not a game make. The core of Dungeon Lords' gameplay is worker placement, a mechanism which I am not overly fond of. Don't get me wrong, it works; but it is an "easy" way to get a game to work. Make up some engine for getting points, assign an action for each step of the engine, and voila we have a worker placement game. I am not saying it is easy to make a good worker placement game, but by definition they are almost always scripted. Strategy is usually more or less prescribed compared to other more "organic" games like Modern Art or Go. Interaction also tend to be limited (yes I know there can be blocking) as there is no move-counter-move type of maneuvers going on as there would be in a more free form game like Imperial or Small World. The actions are spelled out for the players, and they are somewhat prescribed and scripted in what they do. I am not saying that I do not enjoy any worker placement games; I am saying that Caylus is solid and that is enough. At this point, to capture my interest a worker placement game has to offer something new, something unique. Agricola and Pillars of the Earth offers nothing new for me and are consequently absolutely drab. In contrast Carson City has dueling, Cuba has a unique mat system, and Stone Age gets prop for being a low-luck dicefest. What Dungeon Lords offers is hidden action selection.
If we look at the action slots, we will notice a pattern. The first slot usually cost the least to use, but also gives the least in return. In contrast, the third line usually cost the most to use, but gives the most in return. But, to get the most bang for the buck, the second line is usually the best. The trap slots show this very clearly: slot 3 give you the most traps, but both slots 1 and 3 cost 1 gold per trap, whereas slot 2 gives the player a trap card for free. The room slots are also very interesting. Slot 3 gets to buy first for 1 gold, and slot 1 last for free, but here is the trick: there are only two rooms for sale in a given round. So if other players land on slots 2 and 3 and buys up the two rooms, the slot 1 action is wasted; or conversely, the player could luck out and get a room for free.
In most worker placement games, the challenge is recognizing the best actions, or the most effective series of actions; and blocking is as simple as choosing to do so (granted the decision to block may not be as trivial). In Dungeon Lords, knowing what action slots one wants is not enough--it takes clever guessing and a little luck to get there. And here is where the game really shines: to squeeze into the most efficient slots, block others, and prevent oneself from being blocked of certain slots or the whole action altogether requires playing one's action cards in the right order/timing. Because the actions are chosen in secret, a big part of the game comes down to reading other players' board and mind, predicting what they will do, and either piggy-back or maneuver around their action selections. Dungeon Lords is a worker placement game but the guessing and second-guessing involved turns it into a whole other beast with more interaction than that of a typical worker placement game. It is never easy picking which cards to play in what order, and it is always a tense and exciting moment when everyone reveals his cards.
Dungeon Lords is what Agricola should have been: that rare euro with a hearty theme, the next big thing after Caylus to inject some new life and excitement into a tired mechanism. Because of its hearty presentation of theme and brilliant combination of second-guessing with worker placement, Dungeon Lords is my favorite worker placement game. (For what it's worth, my other favorite worker placement games are Cuba and Carson City.)
LUCK Dungeon Lords can be very swingy, and luck can creep up in very inconspicuous ways. One can second-guess to the ninth hell to come but in the end, he still needs a little bit of luck to guess "correctly." There are also other random factors like the fatigue number, which rooms/monsters/adventurers comes up when. These might seem to have a neutral or at most a minor effect, but in actuality they may be quite significant. One small misstep (like digging an extra optional tunnel) can cost you like 5 points (a lot in this game). One extra fatigue could net someone 4 points, which is huge. I can score 30 in one game and 10 in the next. It's just that type of a game.
PLAYER NUMBER Unfortunately the game doesn't scale very well. I would not recommend playing it with 3 because that requires a dummy fourth player that plays randomly. The 2 player game could be interesting because although there are dummy players, they are controlled by the real players and can be used intelligently for affecting the board. 4 player is great and 2 player is something I would like to try, but 3 is just an odd number and I would really recommend something else.
PRICING AND PRODUCTION At over $50 in retail I have to think hard before buying Dungeon Lords. However the production value is decent, from the miniature imps to the red plastic cubes to the great artwork to the nice boards and everything. To use an analogy, I would say that buying Dungeon Lords is a slot three action (and buying Masters of Venice a slot two action, but that is a review for another day).
Excellent review, and I agree with your comments on Dungeon Lords. I do however, also like Agricola and I do think it, like DLs, is blessed with a rich theme.
Any review that can find cause to stick in a great Bergkamp video is good with me!
While the video shows the Argentina goal, it doesn't show the pass. for me, you need to see the length and pace of the ball he brings down to understand why it's so awesome. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc1H2hOHu_s&feature=related
Any review that can find cause to stick in a great Bergkamp video is good with me!
While the video shows the Argentina goal, it doesn't show the pass. for me, you need to see the length and pace of the ball he brings down to understand why it's so awesome. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc1H2hOHu_s&feature=related
After playing Dungeon Lords a few times (and writing half a review before running out of time) I concluded Dungeon Lords was indeed a worker placement game in the vein of Agricola. But better.
I really like the theme and gameplay of Agricola, but I have a hunch this may be the better game. I've played it only once, but this may be the most thematic heavy euro. And even if it isn't, it still has a healthy sense of humor, and it's very colorful. It's my favorite 2010 release so far.
I would not recommend playing it with 3 because that requires a dummy fourth player that plays randomly. The 2 player game could be interesting because although there are dummy players, they are controlled by the real players and can be used intelligently for affecting the board. 4 player is great and 2 player is something I would like to try, but 3 is just an odd number and I would really recommend something else. [/b]
Have you actually played it with three? I think it definitely is more fun with four, but the "dummy" mechanism for three players works quite well. It may technically be playing randomly, but the placements are determined prior to player turns, so it doesn't feel random in practice.
I'm surprised at your response to it--especially since it was one of the things that really impressed me about the game. It's a very deft handling of the player-scaling issue in a game that might otherwise be limited to a very specific number of players.
Thanks, but remember to thumb the thread, not the post!
I played 3er once. Admittedly the dummy was okay but it wasn't ideal in my opinion.
I actually thought it was lazy design. The ideal solution would be to redo the entire board altogether (different slots with different payouts), but that would require a lot of work and balancing.
PLAYER NUMBER Unfortunately the game doesn't scale very well. I would not recommend playing it with 3 because that requires a dummy fourth player that plays randomly.
As a player of many 3-player games, I have to respectfully disagree. I find that it actually plays quite well this way. It's not terribly random, as you know before you plan exactly what the "4th player" is going to do, and when. So, it adds a unique element.
Best friends always together (cobalto)
I guess baby imps have to come from somewhere (cobalto)
Posted Sat Apr 17, 2010 10:43 pm
