Get your party ready, enter the dungeon, plunder for treasure, look out for traps. Dungeon Crawler is a card game for 1-6 players. It takes about an hour to play. It comes from a company called Gifted Vision, who manages to put out a high quality product without being a huge company. This one has a great replay value and some really interesting artwork.
You begin your dungeon crawling adventure by picking four adventurers and three quests. In order to win you can either complete two of the three quests, survive the entire Dungeon Deck or the game ends when you run out of Crawler Cards. This isn’t always an easy game to win either.
You play an encounter step every round from the dungeon deck and face monsters and traps. Monsters, terrain and traps are worth points and you place five points worth of cards in the dungeon to start. Crawler cards are played to help your valiant heroes, giving you skills, weapons etc. Though the rulebook is terrible, it’s a very simple game.(They have gone to great lengths to streamline the rules and some flash videos on their site makes it super easy to learn.) You are comparing your attack to the dungeon’s defense, while playing cards in order to hit a monster in the dungeon. Then it’s the monsters turn to attack you and if you are wounded you place a wound token on your hero. Hopefully you can heal him at some point before you take more. After this attack/defend step, you ready your heroes once again, draw Crawler Cards and repeat the encounter step. It goes on like this until you are either victorious or 4 twitching corpses on the dungeon floor.
Now that was a very basic example. The game gets more complex than that when the right cards come out. You’ll have to be willing to do some math to calculate the encounter results of course, but it’s nothing terribly difficult. It will definitely take several plays to get the hang of this game, but once you do, you are in for a fun time. There are many neat card combinations that come into play.
Don’t have friends? Or none of them like dungeon exploring? No problem. This game can be played with just one player. That means that it can be played anytime you have some spare time, wherever you are. There is also co-op, competitive, and multi-player play. The “Unbound” starter is for solitaire play, but can be expanded for the rest.
My verdict on this game is that it is a lot of fun. It’s certainly one that I intend to play again several times. I may even try some of the expansions. The downside is that learning to play can be a challenge if you use the rulebook. Don’t! Just go to the page linked above and learn that way. Really, that’s it for downsides. This game is fun, the art is interesting, not all of the monsters and traps are cliche and it really plays like a proper adventure. That’s what I want in an RPG or dungeon crawler game so I for one am a happy Dungeon delver.
You can find the Dungeon Crawler starter here for $24.95, along with the expansions. This is a great value for a fun game. Happy gaming.