Review: The Dungeon! boardgame

 

You can pick up this game over on Amazon or at your local game shop. 

Dungeon! is a classic game released by TSR back in the day. The copy we played is the newest version to be released by WotC/Hasbro. 

I've seen the ads for this boardgame for years but never picked on up. Mainly because I was more of a roleplaying game guy than a boardgame guy. There was always something that I had wanted more. But finally my brother picked up a copy. So the two of us and our wives sat down and gave it a go.

First off it takes a bit getting used to. The fold out rules sheet makes it looks a bit complicated at first but once you start going through the steps it gets really easy. Basically you play one of four different classes roaming through a dungeon trying to reach a specific amount of gold in order to win. You have a rogue, fighter, cleric and magic user. 

It's pretty basic. Each monster you encounter has a different number you have to roll to kill it, which is determined by your class or spell. If you miss the monster has a chance to attack you and has a table for them as well. Monsters in specific areas drop a treasure based on their level. 

There is no interaction between players except for maybe picking up a treasure they dropped because they got hit by a monster. You have secret doors, some magic items, traps instead of monsters and a few other bits tacked on. But it's pretty straight foward.

Now this is by no means a high end elegantly designed boardgame like Catan or Ticket to Ride. But it does fit nicely as a bridge for people who want to work their way up to the more complicated and intricate games out there. Especially for younger players who want something more challenging than Monopoly and Battleship. 

My big problem is the board seems small for the amount of stuff that is on there including the dungeon map. The monster, treasure and spell cards along with all the various markers are all rather small. Not to mention treasure and monsters being split up into six different stacks each. But we did have a good time

But in the end we did have a good time. My brother won with his rogue after sliding through secret doors and grabbing up treasure quickly. This was while both my wife and I had gathered up our required amount of treasure and were making a run for the staring point/end point as well. We'll try it again soon and I'm sure we'll approach it with different tactics now that we know how it plays.