Reply To: Recommend me a good dungeon crawler ;)

[angelicdespot 4689xp 1]

Mantic’s Dungeon Saga looks good to me.   The miniatures are much better than a lot of Mantic’s earlier stuff.   I’d say they’re on a par with most other modern, good quality miniature board games these days (while not being up to the Kingdom Death standard).

Beasts of War did a ru through of 2/3 games I think, so you could watch and get a bit of the flavour.   There are rules for running the monsters with an AI deck, although I don’t know what that’s like / how good it is.

As for Dark Souls…   I think most people’s assumption with Dungeon Crawlers is that you pick your characters, go charging in, kill the monsters, grab the loot, level up, rinse and repeat with gradually tougher and tougher monsters but with gradually better and better skills and equipment.

With Dark Souls you enter the first room of your first dungeon and you’ll be torn to shreds in the first ten minutes.   On your second attempt you’ll last a bit longer.   By your third of fourth attempt, you get how it works, what tactics to use, and you’ll barely break a sweat.   You then enter the next room and probably the same thing happens.

In my view the flaws are that they’ve stuck too closely to the PC game it is based on.   Not only is the difficulty level set at ‘hard’ by default, but the tactics you need to learn replicate how you get better at video games: lots of practice, lots of trying and failing.   The combat encounters are in some ways more like puzzles than combats in more traditional dungeon crawler games.   You learn how enemies act and react, and adapt accordingly.   Which is why even the weakest monsters kill you easily first time round, but it’s how you learn to exploit their weaknesses to the point that you can outsmart them and take them out.

It’s a very long game.   You probably need 2-3 hours for a standard game.   The game has a built in ‘get killed and respawn’ mechanic which means it can feel quite repetitive.

Another flaw in my view is that the loot you pick up is really random.   So you keep accumulating wargear that you can’t use because you haven’t levelled up sufficiently / don’t have high enough stats to do so.   And by the time you are strong enough to use the ‘sword of doom’ you then find you keep picking up low level equipment that is no use to you now, but would have been really handy during the first couple of hours of game play.

The random loot acquisition contributes to the long play time to make it feel quite repetitive, as sometimes you know what you need to do to beat the encounter but simply haven’t got the equipment you need to have much of a chance.

That all said, the reason I enjoy it is a) because it looks fantastic.   It’s got a beautiful, dark theme, lovely miniatures, etc.   And because you have to treat it like a puzzle.   You have to tell yourself not to think of a replayed encounter as being boring and repeating yourself.   In practice it’s not very different to clearing one room of monsters, moving on to the next, then the next, and so on.   Most dungeon crawlers are by nature pretty repetitive.   You have to see each encounter as a puzzle, that you have to learn and adapt to.

I think it would be a better board game if it was less like the video game, but although I recognise the flaws, i still think it’s a fun game if you understand the assumptions it makes.