Guild
of Dungeoneering

Guild of Dungeoneering (2015) is a humorous dungeon exploration adventure, but instead of controlling the heroes, you build the dungeon. You play cards to create rooms and place monsters, traps, and shiny loot to lure the hero where you want them to go. The result is a fun system where you get to build the dungeon and play in it too.

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Play starts by choosing a hero and a quest. They might need to get from one side of the dungeon to the other in a limited number of moves, or you might need to beat easier enemies until your hero is strong enough to take on a big boss. The fun is using your cards to create a dungeon that enables them to complete these challenges (and survive).

Each turn you play three of your five cards each turn to flesh out the dungeon. The hero automatically sets out towards the closest, toughest monster it sees, but it can be lured away by treasures, so there’s both planning and tactical strategy needed to get your hero to pick up lots of loot and avoid wandering into the boss fight without gaining a few levels and some good gear.

As you progress you gain armour, helmets, special items and weapon cards. Encountering monsters triggers the combat where you directly control the hero. In combat rounds you and your opponent play cards simultaneously, but you get to see what card your opponent intends to play before choosing yours. The opponent always goes first, barring a special power, so the challenge is figuring out how to survive an onslaught of attacks and circumvent their special moves to gain the upper hand. To do well here you need to craft a deck with a variety of physical and magical attacks and blocks and special abilities.

Guild of Dungeoneering is unique for combining two notoriously complex game genres (dungeon crawlers and roguelike deck builders) and boiling it down to an accessible game that offers up a limited number of easy-to-understand choices at any given time, making it a good entry point for new gamers to the genres or for those looking for a reduced cognitive load.

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Our examiner, Andy Robertson, first checked Guild of Dungeoneering 23 months ago. It was re-examined by Angela Hickman Newnham and updated 15 months ago.