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(More customer reviews)As a gamer, it's tough not to appreciate Z-Man Games and their catalog of eccentric board games that come packaged in a box not much larger than a standard DVD case. A fantasy-themed game fan, Dungeonville has been on my radar for several years now thanks to its unmistakable artwork by John Kovalic and reviews that promised a respectable parody of the whole dungeon delving experience.
I finally got around to purchasing the game amidst a binge online order and after having devoted several hours to the experience, feel prepared to critique the whole affair.
The core of the game follows a fairly unique, if not slightly satirical back-story that each player takes on the role of a wizard who recently inherited a terrible dungeon chocked full of monsters and dangers. Rather than simply call a realtor and try to rip someone else off, you each decide to make the most of the situation by attempting to be the owner of the dungeon that can claim the lives as many brave adventurers as possible.
This demented task is carried out by never revealing to the other players at the table which dungeon is in fact yours. Since each player essentially spends equal time luring others into their own dungeon and attempting to delve into the remaining dungeons for treasure and useful artifacts, the whole game is based on a grand scheme of bluffing.
The set up is surprisingly simple and intuitive after a successful round or two although the dual sided color rule sheet is written in such a way that the only means of actually making sense of mechanics presented is to set up the table as instructed and literally follow the step by steps until the whole system clicks.
The pieces themselves are a hodgepodge of varying quality and detail. The adventurer cards are truly the highlight of the experience thanks to some truly zany and humorous character designs with names and skills to correspond with the theme. The dungeons are, in essence, large cards themselves that contain both a draw and discard pile. The pawns are generic pieces apparently transplanted from Milton Bradley's factory surplus and the blood tokens are just circular punch-out chits. However, becoming overly concerned with the physical components of the game is missing the point, which in this case is packaging up a whole dungeon delving experience, lacing it with appropriately themed humor, and putting it all into a box that could easily be stowed discretely into parties and gatherings.
After the first few rounds of play, the whole mechanic starts to become clear- Turns are broken down into 5 separate phases that feel a bit cumbersome initially but flow a lot more fluidly once they start to make sense to the players involved. As stated, the game works on two simple premises: 1) Hope that the other players at the table continue taking stabs at your dungeon in effort to get them to lose adventurer lives (represented by the blood tokens; first person to gain 7 of their opponents wins). 2) Purchase 3-member parties of adventurers with which to do some dungeon delving of your own. Technically there is a third element to address in the form of the combat system, which only occurs between players when two or more are attempting to gain access to the same dungeon. This is a simple card flipping exercise where the lowest score victors. However, sneaky players can use the combat tactic to steal worthy adventurers to their hand as well.
The game's pacing is steady and a bit methodic but certainly benefits from as many players on the table as possible. While the box states that it's designed for 2-5 players, it should be noted that it seems to work best with the full 5 and steadily suffers downward with the 2-player variation being the weakest option presented. I say this because with only two players, the process of achieving 7 blood tokens in your particular dungeon can be lengthy and drawn out indeed. Worse still is that since there are 5 dungeons on the table from which to select, two players rarely encounter the combat option. Of course both of these situations are rectified naturally once 5 players begin to populate the field. Encounters with other players then become inevitable.
The cleverest aspect to the game's design is the simple fact that nobody knows which dungeon belongs to whom so nobody ever willingly approaches (or shies away from) a particular dungeon. At the same time the rules of the game present a single flaw to the whole "bluffing" angle that I'm still not confident was intentional or not. With the logic of the game being to draw other players into your own dungeon, a good part of the bluffing process would naturally be to visit your own dungeon every once in a while to make it appear to everyone on the table that it isn't in fact yours. The trouble is that any adventurer deaths that take place in one's own dungeon become subtracted from you score. So in other words, the game punishes you pretty severely for trying to play by its own rules. Wasting blood tokens in one's own dungeon to trick the other players is punishment in and of itself, subtracting these same tokens from your final score is almost reason enough to stay the heck away from your own dungeon, bluff or not. I suppose the reason for this is to prevent players from simply "hiding" in their own dungeon so as not to waste their lives in someone else's but it still wrecks havoc on an otherwise interesting strategy.
In all Dungeonville manages to do a pretty bang up job in presenting the dungeon delving experience with enough bright colors and really cute depictions to interest players who would otherwise be turned off by the whole genre. Strategy plays a role in victory in the form of bluffing but for the most part, the in-dungeon encounters are simply randomly presented through flips of cards. As stated above though, the game's pace is more consistent and the level of interaction more rewarding in direct relation to how many players you can recruit to play. With Dungeonville, there is undeniable truth in the old saying, the more the merrier!
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You are a mad wizard who has inherited a terrible dungeon stocked with monstrous beings. For entertainment, you and the other mad wizards in your neighborhood will recruit parties of hapless adventurers to raid each other's dungeons and see whose is the most lethal. Your goal is to be the first to kill seven of the other wizards' adventurers.
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