Kris Hall: A Rules Preview of Dungeon Lords

I have a wait-and-see attitude toward most of the games that will be released between now and the end of the year.  Sure, I’ll pick up the expansions for Agricola and Ghost Stories and Small World, and Martin Wallace’s Rise of Empires, but most of the rest can wait until I’ve played them at one place or another.

Except maybe for Dungeon Lords.  I printed the rules for several upcoming games this week, and Dungeon Lords had the longest rules set of the bunch.  I wasn’t sure I would have the attention span to get through a twenty-plus-page rules set during a busy week, but I was in for a surprise.

The rules were funny.

Maybe not laugh-out-loud funny, but they provoked a smile plenty of times, and when was the last time that a set of rules did that?  The main humor strategy is to have a minion and a demon provide commentary in sidebars, and their observations and bickering are often amusing.  At one point the minion explains that the prison section of the player board is “where you keep defeated adventurers. Here they will slowly languish, tormented by the fate that awaits them.  At the end of the game, as an example to all who would trespass on your dungeons, you score them.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Dungeon Lords is a soon-to-be-published game by Czech designer Vlaada Chvatil (most famous for Through the Ages and Galaxy Trucker).  DL will be published in this country by Z-Man Games.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, DL puts players into the black boots of evil fantasy villains.  Each player tries to create a dungeon, stock it with monsters and ghosts, and then defend it against parties of obnoxious righteous heroes who are looking for evil to smite.  DL seems to have been inspired by the old computer game Dungeon Keeper, although gamers may notice similarities to other action-selection resource-management games.

Each turn, each of the aspiring dungeon lords must shuffle his deck of action cards and pick two at random to place in the inaccessible orders space on his player board.  These cards will obviously not be available for the current turn.  Players then choose three of the remaining six cards to place down on their player board in the hope of executing these orders later.  After all orders are placed, players turn them up, and action spaces are claimed on the Central board.

There are three versions of each action available on the Central board.  Often the first version of the three to be claimed yields fewer resources than the second or third versions.  A player who wants to claim the maximum amount of resources may play that action card as his third card, but he will be out of luck if all three versions of his preferred action have been claimed by other players before his card is activated.

What are the actions?  Get food (needed to feed monsters), mine gold, recruit imps (the workers of the dungeon world), build traps, hire monsters and ghosts, and build rooms.

There are three resources in DL (four if you count the imps): food, gold, and reputation.  Reputation is scored on a track called the evilometer.  Players may deliberately improve their reputation by taking that action, or let their reputation become more evil by hiring certain kinds of monsters (like vampires or demons) or taking certain actions (like raiding local villages for food).  Reputation is important because players score points based on their evil at the end of the game (more is better).  But an evil reputation can also attract the attention of the paladins, the most powerful of all the dungeon-raiding adventurers.  Most dungeon lords would be advised to try to stay off the paladin’s radar (although a defeated paladin is worth big points at the end of the game).

There are also a wide variety of rooms available for construction.  Some let dungeon lords harness their imps to produce resources or even to breed more imps.  Other rooms give the dungeon lord and his monsters advantages in combat against the adventurers.  Still other rooms help the dungeon lord score extra points at the end of the game.

Sooner or later, parties of adventurers show up in the dungeon, and this is when dungeon lords find out if they have purchased traps and monsters wisely.  Each party is composed of three adventurer cards (four if the paladin joins the group) that operate by a strict set of rules.  Fighters have lots of hit points, thieves reduce damage from traps, wizards conduct magical attacks, and priests heal the party after attacks.  Paladins not only have the most hit points, they have some of the abilities of each class of adventurer.

Of course, each class of monster and ghost have their own sets of abilities too, and dungeon lords can deploy them to meet specific needs.  For example, witches can conduct one big attack on the first adventurer in line, or two smaller attacks that do not have to be on the adventurer in the lead.  Ghosts can attack any adventurer in the party except the first one in the line, and the usual one-or- two-monster-per-combat-round limit doesn’t apply to ghosts.  Dragons can damage every member of the party with a fiery attack, and they also keep priests from healing the party on the combat round of the attack.  Finding the right combination of monsters and traps to quickly neutralize intruding parties is crucial to keeping do-gooder damage to a minimum.

Several games have used action-selection mechanisms before, and many recent games like Kingsburg and Comuni have challenged players to deal with ever-increasing non-player armies.  I don’t think that DL will strike many players as an amazing collection of novel gaming mechanisms. 

But DL is a heavily-themed game that seems intricate enough to be a gamer game.  DL has such a wide variety of rooms, monsters, and traps that players may never construct the same dungeon twice.  Balancing the interplay between the actions available each turn, and the various abilities and costs of the monsters seems like the key to grasping the game.  Some of the details in the rules make particular interesting strategies possible.  For example, even though the paladin will go after the player who is the most evil, he will change parties during the combat rounds if the relative reputations of the dungeon lords change.  As the demon adviser in the rules notes: “You know you’re getting good at this game when you can draw the paladin to your dungeon after another player has nearly finished him off.”

It is always tricky predicting the value of a game just from reading the rules.  But Mr. Chvatil is proving to be one of our most interesting current designers.  I look forward to dragging Dungeon Lords back to my lair.

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