DungeonQuest

Today's review is of the 2014 release, DungeonQuest (revised edition). For 1-4 players, it takes 60 minutes.

Overview

You are exploring Dragonfire Dungeon. You'll encounter monsters, treasure, traps, and maybe a dragon, but most importantly- treasure. Can you get the most loot- and get out alive- to win?

This is a tile-laying game with many small decks, each labeled appropriately ("dungeon deck," "trap deck," "search deck," "treasure deck," "catacomb deck," etc.). Each player chooses a hero miniature (with unique abilities, laid out on their accompanying stat card) and places them in one corner of the map (which is blank to start). On your turn, you'll activate any abilities, then perform one action: move, search, or go into the catacombs (an area beneath the dungeon). 

• Move: move your hero into an existing adjacent tile OR randomly choose a new dungeon tile, then placing it in a legal adjacent space and moving the hero into it. Do anything the new tile indicates (one common action is drawing a card from the dungeon deck and doing what it says). 
• Search: if your hero is on a tile with a search icon, you can draw a card from the search deck and do what it says- it may be a trap or monster, but could also yield loot!
• Go into the catacombs: if you're on a tile with a catacomb entrance, you can go into the catacombs (draw a card from the catacomb deck and do what it says). On each subsequent turn, you draw an additional catacomb card until/unless you can escape the catacombs and return to the dungeon- often in a completely different location.

game in progress; image from here

After each play has had one turn, the sun will advance and a new round begins. To win, a player must 1) escape the dungeon before the sun advances too far and the dragon awakes, and 2) have the highest total value of loot. Can you survive?

Review

DungeonQuest is a straightforward game. The cards in various decks will tell you what to do- which can include drawing a card in another deck and following its instructions. You may encounter monsters and other hazards- or nothing at all- as laid out in the cards. This game is easy to learn but hard to master- it is easy to die quickly here.

While the game's different dungeon tiles and decks are a neat twist and way to inject randomness or variation, this game ultimately fell flat for me. There are plenty of choices- but there are few informed options. To be good, games must include meaningful choices. Here, it's all random. Moving, searching, or catacombs are your choices, but they all involve random tile laying or card drawing, so this is really "choose your random outcome."  Every choice was like rolling the dice- no skill involved. This is the revised edition- the original came out in 1985. This game definitely has that "legacy" vibe to it; gaming mechanics have come a long way since then. So while there's some good here, it will go on my stack to sell.

Rating: C+