D99 Problems: Dungeon Roll review

Dungeon Roll
Designed by: Chris Darden
Publisher: Tasty Minstrel Games

Dungeon Roll is a dice game that began life on Kickstarter. A light 'dungeon crawler' themed push your luck game, Dungeon Roll has you rolling dice to create a party of adventurers to take on the monsters of the dungeon. It's a cute, well presented little game and a Kickstarter success story. But how does it play?




Dungeon Roll is recommended for between 1 and 4 players, though you could probably add more with increased downtime. The goal is to acquire the most amount of experience for your character by the end of the game. A character card is dealt out at random to each player, each having one passive ability and one activated ability that can be used once per delve. When a player reaches 5 experience points, the character card is flipped to it's advanced side with a different pair of abilities. Each player takes turns to delve into the dungeon, the game ends when each player has completed 3 delves. Play begins by rolling a pool of 7 party dice, representing the characters in the player's dungeon party. Fighters, Wizards, Clerics, Thieves and Champions make up the faces of the party dice. Also present is the scroll item face that takes the place of a party member, but can be spent to re-roll any set of dungeon or party dice once per delve. Apart from these potential scroll rerolls, the party pool is rolled only once, at the start of the delve. The characters rolled up are then used to face encounters in the dungeon.

Beginning at level 1, the person to the left of the active player rolls a number of dungeon dice equal to the current level. Dungeon dice will show faces corresponding to monsters (goblins, skeletons or oozes), treasure items (potions or chests), or a dragon icon. The party dice are then used to defeat the monsters, with used dice being consumed and removed from the players pool. Each monster has a class it is weak against, allowing one die of that class to defeat all monsters of that type. Fighters beat goblins, Mages beat oozes, and Clerics beat skeletons. Champion dice can be used to defeat all of any one type of monster. Thieves can be used to open all treasure chest dice for rewards of magic items, and any die can be used to defeat any single monster or open any single chest. The potion dice let you 'revive' previously spent dice: you first spend any one die from your party and then return to your pool a number of spent dice equal to the number of potion faces visible, selecting their facing when you do so. Dragons are the last dungeon dice face and are removed from the pool of dungeon dice and set aside on the dragon's lair card when rolled.

If the player manages to defeat all the rolled monsters with their available party, they have completed that dungeon level. Now the dragon dice are checked - if at least 3 dragon dice are on the dragon's lair card, that player encounters the dragon with the party dice they have left. The dragon encounter requires spending 3 different character class dice to win, rewarding the player with a treasure and bonus experience if they defeat it. After the dragon encounter, if any, players may opt to end their delve and return to town. They are awarded experience points equal to the current dungeon level if they do. Otherwise they may increase the dungeon level by one, roll the new dungeon dice pool and attempt to clear another level of monsters. The party pool is not rerolled, the initial dice you start with are all you have to use up until you leave the dungeon. If at any point you continue a dungeon delve but cannot defeat all the monster dice rolled - or the following dragon encounter if there is one - you forfeit the delve and get no experience. Once a player either returns to town or fails an encounter, the dungeon is reset to level 1 and play passes to the next person .

The goal of your dungeon delving then is acquiring as much experience and treasure as possible. Treasures are also worth 1-2XP each at the end of the game, and may otherwise have bonus effects. For example the meat treasure allows you to spend it to change all monster dice to the dragon facing, escaping a potentially unbeatable group of monsters but possibly forcing a dragon encounter. A group of treasures representing each class can be spent as a 'counts as' die of that class (eg you can spend a mage staff to defeat all slimes, as you would a mage party die). Others are just useful for their experience value. Ultimately you are supposed to push your luck, risking greater danger on the deeper dungeon levels for greater rewards of treasure and experience.

Dragons Lair and Graveyard (spent dice) cards

Unfortunately, this just doesn't work. A core concept of push your luck games is taking on bigger risks for greater rewards, however Dungeon Roll doesn't work this way. The difficulty increases at a far steeper rate than the rewards do. Each dungeon level you descend is more and more difficult, the dungeon pool increases steadily but your party pool only diminishes. However, the reward for pursuing another level is.. one more experience point. Risking everything you've acquired up until that point is never going to reward more than a single experience point more. Difficulty going up, risk going up, reward staying flat is not a recipe for that greedy thrill that makes you want to risk it all on one last toss of the dice for death or glory. Once you've spent enough party dice that the upcoming dungeon level is likely to outmatch you, the correct move is almost always to go home. It's a push your luck game that fails to provide any real incentive to push your luck, and it's a killer flaw.

The consumable treasures suffer from the same problem. The idea of treasure as usable party members is an interesting one, but again it suffers from the lack of a genuine incentive to use them as intended. At the end of the game, each of those treasures is worth XP. In the best case use scenario, you'll spend one of them to get out of an otherwise unwinnable encounter for a net gain of... nothing. The numbers only get worse if you're force to spend multiples on a single encounter. The winning choice is generally to not take the risk and sit on the treasures for their end game XP value. While you could say that spending it stops you losing the XP you would have otherwise have lost for failing the encounter, the right play is to not put yourself in the position where you need to rely on treasure dice in the first place. Which again undermines the core push your luck gameplay mechanic. Even when it does work out this way, 'losing less' isn't fun. It feels like mitigating a penalty with a save rather than achieving a victory through clever use of your options. There is a counter argument that delving further provides more opportunities to roll up treasure in addition to the level XP reward, but this doesn't really work out. You still need to spend a character to loot them, treasures themselves are only going to be worth the XP you already spent so again the risk/reward is not huge, and it's also entirely random. Treasure appears on only one face of the dungeon dice and they're getting rolled only once per encounter. You can't play it like King of Tokyo for example and "try for" a set of treasure. You'll get what you're given and (probably not) like it. The treasures themselves are also drawn at random from the box. So there's not even that chance to push your luck to pull the treasure roll you need to say, complete a set of dragon scales for bonus XP. Just another random pull.

Treasure tokens are won from rolling chests in dungeon encounters or defeating a dragon

Randomness is a major problem here. Randomness in a dice game is par for the course, but all good dice or random chance games provide ways for the players to mitigate that randomness. It may be by rolling a lot of dice so that the probability curves even out. It might be with modifiers or special abilities, it might be letting you keep some dice and reroll others a la King of Tokyo or other Yahtzee-likes. Dungeon roll really falls down here. Your party pool, backbone of your gameplay experience, is rolled exactly once per delve, so three times per game. Roll up a crappy party and your delve is going to be of limited effectiveness. This is this sort of thing you could gloss over if probabilities evened out over time, but there are only 3 delves per player in a game. One bad roll could blunt a third of your game and make playing catchup impossible. The presence of the scroll dice seem to recognise this fact and want to help mitigate it, but ultimately it doesn't quite make it. Since you have to spend the die itself to reroll any number of others you're still going to be down at least one useful party member, maybe more if the reroll itself is bad. At no time playing did I ever see anyone want to roll a scroll to sit on, most often they'll be used as fodder to drink potion dice and be returned with a more useful facing. There are scroll treasures as well, but of course you must first randomly roll up treasure chest, spend a party die to open it, pull a random treasure from the pile and then use it at as a one-off reroll that again functionally costs you XP - as a mechanic to mitigate a hugely random game it just isn't enough. The character card abilities try and mix the game up a bit, but again it's subject to chance which character you draw from the deck. There isn't a ton of balance, some are clearly better than others, like the guild leader that gives you a bonus party die every delve. In any case, the only opportunity your character card offers up is when to use its once-per-delve activated ability. And that is almost always 'use it when you would otherwise lose'.

Players draw a random character card with different abilities to draw on

And that's the last and perhaps most disappointing failure of Dungeon Roll. It simply doesn't provide enough interesting choices, and as such, the game almost plays itself. You have no choice in the party you roll. You have no choice in the monsters that appear. Each decision in an encounter is either trivial or arbitrary. Multiples of a monster are of course dealt with by spending a single die of the correct class, or a champion if you have none. Failing that, you spend classes you have multiples of first to keep your options maximised, then it simply doesn't matter what you use as there's no way to plan for or influence the next dungeon roll. You could spend your only thief or your only mage to kill that lone skeleton, it doesn't really matter which you choose. There are various character cards that make X class more effective, defeating additional monsters or allowing you to use dice of one class as another, but this is just an illusion of depth. In each case, the optimal use of dice for a given encounter is still trivial to work out, there's just not that much going on and the encounters all stand alone. This is the final failed save for Dungeon Roll. When every choice is either immediately obvious or inconsequential, the experience is failing to deliver the core of what a game is - a set of interesting decisions.

The components are very nice, the character art is pretty, the reminder cards are helpful. Presentation-wise this is a really nice package for a cheap little kickstarter game. I like the dice and I think it manages to convey a decent amount of theme for such a mechanically simplistic game. The rules booklet is a bit confusing and could really do with a rewrite by a professional proofreader but once digested and practiced a bit the game isn't difficult to understand. However none of this is enough to save Dungeon Roll. I just can't recommend this for anyone. Push your luck dice games can be done really well, and if this sort of gameplay mechanic grabs you then check out King of Tokyo (reviewed previously by me) or Can't Stop. Dungeon Roll isn't terrible, but there's just nothing it does that other games don't do better. I congratulate the designers on their successful kickstarter and well-made final product, and hope that they can channel these successes into improving their designs in future releases.