Dungeon Lords Review

A game that I traded for a while back on BoardGameGeek since it looked quirky (and I didn't want the other game) was Dungeon Lords.

In Dungeon Lords, you, evil genius ("evil"? slanderers!) are trying to protect your home, which some stupid townspeople are calling a "dungeon." In fact, those townspeople are really annoying and you'd like to eat them, but for the most part, you're leaving them alone. Though you're hungry. Anyway... you are simply focusing on building your glorious underground mansion - and then you hear that the obnoxious townspeople have hired people to come attack you! So, as any good home protector would do, you also hire monsters and set traps to keep people from breaking in. After all, you would protect your home if people tried to break in, right? How this plays out is that the game is played in 2 "years" each consisting of 4 rounds. In each round, you get to send your minions out to do tasks for you. These tasks include collecting food, convincing the townspeople that you're nice (which I find highly amusing), mining gold, digging tunnels, recruiting imps, building traps, hiring monsters, and building rooms. After the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th rounds, adventurers will come towards your dungeon, and at the end of the 4th round they will attack it (how rude!). Hopefully you have collected traps and monsters! When they attack, you are able to use your traps and monsters to defend against them, and fighting is fought over a series of up to four rounds. Each round, if there are surviving adventurers, they will conquer one part of your dungeon (fortunately they will suffer fatigue first, which will injure and possibly even kill them). At the end of the four rounds, if there are any adventurers left, they give up and go home (claiming total victory over the "Wimpy Overlord" - I told you that they are slanderers!). After two years, you count up your victory points based on things like "Most Evil" and "Most Unconquered Rooms" along with negatives for having had tiles conquered and other bonuses for things like number of adventurers captured.

Which ones are the good guys?

The first amazing pro for Dungeon Lords is the theme. The theme is utterly brilliant, as I have never played a reverse dungeon crawler. In fact, after the first year, you deal with harder adventurers - because of some magic called "Leveling Up." I find the theme to be incredibly enjoyable, and whereas you might be able to take these mechanics and make a different game out of them, I don't think that it would have the sheer amount of fun as Dungeon Lords.  (So, another pro - Dungeon Lords is fun!)

Second, I really like how the minion placement works. This is really the crux of the game, as it is how you build your dungeon (thus this is a "worker placement game" or, more specifically, a "minion placement game"). Any given round you have two actions which you cannot perform (based on what you performed in the previous round). From the remaining actions, you select three and place them in order on your board. All players reveal, and then in turn order all players place a minion on their first choice, then all place on their second, and finally on your third choice. After this, all of the actions are performed in order, and normally the last person to place a minion on that action has the biggest benefit. However, there are only three slots on each action - so in a four player game it is possible to not get to place your minion if you wait too long. So, you need to balance waiting with making sure that you will get to perform an action. You also have to balance when you want to place various actions - after all, you can't have the best position on all of the different actions. And while you're trying to position yourself to be able to buy the best monster, your opponents are probably doing the same thing! This flows very well but adds a lot of depth to the strategy of the game.

The third pro that I will mention about Dungeon Lords is that fighting the adventurers (once you understand the rules) is straightforward yet engaging. Essentially, every round they attempt to take over one section of your dungeon. You can place a trap and a monster to try to kill them. After your trap and monster damage them, they might heal or cast magic (if they have a priest or wizard) and then they experience fatigue. If they're still alive, they conquer a room. There's no dice rolling or complicated comparisons. Each monster does a certain amount of damage; each trap does a certain amount of damage (though this can be reduced by an adventuring Rogue). Yet, with the system put in place, there are still different types of adventurers, each adding an important and different element to the game.

Worker imps look awesome!

The final pro that I will mention is that the design of the gameboards is amazing. Having not played Dungeon Lords in a few months, I was able to pull out the game and remember 97% of the rules from the boards themselves - it's all there! I think many other games would benefit from looking at how Dungeon Lords laid out it's components in a compact yet helpful way.

With all that said, my biggest con for Dungeon Lords is that there are a lot of rules that you can easily forget. If you're like me, then you will often have a few months between two plays of any given game (because I have "a few" others to choose from). Whereas the gameboards really help to jog your memory in Dungeon Lords, chances are that you will forget some of the smaller rules - like moving one step towards the "nice" side of the evil-o-meter after having a dungeon tile conquered. That one, specifically, is clearly marked on the gameboard, but there are enough small rules that unless you play it on a regular basis, some will probably be missed.

Overall, I give Dungeon Lords a 9.0/10. I almost slipped this score down a bit, but eventually decided not to. I really like Dungeon Lords - I think that it has a solid theme and mechanics that flow very well. And, even as a Dark Overlord, the game doesn't have a dark or creepy feel, so it's theme is really open to everyone.

If you like Dungeon Lords, you should also check out Age of Empires III, Cookie Fu (if you like quirky themes), and Through the Ages (which is by the same designer as Dungeon Lords).

Thunderstone Advance: Towers of Ruin Review

The latest and greatest (literally) version of Thunderstone has broken onto the gaming scene - Thunderstone Advance: Towers of Ruin.

In case you're new to my site - hi! I hope that you keep coming back (and note, that you can follow me with RSS, Twitter, or Facebook). But, you should also know that Thunderstone Advance is definitely not my first Thunderstone review. So far I've reviewed Thunderstone, Thunderstone: Wrath of the Elements, and Thunderstone: Dragonspire. So, I'm going to assume that you're familiar with Thunderstone, and I'm only going to cover the new elements introduced in Advance. If you aren't familiar with the game, you should definitely check out the basic Thunderstone Review - and maybe the Dragonspire one, too (though Wrath of the Elements introduced some new concepts, too).

The first new addition that Advance introduces is that Monster groups now have "Levels". This is small, but is by far my favorite new feature! Yet, not when I play the game by the "official" rules. I think that one of the biggest problems with Thunderstone is that the dungeon often fills up with gigantic monsters, and so nobody will ever go fight them - thus the game gets really boring. (One of the expansions, I believe Wrath of the Elements, introduced a variant of "advancing monsters" that also helped address this problem.) So, in Advance, the official rule is that you select a random monster group from each of the three levels. And, that is the extent of their role - you shuffle them together and play the game. However, it is easy to come up with a slight variant that helps keep the game flowing - either stack all the Level 1 monsters on top, followed by Level 2 then Level 3. You could also shuffle the Level 1 monsters with half of the Level 2 monsters, and the Level 3 monsters with the other half of Level 2. Or, any other combination that you like. No matter what, you actually have the freedom to setup the dungeon hall to prevent this stalling!

One of the more awesome Familiars

The next new feature introduced in Thunderstone Advance may seem a bit "familiar" to you (hehe - I love puns). You can now gain a Familiar. The first time that you defeat a monster in the dungeon, you gain a Familiar. This card goes in front of you and gives you extra abilities that you can perform. Some of the abilities require you to own Experience Points (though you don't spend it). The Familiar stays in front of you every turn until you use it - at which point it goes in your discard pile. But, once you play him again, he will again stay in front of you. This is a neat concept, but I dislike that your Familiar is random and that you have no ability to change it. They all seem to be fairly balanced, but I still think that in a game where one of the main objectives is to tune the cards you play with, it doesn't make sense that you get a card at random with no ability to decide which one to get - though you can prevent yourself from having to draw it by never using it (thus never discarding it). But, if you do this, then the other players with Familiars that are helping them have a slight advantage.  Overall, Familiars are a nice addition, but they won't change gameplay very much.

The third major change (do you like how I've now upgraded that first change to "major"?) is that you now have a fourth option on your turn - you can "Prepare". When Preparing, you simply discard what you want from your hand and keep the rest. Then you draw back up to six cards. This is a very small action, and yet it can be incredibly helpful. When you draw all weapons and no heroes, you can keep a few and hope to draw heroes. When you draw three amazing heroes and three cards that only help in the village, you can keep what you need for next turn. When you get a bunch of useless trophies, you can keep the useful cards. This action will really be used much more than you would originally think, and it mitigates some of the inherent luck involved in trying to draw the "perfect" hand.

There are a ton of other changes that Thunderstone Advance makes to the brand, but I won't cover them all. I will say that I think they all improve the game. Here are a few more (without discussion about how useful they are):

One of the new Guardians

• The game end condition is based on a Guardian instead of a Thunderstone (thus, no free points to whoever ends the game unless they kill a huge monster)
• "Militia" have been turned into "Regulars" and have been improved slightly
• "Iron Rations" has been replaced with "Thunderstone Shards" which are worth actually using
• The game comes with a board that helps you in setup by preventing you from overloading a single card type (Weapon, Spell, Villager, Item)
• You can play in a Dungeon (light penalty of 2) or a Forest (light penalty of 1)
• The packaging is better than the original Thunderstone but not as good as in Wrath of the Elements (yet the cards stayed in place when I carried it vertically in a backpack - kudos!)
• Diseases are replaced with Curses, and each one has an Ability that lets you destroy it (by suffering a temporary penalty)
• There are more cards that encourage you to go to the Dungeon even when you don't have a guaranteed victory

Overall, I give Thunderstone Advance: Towers of Ruin an 8.5/10.  If you disliked the previous Thunderstone offerings, there's not enough in Advance to pull you back in.  However, if you liked the previous games, or you were interested in trying out the game, I think that this is a good set to buy.  I think that Advance improves on the game in a large number of small areas, which add together to make a better game.

If you like games like Thunderstone, you might also check out Nightfall, Warhammer: Invasion, and Runebound. Or, if you're looking for more opinions on this set, you can check out a Thunderstone Advance Review from I Slay the Dragon, or another Thunderstone Advance Review from the Board Game Family.

I would like to thank AEG for providing me with a review copy of Thunderstone Advance: Towers of Ruin.

Castle Panic: The Wizard's Tower Expansion Review

People complained that Castle Panic was too easy.... the designers listened - and they came up with Castle Panic: The Wizard's Tower. (In this review, I will assume you are already familiar with Castle Panic. If you are not, I recommend reading about it first (the link was to my review of it), as I will be focusing more on the new elements that the Wizard's Tower introduces, and not rehashing the basic game.)

Going from Castle Panic to the Wizard's Tower is (in video game terms) like going from the "Normal" difficulty setting to the "So Insanely Difficult That You Won't Win Unless You Never Do Anything But Play This Game" difficulty (I think Halo had these difficulty settings - though they called the second one something else.. "Legendary" maybe?). Basically, you take the basic game of Castle Panic and you add a lot of nasty monsters. Plus, you remove some of the standard, "easier", tokens and replace them with more monsters. Oh, and on top of all of that, you have "mega" monsters (which are insane - like the Hydra that for each point of damage you deal to him causes two Imps to show up in the Forest). Fortunately, you have been smart enough to employ a wizard (do not let him die!), and so he is helping you in your fight. Basically, the big differences to the gameplay are that 1) there are a ton of big, nasty monsters, 2) there is a wizard deck that you can draw from when performing a discard and draw action, 3) things can catch on fire. Since I've covered the first two, I'll briefly mention fire. If a monster is caught on fire, then he takes a point of damage at the end of each movement phase. If your structures catch on fire three times, they are destroyed. Also, when on fire, structures do not damage monsters that attack them - though they do catch those monsters on fire.

The first new element of the Wizard's Tower are the new monsters. I like the new monsters - I think that they add quite a bit of variety to the game (though it can be annoying to have to look up what they do on your cheat sheet every time one comes out in your first few games). There are monsters that are immune to damage in certain rings, but can be killed by one hit in other rings. Other monsters can climb your walls, move two spaces at a time, bring out imps, have four damage, and several other things. Also, the Wizard's Tower introduces the "mega" monsters. These monsters are the Superman of monsters - and the game would be harder, even if they weren't included! Each game that you play, you randomly pick 3 of the 6 mega monster tokens (using their "harbinger" tokens, which have the standard triangular shape so that you will still pull tokens randomly from the new monster bag). All of these "mega" monsters have more than three hit points, but they also have some extra abilities - some of which are especially powerful, like the Hydra (mentioned earlier) and the Basilisk, which prevents you from being able to perform the "discard and draw" phase of your turn.

The wizard's tower and mega monsters

The second new element of the Wizard's Tower is... the wizard's tower. One of your standard towers is replaced with your fancy new wizard's tower, and as long as it is not destroyed, you can draw cards from the wizard deck when you perform the "discard and draw" action. These cards are crucial, and without them, you would have no chance in the game. These can allow you to rebuild towers, hit every monster in a single space for one damage (very useful if you just killed a Hydra and it spawned 8 Imps), prevent monsters from moving for a turn, and many other things. I think that this is a neat element, and the wizard fits thematically. However, I'm not sure if I prefer the separate deck, or if I would have preferred the new cards to simply be added to the standard castle deck. (As a note, there are also a few cards that are added to the castle deck - mine were just barely larger than the original castle cards so that they didn't shuffle especially well. This was probably my biggest complaint with the entire expansion.) Overall, I don't think that it takes anything away by having separate decks - and it forces you to protect your wizard's tower more than the other towers, so it probably is better to be a separate deck.

My only victory - it was close!

Finally, there is fire. I have played several games, and I have only ever seen one structure be destroyed by fire. However, I have seen several monsters be heavily damaged by it. I guess it wouldn't make much sense to have the monsters affected but not the castle itself (unless it was "poison" instead of fire). However, in my experience it feels like adding the fire to the castle seems a bit like busy work, since you probably won't lose your structures to flames. Fire is a helpful thing for slowly killing large monsters, though. Also, fire is a way of allowing the dragon to make more sense - he doesn't directly attack your castle, but he breathes fire on it. In summary, I like that you can slowly deal damage to monsters, but I think that fire is fiddly on the castle structures.

Overall, I give the Wizard's Tower expansion an 8.5/10. (Oh, yeah, I really have no idea how to score expansions.) I gave Castle Panic an 8.0, but now that I've played with the Wizard's Tower, I don't think that I'd ever want to go back and play the basic game without it - which I guess is really the trademark of a great expansion!

While we're talking about expansions, some other expansions that you might want to read about are Thunderstone's Wrath of the Elements Expansion, Nightfall's Martial Law Expansion, and Lord of the Rings: The Card Game's Shadows of Mirkwood Expansions.

Finally, I would like to brag... I have defeated the Wizard's Tower expansion... once.  And, more finally (and for my amusement), here are some other ways you could describe the difficulty of the Wizard's Tower expansion:

"Like Trying to See Through a Blindfold While Being in the Forehead with a Taser"
"Like Trying to Defeat Superman in an Arm Wrestling Contest while using a Prosthetic Arm"
"Watch me Die!" (this was an actual difficulty setting in Doom 64)
"Like Trying to Make an NFL Team as a Freshman in High School"
"Playing Call of Duty on XBox Live"
"Beating Tiger Woods in Golf Using Nothing but a Putter"
"Hitting Off of Nolan Ryan While Standing ON Home Plate"

I would like to thank Fireside Games for providing me with a review copy of Castle Panic: The Wizard's Tower expansion.

Defenders of the Realm Review

About a year ago, a sweet looking new game showed up on the shelves of my game store in Joplin. It was called Defenders of The Realm. And, once I found out it was cooperative, I decided that I really must try it!

"Defenders of the Realm is just Pandemic with monsters and dice." Well, there are definite similarities - but, no. Defenders truly does stand on it's own as a different game.  In Defenders of the Realm, players will alternate taking turns - each turn consisting of performing actions, drawing Hero Cards, and then drawing "Darkness Spreads" cards (which bring out minions and move Generals). If the heroes are able to kill all four evil Generals before any of the loss conditions occurs, the they win. If a General (or five minions) enters Monarch City, the land becomes entirely tainted, or if you run out of minions, then you lose. When performing actions, you can move, attack minions, heal the land of taint (not available in Pandemic), build magic gates, listen for rumors at an inn (not in Pandemic), and a few other things - the number you can perform is based on the number of hit points your hero has remaining (also different from Pandemic).

Generals also look awesome

The first thing that I like about Defenders is that the Heroes, Generals, and Minions all have different characteristics. This (to me) is the main thing that sets it apart from Pandemic - many of the mechanics feel similar, but whereas Pandemic has a very generic feel to it (every disease is the same and every city is the same), Defenders is much more engaging thematically. Minions change in difficulty - an orc is much easier to kill than a dragonkin. Because of this, when attacking orcs, you must roll a 3+ on a die to kill it; against a dragonkin you need a 5+! Likewise, each General has special abilities that make it unique - along with a different life total and die number needed for hits. Some Generals are able to block attacks (if you roll 1's along with your other attacks), some prevent re-rolls, and some are just hard to hit! Fortunately, different characters have different abilities to help them prepare for the fight. I think that (in the game) the most useful of these is the rogue - the rogue is able to listen for rumors at the inn incredibly well, which can help him draw a lot of cards of a certain color quickly; thus preparing him to fight a General. I could continue talking about how well I think the different characteristics of each part of the game are executed, but I believe you get the point.

The next thing that I like about Defenders of the Realm is that the game gets more difficult as you do well - not just as you keep playing it (like both Pandemic and Forbidden Island). There is a "War Status" track in Defenders - and each time that you defeat a General, the War Status is increased. As the War Status increases, more Darkness Spreads are drawn. However, not all of these cards bring out more minions. Each Darkness Spreads card has both minions that are brought out and a picture of where a certain General will attack (if he is in position). As the War Status increases, more cards will be drawn, but some of these cards will only be used to help Generals move forward - after all, as you defeat Generals, less of the "Generals move" icons will be applicable. So, this War Status keeps the game from getting much easier as you keep playing.

I hope you roll well.

The next thing that I must mention is the die rolling. I like and absolutely hate the die rolling. Each time that you attack anything - whether a general or minions, you roll dice to see how successful you are. This is really sweet, because when you attack a group of three minions, you get to roll a die for each one of them using a single action! However, if you hit all but one of them, you could spend the rest of your actions that round attempting to hit the final minion, and never hit him! This causes a player to decide if it's truly worth attacking single minions (often the answer is no). However, when attacking Generals, this like/hate relationship grows. In my opinion, if you don't kill a General in a single attack, you're probably not going to kill him. They heal very quickly. Therefore, your goal is to attack him when you have enough dice that you should be able to defeat him. Yet, there is never a guarantee. One game that I played, I attacked a General that required 5 hits, and a roll of 4+ to hit him. I attacked with 11 dice (if you are good at statistics, you know that I "should" get 5 hits, 5 misses, and one that is either a hit or miss). I hit with 4 dice - not quite enough.  Since I lost, I had to roll a die to see how much damage my character took. I rolled a 5, which was all of the life I had left - instantly killing myself! So, again - I think it's neat... but since I don't roll dice well, it can be very frustrating.

Now, for my first true con - I felt like the game should scale your hand limit based on the number of players. Specifically, in a solo game. Each player has a hand limit of 10 cards. This works fine in most games, as all of the players are collecting cards to attack a General together. However, in a single player game (assuming you're not pretending that it is multiplayer and using several characters), you can only have 10 cards in your hand at the end of any given turn (during the turn it can be higher by listening for rumors at the inn). This makes it impossible to attack a General with more than about 12 dice. And, as I just mentioned about die rolling, this is far from a sure victory!

Where are Windy Pass and Raven Forest??

The next con that I will mention is not about gameplay as much as about graphic design. When you flip over Darkness Spreads cards, you have to place minions in certain locations on the board. Yet, there is no way of knowing where on the board those locations exist (without playing the game repeatedly). I have had several turns where I spent far more time looking for where I should place minions than I did performing my actual actions.

The final con that I will mention is that my copy of Defenders seemed to be a production anomaly. My "Special Action" Hero cards were a smidge bigger than my other Hero cards - this made them hard to shuffle, and also hurt your thumbs when you tried it. I also received an extra copy of the Wizard and the Undead General character cards (fortunately nothing was missing). I haven't heard anyone else say they had any issues with this game, so I'm assuming that I somehow just received a rare bad copy. I'd also guess that if I asked, the people at Eagle Games would replace my Hero deck for me so that the cards were all the same size, but I got my copy for free from them, so I decided not to press my luck! Oh, and I also thought it would have been cool if the different minions had different molds - instead, they all look the same, but with different colors. Since the game is $85 MSRP, I thought this could be a nice touch, but it doesn't affect gameplay.

Overall, I give Defenders of the Realm a 7.5/10. This score is only this low because the game costs $85 MSRP, and I felt like (though I like the game) I may have been disappointed if I had paid that much. (And, this is making me reconsider whether I should even factor in the price of games when I do my reviews.) If you enjoy cooperative games and fantasy themes (and don't hate dice), then you will love Defenders. If you like cooperative games (and don't hate dice), then you will like Defenders. If you hate dice rolling, then stay away.

I'm not the only person to review this one - if you're looking for more opinions, you might check out the Board Game Family's Defenders of the Realm Review, or even Play Board Game's Defenders of the Realm Review. Or, if you want to read about other cooperative games, you might check out Knizia's Lord of the Rings, Castle Panic, and Sentinels of the Multiverse.

I would like to thank Eagle Games for providing me with a copy of Defenders of the Realm to help rebuild my game collection after the tornado.