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This sound like a dungeon game you'd like to play?

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29 May 2008 04:28 #7246 by Matt Thrower
Hi,

I've posted this on various other forums, so just ignore it if you've seen it before.

I wanted to try and design a dungeon adventure game that I liked - most of the current crop are either too complex, lacking in interaction or lacking in variety. So I tried to come up with something that would be easy to learn and play, had a good sense of narrative, provided a framework on which to hang a potentially very large variety of encounters and which had a good level of interaction above and beyond characters just meeting and fighting.

This is my first draft of the rules, which may not make much sense:
www.biguns.co.uk/Dungeon-game-rules.htm
Currently I'm interested in any obvious flaws or improvements I could make or, indeed, whether it sounds much like a game worth playing. I don't want to invest much time in this if I haven't got the basis of something worthwhile.

Cheers,
Matt

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29 May 2008 05:37 - 29 May 2008 05:40 #7248 by Schweig!
Sounds fun, but I don't know many dungeon games. I would give it a try.

What I noticed though is that the players don't start in the same room. I thought that was pretty much standard for a dungeon crawler. However, that's just minor thing. Maybe though you could re-theme it more into a race giving players the ability to hinder each other and placing a very special room in the middle which benefits everyone.
Last edit: 29 May 2008 05:40 by Schweig!.

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29 May 2008 06:43 #7250 by Matt Thrower
The players don't start in the same room because it's not a co-op game. This is intentional - I wanted to make something in which co-operation was a choice but there was always some tension between the benefits of co-operating and being an individual winner. The pressure to co-operate will come from rooms which have two or more monsters which should - depending on what gets played into the room - be pretty tough for one player to beat.

Having said all that it'd probably be worthwhile to give players the option to start as a team on the same tile if they so wished.

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29 May 2008 07:05 #7251 by Citadel
It looks good so far. I couldn't quite work out how Dungeon Cards are played. Do players play them on each other? What sort of player interaction will there be in the game?

The groundwork looks solid if basic. I think a lot of the atmosphere, excitment and decision making of a game like will come from how you write the cards. Can you give an idea of how you would want an ideal turn to go (don't worry about the actual rules)?

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29 May 2008 08:05 - 29 May 2008 08:19 #7252 by Matt Thrower
Citadel wrote:

It looks good so far. I couldn't quite work out how Dungeon Cards are played. Do players play them on each other? What sort of player interaction will there be in the game?


Dungeon cards mostly get played when a player enters a room. On doing so, he can play a Dungeon card into the room providing it's of a type (foe, encounter, treasure) which is listed on the room tile. Each player in turn may then, if he wishes, play a dungeon card into the room providing it's a valid type for the tile and doesn't exceed the number of cards allowed for that type.

The idea is to create some tension between the exploring player wanting to play "good" cards (weak monsters, high value treasures, things that help him fulfill his quest) and the worry that in leaving gaps, other players may play undesirable cards into the room. For example if you play a weak monster, other players can fill the treasure slots with crap. On the other hand if you put down a good treasure, other players may fill the monster slots with fearsome beasties. There's also a tension involved in wanting to keep high number value cards (which will tend to have more powerful foes/better treasures) for use in combat or encounters.

One problem with this I can forsee is that players may try and hoard certain types of cards, so I'd like to encourage players to play out a hand of cards before getting more. But on the other hand, leaving players with less cards means it's more likely that the exploring player will get a "free ride" - able to fill the treasure slots in the room while other players hang onto their cards for emergencies. Hopefully I can find some balance here - I've tried to do it by giving everyone more cards each turn, but not as many as they're likely to play. One could also force everyone to play at least one card, if able, but that could lead to deliberate or inadvertent cheating..

The groundwork looks solid if basic. I think a lot of the atmosphere, excitment and decision making of a game like will come from how you write the cards. Can you give an idea of how you would want an ideal turn to go (don't worry about the actual rules)?


Bang on about the cards. That's partly the point here - I wanted a system that could take a very wide variety of cards to up the narrative.

A player turn might go like this:

Player 1 decides to move through the northern door in his current room. The room tile that's revealed is an armoury - it has two doors in adjoining walls, one monster symbol, no encounters and two treasure symbols.

Player 1 first has to line up one of the doors with the door he's just come through but has the choice of how to rotate the tile. On the other side of the tile, player 2 is standing in another room so player 1 decides to rotate the tile in such a way that it blocks the one remaining exit to player 2's room, forcing him to backtrack and waste time.

Now Player 1 has the option to play cards into his newly-revealed dungeon tile. He sees that there's two treasure slots, but only one monster slot so he figures it's best to fill that monster slot first, to ensure no-one else puts anything really horrible in it. He checks his quest - Vampire Hunter, which requires him to collect horror-theme monster trophies - and as luck would have it he's god a pretty feeble horror monster in his hand. It's a Skeleton, with strength 4, so he plays that.

Player 2 is obviously cross about having his exit blocked, so he decides to play a card and fill one treasure slot with a fairly worthless "1" value gold coin card. Because he's annoyed he also chooses to use a "fate" Dungeon card on player 1. The card in question is "Feeblemind" which causes the target to discard a random card. Player 1 complies.

Player 3 declines to play a card. There's only one treasure slot left on the card so maybe he has no treasure cards to play, or no low-value ones that he wants to inflict on Player 1.

Then we're back to Player 1. He's obviously happy that there's an empty slot he can play a cool treasure in to, but here's a dilemma. There's only two cards left in his hand. One of them is a nice magic sword, a weapon giving him +2 on combat rolls, but the other is another "1" value gold coin card. If he plays the sword then he'll be left with nothing to help him beat the skeleton. But the skeleton isn't *that* hard, so he plays the sword.

All the slots in the room are now full, so Player 1 has to resolve the cards in the room. He has to deal with the foe first. He decides to save his card and just rolls the dice, but it comes up a "2" and he looses a life token. He wants that sword, and the skeleton trophy, so he decides to try another round of combat. This time he plays that "1" card for a +1 bonus. This time he rolls a "1", which even with the +1 is still a failure so he looses another life token. Now he's out of cards so he decides to retreat and wait until next turn when he'll have another full hand. The skeleton and treasure cards stay in the room, because none of them were resolved.
Last edit: 29 May 2008 08:19 by Matt Thrower.

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29 May 2008 09:20 #7255 by mikoyan
Base it on nethack.

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29 May 2008 09:51 #7256 by Shellhead
Between Descent and Dungeon Twister, the potential market for a dungeon crawl game is covered right now. But as mentioned in a recent discussion here, people would be interested in a good Indiana Jones-type game. Maybe you could re-theme your dungeon game for pulp adventurers exploring the ruins of a lost civilization?

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29 May 2008 09:56 #7257 by ubarose
I'd play in a New York minute. I realy like the idea of having your own Quest. The only problem I see is balancing the Quest cards. It could be very frustrating if your goal was to kill certain types of monsters, but that type of monster just isn't getting drawn/played. Meanwhile, someone has the Quest to get to the corner room, which is something that they have some control over. You'd have to play test to see if this is a problem or not.

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29 May 2008 10:07 - 29 May 2008 10:08 #7260 by Schweig!
The basic system has some interesting twists. While reading the text, I often thought "Okay I know how he is going to resolve this", but then you were very innovative. However, I guess the real work is in designing interesting and balanced cards. You could however also have different characters with special abilites and their own victory conditions (e.g. the Thief has to garner a lot of money) to add in artificial imbalance. Hmm, you could maybe add in a rule that only if you meet another player then you know what character s/he's playing. So you can avoid other players to not expose your victory condition. Otherwise I see no disadvantage in teamplay.
Last edit: 29 May 2008 10:08 by Schweig!.

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29 May 2008 10:39 #7262 by Matt Thrower
Schweig! wrote:

The basic system has some interesting twists. While reading the text, I often thought "Okay I know how he is going to resolve this", but then you were very innovative. However, I guess the real work is in designing interesting and balanced cards. You could however also have different characters with special abilites and their own victory conditions (e.g. the Thief has to garner a lot of money) to add in artificial imbalance. Hmm, you could maybe add in a rule that only if you meet another player then you know what character s/he's playing. So you can avoid other players to not expose your victory condition. Otherwise I see no disadvantage in teamplay.


Good point. I figured the "disadvantage" was having to share loot, but I see now that it's not enough - I need something else.

Thanks for the feedback so far. It sounds like it might be something worth exploring further.

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31 May 2008 16:34 #7338 by metalface13
Hmm ... gameplay sounds bit generic. Like I've played a couple of homebrew dungeon crawls like this. The random room cards trick can be a bit annoying. One time playing a home made game with the creator similar to this I got stuck in an area that was really hard to get out of without going out of my way and I wasn't even a contender for being the winner.

Although I suppose having different winning conditions could help alleviate this problem. But even then in Dungeoneer you can get stuck waiting for the room you need to come up.

If you really like these mechanics though, I really like other people's suggestions fo r a different theme. An Indiana Jones idea would be good. But I really like the nethack idea! The cyberpunk/hacker theme works really well with the idea of blindly trying to find your way through a mainframe looking for bits of information, decoding encryptions and defeating security programs. That would be cool.

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