It is always mysterious what attracts you to a new board game. Is it the colourful image on the front, that great review you read (on The Hobby Compass), the description on the back of the box or a recommendation of a friend; For me, in the case of Dungeon Lords, it was the mental image it conjured up of an old but much loved PC game called Dungeon Keeper.  Like in the board game, you impersonate an eeevil lord who owns a dungeon that you have to develop by adding new corridors, rooms, traps and monsters; and also like in the board game, heroic adventurers try to penetrate your realm in search of treasure and fortune. So all I needed was an excuse for the wife and as it was my birthday, I bought it straight away.

Main information: this is a 2 to 4 player game, it is suitable for 12 year + and it says on the box that the game playing time is 90 minutes

The game plays at its best with 4 players.

What is in the box:

Some of the contents in more detail: the 4 double sided player’s boards have 1 side for game playing and the other for learning the combat mechanics and in case there are less than 4 players.

I quite like to have player specific boards as it creates a clear and compact space to organise your pieces and helps you in better planning your strategy. It is also very good to have all of the action relating to your dungeon close and always under control.

The pieces are of mixed ”type”: there are very nice wooden pieces, used for food, gold, phase and points counters; there are cardboard pieces representing monsters adventurers and the dungeon’s rooms and corridors, the “workers” are in injection moulded coloured plastic in the shape of imps and there are cards to represent the players actions and other such things . I must say that this makes the contents feel as if they come from a mixed bag, as if the developers could not make their mind up onto what to use throughout. It does not however detract from the high quality of all of these pieces and I guess one could say that there is something in there for everyone.

  The cards are of the smaller size, but there are quite a few of them.

Setting up:

The main board is placed in the centre next to the seasons board that helps to track the progress of the game and reminds the players what to do both in the building and (on the reverse) in the combatg phase.

There is also a “distant lands” board, its main purpose is to tidy up the table giving you a specific place to put cards and pieces not yet needed or used and discarded.

All of these boards fit very nicely on an average sized kitchen table as the main central board is quite compact.

Setting all the necessary pieces (cards, wood counters, card board and plastic imps) in place takes a good 5 to 10 minutes, so it is not the fastest game to play out of the box.

The session:

The very colourful rulebook introduces you to the game by going through the combat system that your monsters will use to defeat the adventurers. This system has simple mechanics that once learnt can be applied and dealt with quite rapidly.

However the main strategic part of the game is in the building phase in which you enlarge your dungeon and fill it with traps and monsters. There are 2 years of building, at the end of each, adventurers try to defeat your dungeon. Each year is divided in 4 seasons and each season has similar actions you can perform that ultimately will provide you with the right tools to deal with the adventurers.

There are a lot of little mechanics in this game that feel very cleaver, for example, after you have given 3 orders to your minions, you will not be able to give 2 of these in the following season, but will have to wait the season after that to get the orders back in your hand. Or the Evilometer: you need to become more evil if you want the better monsters, but if you pass a certain threshold, a paladin will come down your dungeon with the other adventurers in the fighting phases and he is very tough.

The game is won by obtaining the most victory points, these can be earned by having monsters, and a good dungeon; but points are lost for every section that the adventurers conquer and if you can not pay taxes. Points are also gained for “titles”. These are given out if you are the best at a specific task: biggest dungeon, most monsters, most evil, etc.

FINALLY

Positives: this is a very fun game and has hilarious gags especially appealing to old roleplayers (like me). It has very strong mechanics and you need a good dose of strategy to win. The quality of the pieces is very high and there is a space on a board for everything helping to maintain your table surface nice and tidy. The time needed to play is of 120 to 150 minutes for first sessions or slow groups (...who’s turn is it?), but it looks like the 90 minutes advertised on the box could be easily achieved after a few sessions.

Negatives: Some pieces (especially the imps) look out of place, I think that consolidating the materials would have been better. Setting up the game can take up quite a long time as there is a place for everything, so you have to put everything in its place. As far as the game itself, some might not like the randomness of the order assignment. There is only so much guess work you can do and sometimes you will not get what you were expecting, making it more difficult to manage the available resources.

Overall: This is a great game. Maybe I would not go so far as calling it a classic that everyone should have in their collection, but it is definitely worth the money, and I am very happy to own a copy.

The back of the box.