Dungeon Run takes the usual formula of exploring, fighting, looting and leveling up and adds an extra twist - after you defeat the boss and take his treasure, your character becomes the boss that everyone else must kill. The one who gets out with the boss's treasure wins.
Dungeon Run is published by Plaid Hat Games, the same company that brought us Summoner Wars, a fairly successful and popular card game. The owner also runs the Heroscapers fan site and is partially responsible for the longevity of the Heroscape product line, despite it finally being discontinued.
The game comes with a stack of dungeon room tiles with varying positions of exits. Whenever a player moves off an open exit, another tile is placed. Each tile has a random chance for an encounter and treasure to find, so each placed tile represents a new resource for someone to gain from. Characters that step into a new tile more often have more chances to be the first to snag the encounter or treasure there, but also face more exposure to risk. Each game requires that 6 tiles per player be placed before the boss lair and boss be revealed. This gives each player ample opportunity to power up and find treasure to prepare for the boss encounter (and the inevitable fights against each other).
Some tiles have special attributes that force you to roll against taking damage, or possibly causing another encounter to appear even after the tile was cleared.
Each player picks from 8 different heroes, each with their own unique set of abilities and stack of power-up cards. When a character powers up, the player always draws two power cards and discards one from the game. This allows the leveling up option a certain degree of customization. Additional pieces track hit point loss and powering up of your character's various attributes.
Randomization during fights, generation of encounters, and finding treasure is done by rolling one or more 6 sided dice (provided with the game). The randomness of the die rolls can potentially be problematic. One game I was told about lacked a lot of found treasure because of the die rolls. In the same game, the final fight was determined from the character with the boss treasure being down to 1 life facing off against a warrior that automatically deals 1 life to anyone that damages him. So the final battle turned out to be less than epic. Expect a lot of swing in how a game plays out.
There are also many opportunities for decision making that affect how the game plays for you. For instance, the players dictate the layout of the dungeon by laying tiles into empty areas they step into. This can cause the dungeon to be several different long threads, each a trail followed by different heroes, or multiple loops that would result in the boss character having multiple routes back to the entrance. During fights, you can use your successful die rolls to cause damage or block incoming attacks. You have multiple options for how to power up your character as you level. With your two action options per turn, you can move, attack, escape, search, etc. You can also choose to perform assist or sabotage actions on other players as they attempt actions with their characters. Each character has only 4 body slots with which to equip found treasure, and only one item can be in each slot.
The game is more fun with at least 3 players, fully supports 4 players and cautions that 5-6 players might make resources slim for everyone, since only 24 dungeon tiles are provided (not including the required single entrance and boss lair tiles). Single player rules are also provided, although they are presented more as accumulating a survival score rather than experiencing the full game.
While experimenting with a solo game using 3 heroes and 18 dungeon tiles, there were enough encounters to advance each hero once. I was expecting each to raise at least twice. There are enough ability cards to handle advancing a hero 4 times during the game.
The game comes with 16 normal dungeon tiles, 8 special dungeon tiles, an entrance and boss lair tile, 4 boss cards (only one of which is used each game), 4 artifact cards (one of which is the treasure gained from the boss - the others can be acquired by other specific means), a stack of encounter cards and treasure cards, 8 large hero cards, 8 unpainted gray plastic hero figures, a stack of multiple ability cards specific to each hero, ability advancement markers, life markers, a pile of small 6-sided dice, a First Player token that gives one player specific control over some aspects of the game, and 4 rule reference cards. Production value is very high - the tile stock is very thick, the cards have a nice glossy texture, and the art is attractive.
Despite the element of randomness throwing off the excitement factor, this game has potential for riveting face offs and can offer a change of pace from usual RPG dungeon crawling.
