How to Play Masmorra: The Dungeons of Arcadia & Review

Masmorra: The Dungeons of Arcadia is a Dice Rolling, Dungeon-Crawl game.

Title: Masmorra: Dungeons of Arcadia

Year Published: 2017

Designer: Daniel Alves, Patrick Matheus, Eurico Cunha Neto

Publisher: CMON Limited

Players: 1-5

Game Time: ~45 minutes

Set-up Time: ~5 minutes

Ages: 13+

Theme: Arcadia Quest

Mechanisms: Dice Rolling, Variable Player Powers, Modular Board

How to win: Have the most XP after a single player scores 16.

Game Description

Masmorra: Dungeons of Arcadia is a fast-paced, dice-driven dungeon crawl board game set in the Arcadia Quest universe where players control Heroes that explore three levels of a dungeon filled with monsters, traps and treasure! Bosses, special rooms and countless surprises await the Heroes, but only one can be the first to reach the final level and become the undisputed champion of the Realm!

How to play Masmorra: The Dungeons of Arcadia

Round-Up

One really good thing is the lack of setup time. Place the start tile, do a bit of shuffling, get your player pieces and you’re good to go. After playing Arcadia Quest which needs a specific level setup each time with tiles, doors, tokens etc this is a welcome change.

There is plenty of variety in characters too. There are 5 in the box and all are different enough to provide some variation from game to game. But, I got the Kickstarter edition that comes with another 14 then the crossover pack that lets you use characters from Arcadia Quest in the game. That’s 50ish characters in total… I’d hate to have just 5.

But anyway, the game itself is fun.

Levelling up the characters makes you want to get XP, apart from just winning the game of course. You see those cool abilities on the cards then hide them behind the character sheet, you want to uncover them 🙂

Dice & Actions

The dice give a load of options and while you might not get what you want you can always mitigate a lot of it. You get one reroll… Magic lets you change the face of a die… Then that Step token is a really good idea, can you imagine having a turn where you can’t move just because you didn’t roll the right result on some dice? 🙂

Combat is fun and familiar if you’ve played Arcadia Quest. It’s very stomp/mash/slam but at the same time elegant and tactical. Run in with Swords and you’ll be taking damage, try to hold back at range all the time and you’ll be too slow. What do you do?

Monsters

The downsides to the game all focus around the monsters. I love them being on dice, it reduces the cost of the game I guess. It also makes it easier to store, takes up less shelf space and adds a little randomness to spawning.

The variety of monsters is great too. Yes, I do have a few Kickstarter extras but this time it’s not as drastic as increasing from 5 to 50, you can live without the few extra dice.

In fact, you’re better off without them! Each die has a fairly large card containing the information about each monster… Each player needs a copy of each card… That’s a lot of table space… Also, the colours of the dice and cards are quite similar for some of them and finding the right one, and then finding the correct side of the die on that card is tricky…

The rules for spawning monsters and what to do if none are available is one of the fiddliest rules too.

But, overall, this is an enjoyable game.

Masmorra: The Dungeons of Arcadia Rating

Very fun both solo and competitively with other players.

I give it 7/10

Masmorra: Dungeons of Arcadia Solo Play May 2017

This is a brief overview of playing just 3 rounds so you get an idea of the game then we go to my thoughts on it.

1:48 – Overview
4.37 – Game Play
11:32 – Summary

This was my first video so hopefully, you see an improvement today! 🙂

Jesta ThaRogue