Dungeon Lords Board Game First Impressions

In Dungeon Lords, you build a Dungeon, attract Heroes and capture them.

Also, feed your minions…

Have you ever ventured with party of heroes to conquer dungeons, gain pride, experiences and of course rich treasure? And has it ever occurred to you how hard it actually is to build and manage such underground complex filled with corridors and creatures? No? Well now you can try. Put yourself in role of the master of underground, summon your servants, dig complex of tunnels and rooms, set traps, hire creatures and try to stop filthy heroes from conquering and plundering your precious creation. We can guarantee you will look on dark corners, lairs and their inhabitant from completely different perspective!

The goal of Dungeon Lords is to score the most points and there are a few ways to do this but who cares. Build a dungeon, hire monsters, build traps and capture Heroes!

This is an action selection/worker placement game at its core. You’re playing 3 action cards to select which action spaces your ‘workers’ will take but you lay out 3 cards face down, then reveal left to right one at a time in player order then place your worker.

Action Selection

There are 4 players (including a dummy 4th in our 3-player game) and only 3 spaces per action, but the spaces get better the later you get one and you have to place in the first empty space on that action…

So playing a card early will almost guarantee a space but it won’t be as good as playing late, but play too late and you might miss out altogether. I enjoyed this part which is good as it’s the main part of the game.

Of the 3 cards you play, the first is returned to your hand the other two are locked for the next round.

What do these spaces do?

You can gain food, reduce your evil-ness, dig in your mine, get gold, hire minions, buy traps, recruit monsters and build rooms. All important.

Once everyone has placed their 3 workers you go across the board in order and so what you need to do.

All of this is very quick… Once you’ve picked your cards, which doesn’t really take long, the rest is easy. Put a worker on a space then go through and do what they say.

The board is big and bright and cartoony too.

It’s not as simple as most games where you’re doing this every turn until the game ends. You’re moving a marker down a board that represents a year and each space will either activate something or remind you to refill certain cards or tell you when to distribute stuff and affect things. (I didn’t manage this bit but the person who was seemed very busy on these points :))

Dungeon

Your dungeon is on our player board with rooms represented by square tiles and tunnels by crosses.

This is where the Heroes march through your Dungeon when it’s time, taking over rooms. The ‘White’ rooms have been captured and the yellow token represents where the Heroes start off again when they return.

Combat

Combat works the same way as Xenoshyft Onslaught (but a LOT quicker) were a monster and Hero attack each other. Except they only attack once each instead of till death. Then Monster tire and sit out the round and Heroes gain damage from exhaustion and may or may not be removed.

Each monster you have damages in different ways. Heroes prevent damage to themselves and each other.

At the end of the game, you score points for various things. These include captured Heroes, most minions, rooms, tunnels etc Lots of things.

Dungeon Lords Summary

This is a fantastic game. It’s a worker placement game with a decent theme like Argent: the Consortium.

We played the 5th Anniversary edition which had a huge box but really nice bits. But the gameplay is very good so that extra cost may not be needed. Although it does add some mini-expansions I believe which could be worthwhile…

The action cards are great, the theme is cool, and the overall look is nice. It’s tight without being frustrating which is perfect.

Dungeon Lords is definitely worth playing more.

Jesta ThaRogue