Dungeon Roll review

Tasty Minstrel Games | Fantasy dice | £16.99 | 1-4 players | 15 minutes | www.playtmg.com 

Normally assembling a band of intrepid explorers to venture deep into the bowels of an ominous dungeon requires a lot of hard work. It involves trips to inns to find courageous dwarfs, weapon crafting, spell weaving and then back to the inn again for a flagon of mead. However, Dungeon Roll boils all that complicated process down to a few dice rolls.

Following on from a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2013, Dungeon Roll sees a player building their own party of adventurers by rolling a set of seven white party dice. Meanwhile another player rolls increasing amounts of the more ominous-looking black dungeon dice to simulate an increasingly difficult delve into the depths.  

By using the six characters/items on the party dice – Champion, Fighter, Cleric, Thief, Mage and Scroll – the adventurers can defeat the monsters rolled by the dungeon master, e.g. a Champion can easily best a group of goblins but struggles against skeletons. Each round the explorer must choose which of their dice to sacrifice to beat the dungeon monsters and whether they want to gamble on exploring the increasingly difficult dungeon. It’s a great balance of risk and reward because as the party dice decrease, the dungeon dice continue to increase too.

However, that’s not all, if the dungeon master rolls three dragon icons the adventurers must face a challenging encounter against a powerful dragon, which requires up to three dice to be sacrificed. Luckily, adventurers can earn special treasure tokens containing extra fighters or potions on their quest to help overcome the challenge.

Dungeon Roll is a cracking little quick game that’s great as a warm-up to a longer dungeon crawling boardgame and it comes in a genuinely awesome box that’s shaped like a tiny treasure chest… we’re sure some people probably buy it just for that!

Buy a copy here

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