Guild of Dungeoneering - (P)Review Roundup

I didn’t realise quite how elegantly designed Dungeoneering was until I sat down to describe how all the parts fit together. You sometimes hear about developers blocking out their games on the tabletop first to make sure the systems are robust - the excellent Atom Zombie Smasher among them - and Dungeoneering feels like one of those.

Once your intrepid ward does bump into a baddy, combat initiates: a separate turn-based system in which your opponent draws a card, and you find a way to counter it using a move in your hand - blocking, healing, or dealing damage of your own. Hearthstone players will recognise the constant toss-up between pain mitigation and sticking the blade in; a handful of hearts is the only thing saving you from beginning the dungeon anew.

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There may not be much more to the game than the constant adventures, but it's tailor-made for short, easily-digestible chunks of gameplay. It would've been right at home as a 3DS or mobile title, but it has an honest shot at displacing Minesweeper as a go-to timewaster whenever there's 5 minutes to kill, and you feel the need to slay a rampaging hellbeast with a fork. If that's not a need you've ever had, don't worry. After a few go-arounds with the Guild, it will be.

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Would I like more depth? Would I like better graphics and animations? Could it be more than it is?

Sure it could. But what it does bring to the table is fun and clever. The little rhymes that accompany new dungeoneers coming to the guild are adorable. It’s a neat little game with a nice little price-tag. It’s not a perfect game and it probably won’t hold my attention for a very long time, but I like its simplicity. I like accessible card games like this or Hearthstone.

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When your adventurer lands on the same tile as a monster, it's time to fight. Fortunately, you do have control of how your hero squares off against the enemy, so you don't have to rely on the deliberately-obtuse AI that controls their movement. Combat is a CCG-style affair, where each combatant has a deck of cards that they draw from and play to try to kill the other with damage, while staying alive themselves. There are only physical and magic damage types, so the card game combat isn't as complex as you've seen from Hearthstone or Magic, but it's delightfully well implemented here, with a surprising eye on balance. You'll find that an impressive portion of your fights will result in you barely eking out a win, or dying as you strike the killing blow.

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I spent half an hour with GoD last night. It’s an odd game and there are certain concepts that I failed to grasp immediately, which hindered my enjoyment somewhat. The most notable is the lack of individual characters. Each trip to the dungeons is a self-contained incident and none of the equipment/skills that a hero gathers during a quest stay with that hero. That’s because the heroes are simply representatives of each class that you’ve unlocked, so they can’t die, level up or change in any way.

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This grindiness, and an inevitable sense of repetition that sets in, is largely offset by a lovely Biro-and-paper artstyle that invokes the kind of rough-and-ready RPGs that were played in the back of an exercise book during maths class, and by that central concept that sees you leading an adventurer not so much through a dungeon as through the upwards trajectory of becoming a hero. Many RPGs allow you to balance the levelling curve in some way, of course, even if it just comes down to fleeing a pack of goblins you aren't ready to cut to pieces just yet, but Guild of Dungeoneering takes it all one step further, mingling the lineage of Hero Quest...More information.

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