Gimme Games: Dungeoneer: Dragons of the Forsaken Desert

Published in 2005 by Atlas Games the outside of this box proclaims adventure! And also that you need to bring your own six sided dice and tokens. I picked this up at Nexus on clearance for $10, and I'm glad I only bought the one expansion.

Upon opening the box you are faced with two decks of cards and a rule sheet. The rule sheet is about four square feet of densely packed text with few illustrations. Two of the cards, you will read in the set up instructions, require you to cut them up. These will be your miniatures and tokens.

There are fours decks of cards in Dungeoneer. The Quest deck, the Adventure Deck, the Map deck and the Hero deck. There are also six scoring cards that double as either turn summaries or symbol references. The Quest deck contains all of the quests that can be completed. The Adventure deck contains monsters, treasure, 'boons' and 'banes'. The Map deck contains cards that show either places ('sites') or passageways, as well as doors and walls at the interconnecting points. The Hero deck is a set of six cards each with a hero's stats on it.

You need at least one die, plus a way of marking every player's level and health, either with more dice or tokens. You also need two tokens per player to mark out where their 'Glory' and 'Peril' are. Each player starts with a hand of five adventure cards, two face up quests, a hero card and a tracker card. They take turns playing first the 'Dungeonlord' and then as the hero, building the map as they go. The first to either kill off all the other heroes or complete three quests wins.

Honestly I have picked this game up and put it down several times as I was not willing to wade through the mass of rules they call a rules sheet. However I finally waded through and played with a friend today, and I was sorely disappointed.

The game plays out slowly with two people, and the rules are confusing enough to make a simple battle take us minutes of time to try and figure out. You are using other people's Peril points to buy certain things and your Glory to buy other things. As Dungeonlord you are playing the monsters and traps, as hero you are playing, well, your hero.

The artwork, while good, is a bit too dark to read well, even in full light. The cards are of very good quality and are easy to hold. You need a rather large playing surface on which to build out the map. The floor is my first choice, at this point.

I would certainly give this game another shot if there were a more experienced player in the group, or I found a tutorial to follow. However until those conditions are met I will be shelving Dungeoneer and hoping no one asks to play.

Good luck gaming,
~ekobor