There were times when I’d get to the end of a dungeon, only to be thrown off by a bad hand and end up building out useless rooms just to dispose of the cards, while my hero was left to meander meaninglessly. At times, though, the nature of the randomized card draws was too constricting, which – combined with the more specific quest goals and the fact that it’s not immediately clear what determines a hero’s pathfinding – made for the occasionally frustrating and seemingly impossible scenario. This offers a welcome challenge that balances your freedom as a sort-of dungeon master while still limiting your power. The dungeon-building in some quests demands careful decision making and even risk taking, since you never know what the next hand of tiles holds. On one adventure you might need to get your hero from one side of the dungeon to the other in a limited number of moves, and in another you might need to grind against lower-level enemies until your hero is strong enough to take on the dungeon’s overlord. Some of the unpredictability is a good thing, such as how different quest types change up your goal so you’re not always doing the same thing with the same tiles. With a limited number of tiles to play per turn and just three types (represented by loot, land, and enemy cards), comes a surprising amount of strategic depth – when it wasn’t bogged down by an unbalanced sense of unpredictability. Figuring out the proper way to coax my hero through the dungeon by connecting the rooms on the board was a neat puzzle system in itself. Each quest starts your chosen hero out on a single tile, with some parts of the level already mapped out in small patches.

What grabbed me instead was my role in building the actual dungeons as I played them. This setup establishes a playful tone early on, though all the tongue-in-cheek bard’s tunes were a bit overly cutesy for my tastes. Your goal of rounding up a ragtag team of disposable adventurers and sending them out in search of loot adds some light-hearted justification for the harsh amounts of permadeath in store, making the fact that your guild’s cemetery will largely outweigh the trophy room darkly comic. A humorous take on turn-based dungeon crawling puts you not in the role of a single, glory-seeking hero, but a rejected thrillseeker-turned-guild master looking to steal some glory from those who doubted you.

Guild of dungeoneering wiki