Review: Doodle Dungeon (Pegasus Spiele)

When your new dungeon turns out to be nothing but an empty cave, it’s time to channel your inner dungeon builder and get to work. That’s the premise for Doodle Dungeon (Pegasus Spiele), a card-based twist on the popular roll-and-write genre.

Fair warning: There’s so much to love in this review that you may need a bucket to hold the gushing by the end.

With that, let’s go exploring to find the top five things you need to know about Doodle Dungeon.

What’s In the Box

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When you open the box, you immediately run into The Pad. It’s a glorious stack of 100 full color, double-sided dungeon sheets. Each player needs one sheet to play a game, so the supplies will last you for quite a while.

As you keep digging, you find the double-sided score sheets (dubbed “Mini Pad” at our house), some ten-sided dice, the hero meeples, pencils and an eraser, and the rules.

Finally, you get to our favorite game components: The templates that help you draw monsters and other dungeony stuff, and the pencil sharpener which doubles (we’re not making this up) as the game’s first player marker.

One Deck, Two Purposes

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Say hello to Doodle Dungeon’s secret sauce: the card deck. These 60 cards power both the dungeon building and dungeon defense phases of the game (more about those in a moment).

During the first phase of the game, you use the dungeon elements at the bottom of each card to strategically build your dungeon.

Once everyone finishes their dungeons, the cards each player selected in the building phase become that player’s draw deck to use against their opponents during dungeon defense.

With all of the stuff in hand, let’s look at the game’s three stages of play.

Building Your Dungeon

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Players spend the first part of the game building their dungeons.

The most diabolical player starts by flipping over the top card from the deck and then revealing one more for each player (so in a three player game, four cards get revealed each round).

Starting with the first player, each person picks one card and draws all of that card’s dungeon elements — monsters, traps, walls, and treasure — on their sheet, following the build rules. Each player’s selected cards become that player’s “action deck” for the last stage of the game.

The first player sharpener goes clockwise around the table, more cards get revealed, and drawing continues until the deck is empty, which happens a lot faster than you think it will.

Marking a Path

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Once everyone finishes building their dungeons, the second phase of the game begins. It’s time to plot the hero’s path!

Players pass their maps to the left and draw a line on their opponent’s sheet starting at the dungeon entrance and leading to its exit. This is the route an adventurer will take through the dungeon in the third phase of the game.

The line can (and will) follow corridors, cross traps, and go through all kinds of monsters. The rule book does a great job explaining the details of how the adventurer’s path works, so pay attention to the examples.

Defending Your Creation

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With all of the dungeon sheets back to their owners and an adventurer’s path marked on each one, players shuffle their action decks, draw a hand of cards, and begin moving adventurers through their dungeons.

Each turn, the players move their respective adventurers along the drawn path to face traps and fight monsters. (Interestingly, players only own the dungeon, not the adventurers. Adventurers are neutral, just following the path and wreaking havoc on your beautiful dungeon as they go. Stupid adventurers.)

Players use action cards to either give their dungeon an edge against the adventurer or to make an opponent’s adventurer stronger versus that player’s dungeon. But each player’s deck is limited and cards only get played once, so it pays to carefully choose when to play a card.

Verdict

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We loved this game. It brings together player choice, strategy, and luck in a really great package. Plus it’s just plain fun to draw dungeons and then inflict woe onto adventurers.

Roll-and-write dice games never really caught our fancy in the past. They’re fun, but they always felt too light and luck-driven. Doodle Dungeon avoids that fate thanks to its card deck.

The need to balance building the dungeon now versus defending the dungeon later sets Doodle Dungeon apart. That’s the secret sauce. (Well, that and the John Kovalic artwork because it’s a perfect fit for the game.)

Since every card has a different function in the first and last sections of the game, the deck builds (inflicts?) a beautiful tension on the players. Do you grab the card with the walls and monsters that fit perfectly into your diabolical design, or do you go for the powerful action card that could save your bacon later but adds almost nothing useful now?

Doodle Dungeon earns a solid recommendation. Have fun designing delicious doom for those pesky adventurers!