Guild of Dungeoneering
Building a basement of cards
$3.99 Developer Gambrinous, guildofdungeoneering.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 8 or later
Fantasy gaming can seem to take itself too seriously. All those armored shoulder plates, stat counts and weirdly named wizards can seem a bit… po-faced to outsiders. Guild of Dungeoneering is aware of this perception, and does all it can to undermine it.
You don’t have any friends, so you’ve decided to set up your own adventurers guild – that’ll show them. And you’re going to do so while accompanied by a number of entertainingly snide, bard-esque tunes.
Rather than steering your characters through a dungeon with a certain number of moves per turn, you instead lay out the dungeon for them, placing down cards down to create corridors, position enemies and stash loot conveniently in their paths. You can place up to three cards per turn, after which your hapless hero will head off in the direction marked by the footprints trailing out in front of them.
They’ll set out towards the nearest point of interest, whether that’s the enemy closest to their own level, or – even more keenly – a shiny trinket. As such, you’re as much architect as adventurer, engineering dungeons that coax your 2D charges in the desired direction. Combat, when it comes – and how often it does is largely up to you – takes the form of card battles. You can deal physical or magical damage (although both deduct from the same health bar), as well as blocking or… standing still and scratching your head. Really.
Both heroes and foes can boast different traits – we loved playing as the Bruiser, whose “spikey” trait means they deal damage every time they block an attack, for example.
Because your adventurers’ health regenerates after each encounter – and you can pick up some seriously sweet loot, plus a level-up, after each – the game positively encourages you to play dangerously. It’s refreshing to have combat feel so rewarding, and we found ourselves placing as many enemy cards as possible to see how much good stuff we could hoover up before facing each level’s end boss.
the bottom line. A simple set of systems, but one that intertwines effortlessly to provide you with deep, entertaining fantasy play.