Sunday, November 5, 2017

Comparing Some Dungeon Crawler Board Games

In 2015 there were a lot of fantasy based dungeon crawlers on Kickstarter.  I was just getting into hobby board gaming and has just gone a little crazy on Monolith's Conan and late pledged a few of these games looking for something to occupy my time around the time my son was born.  One of my favorite things in Age of Conan, and fantasy in general, is being immersed in a world.  As a fan of Robert E. Howard, AoC was my favorite MMO both for its fun combat but also for the great stories and the characters you meet.  I was looking for more stories and interesting characters in the board game medium.  I was looking for that RPG in a box and looking for something with solo play since I don't have a dedicated game group anymore due to life.



And since it's Kickstarter and a lot of these are miniature games, they've all arrived in the past 12 months, each after their own delay.

The games I'm going to compare are the following:
1. The Dungeons and Dragons Adventure Series
2. Mice and Mystics
3. Gloomhaven
4. Sword & Sorcery
5. Folklore: the Affliction

Note with the DDAS and Mice and Mystics - these are the baseline dungeon crawlers and many people have played one or both of these. Versions of both are almost always available which make them good ones to use for comparisons.

There are a lot of other games out there from the less known games like the pirate themed Skull Tales (okay but not great), to Shadows of Brimstone (another game I really enjoy), to the well funded horror games like Deep Madness, and science fiction based Star Saga.  Additionally there are a lot of other fantasy games out there like Dungeon Saga, Descent, Heroquest, etc.  Descent (and likewise Star Wars Imperial Assault) are being ignored for being a one vs. many game instead of a solo or co-op game.

They will be compared across the following topics:
1. Characters - Variety, Progression, balance,and how interesting are they?
2. Campaign - Immersion, world building, choices, and length
3. Gameplay - Mechanics, variety of missions and monsters
4. Components - Tiles, miniatures, cards, etc.
5. Overall value

At the end I'll rank these with my BGG scores and give a quick blurb about who each of these is good for.

Dungeons and Dragons Adventure Series
I bought Wrath of Ashardalon in 2015 and it's by the far the most simple of the games listed here.  Any of the DDAS games are a good introduction for people interested in dungeon crawls or RPGs.

Characters
The base game comes with 5 characters - Female Elf Paladin, Male Human Cleric, Female Dwarf Fighter, Male Half Orc Rogue, and Male Dragonkin Wizard.  They each have different abilities and play a little differently.  Having choices of abilities gives some limited customization to make each play the way you want.  Progression, in this system, is all but non-existent as you can level up once. The Temple of Elemental Evil, and presumably the upcoming Tomb of Annihlation, have a slightly more robust progression and campaign system but this game is really meant as a series of one-shots.  I solo played a three character party using the paladin, cleric, and wizard.  Have minor healing abilities on two characters was pretty valuable.  I think a party without the cleric is in trouble but otherwise think the paladin and fighter can be interchangeable, similar to the rogue/wizard.

Each game comes with its own characters and the sets are interchangeable - this adds a lot of variety if you want.  The Drizzt set are allegedly overpowered relative to the others based on some comments I've seen online.

Campaign
As stated above there's not much of a campaign.  I played the 8 scenarios (repeating a few a couple of times to "collect" all of the bosses) but that was just to make it feel like a campaign.  To have a flavor of progression I kept the loot I found, but that ended up making me overpowered for the later missions.  It was fun, but not as challenging as it should've been.

Choices are minimal, at best, you are running through a dungeon to get to your end goal.  There is no story within and, from what I've seen, no story moments that bring an RPG aspect to a play session.

Like above, you can mix and match the sets to add variety of monsters.

Gameplay
Very streamlined and simple to teach.  Move then attack or attack and move.  Get to a tile edge to show a new tile or gain an encounter card.  Some tiles also come with encounters automatically.  Encounters are generally bad for you.  Every tile comes with a new monster and they are always bad for you.  Once you lay down a tile - the monsters go.  Rinse and repeat.  There is one die that comes in the box, it's fittingly a d20.  Roll...

Each of the boxes comes with a good number of different monsters and several boss monsters, including a couple impressive sized ones.  Each box, I believe, includes a large model - mostly dragons.  The AI for each is slightly different but essentially they either attack, move, do both, or get help (go to an edge to expose another tile).  There's two conditions inflicted upon the characters: Dazed and Poisoned.

One choice you get is whether to spend 5 XP (from monsters killed) to cancel out an encounter.  This can be worthwhile at the end of the game when fighting a boss.  5 XP can also be coupled with a roll of natural 20 to level up a character.

Setup and tear down takes just minutes - making this great if you only have a short amount of time to play.


Components
One d20.  That's it?  Come-on and throw two or three in there.  I play solo for the most part so it's not as annoying for me, but the principle is there.  Give me another die to choose from when I keep missing with my attacks.  It's the rational thing to do.

Also the tiles are really boring in this game (see below).  There's only a handful with meaningful artwork besides the stonework floor but this may be different in some of the other boxes (the newest one; Tomb of Annihilation features jungle tiles).  The miniatures are pretty good but are generally made of a pretty soft plastic.  The cards are decent quality but have minimal art.  Text is easy to read and is generally pretty easy to understand.

The female characters are slightly overly-sexualized.  The elf's armor highlighting the elf's boobs and the character card of the dwarf portraying a little more cleavage than I ever wanted to see on a dwarf stand out as odd choices compared to the attire of their male companions.

The trap tiles and some treasure tiles could've really used some artwork to increase the immersion and make the rolling boulder trap feel different than the dart trap (both are just blue borders with white text).
Sample setup.


Value
8 missions, 43 miniatures, and stack of tiles, and some tokens for ~$45.  It's okay bang for the buck.  The real plus for this system is being able to mix and match sets which could help give a more progressive feel if you made custom missions with custom monster decks.




Mice and Mystics
This is a family styled dungeon crawler.  Large amounts of story set up and close out each adventure.

Characters
There's a decent selection of characters that fall into typical fantasy roles such as cleric, rogue, wizard, and fighter.  Each has their own abilities that make each one feel unique.

Campaign
The story of Mice and Mystics is very good and engaging.  Where it loses some points, for me, is where you don't keep all items or abilities you find.  This hurts the feeling of progress but was done to allow you play different characters in different missions.  It also loses a point there - because the flavor text will have certain characters talking that you may not have brought with you - and the game doesn't force you to either (in many cases).  This game is set up to play with 4 heroes.

There's also a shortage of varied enemies that makes the game drag a bit as you get on to the later scenarios.

Gameplay
There's some neat game play elements used including the initiative track, where cards are shuffled and placed one at a time for all the heroes and enemies.  When you roll a cheese symbol on attack or defend you (or the bad guys) get a piece of cheese.  Cheese is used to gain new abilities, use existing abilities, re-roll dice, and by the bad guys to spawn new monsters - which also drives you closer to a lose condition.
Initiative and storybook Track

The biggest area where Mice and Mystics lost my interest was the combat.  It felt like a slog.  Roll to hit.  They get to roll defense.  Against some monsters that could roll 3 defense dice, it took a while for hits to get through.   While thematic, that mechanic just ground the game to a halt.

Each scenario has its own rules added, which can feel a bit daunting at times.  Overall, it's actually more involved than it seems at first glance but it adds those layers slowly as you play.

Mice characters don't die, they're captured which allows you to bring lost characters back on subsequent tiles.

Components
The eight double-sided tiles for Mice and Mystics are varied between dungeon, caves, rooms, and a courtyard and clearly marked with iconography that helps you know where you can move.  The artwork on the cards is well done and much of it can't help but be described as 'adorable'.  Button shield?  Acorn helmet?  You try to keep your "aww's" in the first time you see some of those.

The miniatures look really good and have a fair amount of detail.  The cockroaches are little lackluster but that's made up for by the large spider and centipede miniatures.  Also, with there only being four different enemies (some have variants), combat does get a little samey after a while.

There's a handful of tokens and the initiative track is a nice two piece board that holds the search and monster surge cards.

Board with miniatures and dice
More miniatures and sample of character cards and items

Value
If I recall correctly, there's 11 chapters in this game (plus expansions).  For about $50, that's a pretty decent bang for the buck.  This is probably best with children or families.  While there is a lot of fighting (it's a dungeon crawler, after all) there are also some puzzles.  But really, you're here for the story more than the gameplay. 

There are also a few expansions available to continue your adventures in this world.

Gloomhaven
The legendary 95 scenario behemoth.  It's the most unusual dungeon crawler most people have ever seen.  Is it the best?  It is overhyped?  Is it fun?  It's weirdly all of these.  A diceless, card driven dungeon crawler with a sprawling branching story line.  It is an amazing game but will not be everyone's pint of beer.

Characters
You can start the game choosing from 6 unique classes.  Each character then gets a life quest that determines when they'll retire.  When they do (and at some other times in the game) you're allowed to open one of 11 new character boxes.  This is a really cool idea and you look forward to seeing what's inside each box and learning how to play that new character.  The only bummer I've found so far is when you retire a character you love and get one who's style just doesn't work for you as well.  I loved my cragheart (starting class).  He was part tank, part damage dealer, and part healer.  He was amazing and I loved how I could chain his abilities together and just plow through enemies.  I then unlocked a new character class that it took several missions to just learn to appreciate their flexibility.

I haven't played with all of the characters, but the five I've tried so far (3 starters and 2 unlocked) have all been fun.  Each is a unique challenge to learn how to play well.

As you level up, you get to pick perks which change your combat deck and gain new ability cards to change how you play the game.  It's a struggle picking which cards you're going to put into your hand vs. leave in the game box forever.  As you learn new abilities, your old ones go into your pool - so you can use those later but you need to pick your hand at the start of a mission.

There's no elves and dwarves here.  Instead there's Savvas - elemental based creates that appear to be made of rock, Inox - large brutish creatures with horns, and Quatryls - a gnome like race that tinker with gadets, lending a steampunk vibe to a dark fantasy world. 

Retiring characters is exciting, nerve-wracking, and depressing all at the same time but so far, every character I've played has been fun once I've learned some of their secrets.  The BGG community is active and is also pretty good about not dropping a ton of spoilers.  If you want to know how to play a class, look for a forum post about it's identifying symbol and read up.  Don't want to know what a certain symbol means - don't read that forum.

Campaign
Ninety-five (plus) scenarios in a legacy styled game.  To play through the full story will ONLY be 50-70 scenarios.  This game carries an epic story line through a gritty world with atypical fantasy races.  As you complete missions, some missions will become unavailable while other ones unlock.  As a a general thing, your game world will be different than mine when we both finish and that's pretty amazing for a board game.  You get to place stickers showing where you've unlocked and banners across the top showing different achievements.

In the city and on the road you draw, once per quest, a road and city events.  These cards lend a flavor to the world and, while a minor part of the game, make the world come alive.  After certain events, new cards are added to these decks so you can bump into old friends and adversaries.  You add stickers to your world map showing what's unlocked, where you've been, and even some banners for global achievements.  This is your world that you are shaping through your questing.

Isaac Childres could've gone full Kingdom Death and made miniatures for all of the monsters in the game.  The box would've had it's own zip code.  Instead he went with 236(!) standees.  This gives the game over 30 (!) different types of enemies to fight plus bosses.  Each type can be normal or elite and each can level from 0 to level 7.

Because of the spolier-ish nature of much of Gloomhaven, I'm omitting pictures of the game from this review.

Gameplay
Gloomhaven is actually pretty straight forward but takes a while to get good at both hand management and utilizing your cards effectively to maximize each turn..  Every round you play 2 cards, using the top half of one and the bottom half of the other.  Some are one time per adventure cards while others you can get back when you rest.  Resting also costs you a card from your hand, which builds a timer into the game.  The trick is learning how to utilize your hand each turn so you can have the most rounds before you run out of cards and are exhausted, losing the scenario.  Likewise, you also have to keep your health above 0, so don't die.

Monster AI is controlled by cards.  Initiative is on every card so there's times when you think you're going to go first and have a brilliant move planned out and the enemy goes before you and mucks everything up.  Or heals up previous damage, or unloads on you.

Every attack you draw a card from your combat deck.  This usually gives a bonus from -2 to a +2 with a one in a deck chance of a complete whiff or a critical hit (2x damage!).  You can augment your deck to add special cards that give you shields or gives you special buffs, depending on your class.  Here's another way every player can customize their character for their style of play.

Missions are often just kill everything or protect X for Y number of turns.  So far I've also had a few missions that had some different objectives (one of them, I don't think I could complete with my current party, just due to their own stylistic limitations (or my own ability to play them well).  Within a mission there is some starting story text, sometimes some in the middle, and then a conclusion.  But within a mission, you rarely are given choices.  So if you play mission 4 twice, it'll probably end either with a failure or a success but there doesn't seem to be branching paths within each scenario, from what I've seen.

The mechanics are very Euro-based and while well received by the gaming community a small minority of gamers aren't a fan of it.  This isn't a dice chucking game.  This game is very thinky and can be challenging.  Sometimes I feel like I slog through the combat to see how the world will change after the scenario.  For the first four or five scenarios, I almost always lost the first time and had to try again until I learned how to play my characters better and how to use the abilities I had.  It's important to emphasize that the balance in this game is phenomenal and scales amazingly well at different player counts.  Based on pure mechanics, Gloomhaven is worth all of the praise it receives.



Components
Tiles, while many done with subdued colors, have a good amount of detail and the insanely large number included in the game give it a lot of variety.  There's also tons of tokens to add obstacles from alters to water to lava to make dungeons feel different.  The standee art is great as is the character boards.  Female characters aren't exaggerated and Isaac made sure to not make all the female characters into barbie dolls with broadswords.  Isaac wrote a blog post about this topic.

The handful of miniatures I've seen are very high quality with lots of detail (probably the best of the bunch of the games reviewed here).  The second edition of the game will come with stat trackers to replace some fiddly wooden components and not so hot slots on the character boards (this concept may have been Isaac's biggest mistake in the game which help explains it's extremely high BGG rating).  The element board is beautiful and has some small wooden tokens to push around.  Every item card has art on it while the ability cards are easy to read with clear iconography but no art.  The world map is a nice four fold board that you will cover with stickers showing your progress around the world.


Value
On a per scenario or per hour basis, it's hard not to hand Gloomhaven the crown now for best bang for the buck.  You're talking $1/scenario.  DDAS is $5 and Sword & Sorcery (retail) is $10.  Gloomhaven does have a long set up and clean up time just due to the vast array of stuff you have to go through to set up each game.  There are organizers on the secondary market for between $50 and $70.


Sword and Sorcery
Sword and Sorcery, much like Folklore the Affliction, are harder to describe because the Kickstarter came with more scenarios, more miniatures, more tiles, etc.  Ares' Sword and Sorcery is available in retail, so I'll just talk about the Act I retail version.

Sword and Sorcery is a pure Ameri-trash dungeon crawler full of typical high fantasy tropes.  Fancy tiles, lots of miniatures, and tons of tokens.

Characters
The characters here are your standard high fantasy fare.  Dwarven cleric, Human Knight, elvish sorceress, etc..  They each have unique powers that lend each one a different feel.  You can also choose to be Good, Neutral, or Evil which changes your class power as well as gives you some different choices to make as you gain new abilities.  It can also change how your campaign progresses as certain options will not be available to certain alignments.

Having choices for abilities as you level up as well as a broad selection of items helps the feel of progression.  You can pay to enhance you weapon or armor for a single mission as well as buy or find improved gear.

Some of the retail box miniatures

Campaign
There's 7 stories in Act I.  While there is some replayability due to how the event deck is assembled (see below), party composition, and party alignment (see above)- this is a little disappointing.  I think where this gets more replayability is with the Act II components and extra characters, several of which are eventually coming to retail.

The story is good, if not pretty typical.  As you progress through each adventure, you'll be pointed to the Book of Secrets and told to read a specific paragraph.  This then advances the story and may provide a choice taking you to another paragraph.  It's a neat choose-your-own-adventure mechanism that adds to the immersion.  Choices made in one scenario can affect outcomes in later ones.

Some people have complained about the meta-game humor Ares has injected into the game.  It's silly.  Some of it is amusing to me but others on BGG aren't laughing.  This game has it's tongue planted into its cheek and is reminding us of it.  But if you want a dark, sinister, and somber game - this isn't the one for you.  If you want to kick back with friends, have some laughs and some beers this may be a good choice.

Gameplay
This game uses symbols on blue and red 10-sided dice to determine everything.  Saving Throw or Search? Throw 1 Blue die.  Attacking?  Check your item, could be red or blue, or a combination of the two.

There's a lot of fiddly rules, tokens, and effects to take into account, but after a few sessions, you'll get most of them, most of the time.  Enemy AI is clearly defined and different monster types act differently, making them feel different.  Drawing Enemy Power cards also changes up what they can do and adds to the challenge level.

After each character's turn, you draw an encounter card which activates existing or spawns new enemies.  This can lead to a single monster repeatedly wailing on a single character.  There's also a deck of event cards that you slowly flip through (every other turn drawing a new one, sometimes adding one from the board).  This timer triggers different events in a specific order.  Most of the time, the deck is assembled by shuffling a few cards, then adding two more shuffled cards below those, and then a few more shuffled cards, etc - so there is some randomness to the events that unfold during the adventure.  There's also Shadow Tokens which are randomly placed based on what's described in the setup.  This also lends some randomness as some tokens are civilians (not enemies) and others show one, two, or one with an extra power.

The defending mechanic here allowed you to roll 1 defense die per hit against you.  This still allowed for lucky shots to get through or to block large amounts of damage.  Special effects applied on attacks, meanwhile, gave you some strategic choices in combat.

A nice feature of this game is that there isn't player elimination.  Dying costs experience but you can continue to fight on as a ghost that has it's own abilities.

Overall, Sword and Sorcery is really fun.  I had a blast playing through the campaign.  Each adventure can take a while but once it's set up, time flies by.

Components
Sword and Sorcery has beautiful tiles with varied shapes and backdrops.  The miniatures look pretty good (soft plastic so some had to visit a pot of boiling water to get straightened out).  The Troll and Orc King (purple epic bosses) look amazing.  Tokens and card art also look good and there's a lot of unique cards for items.
Game Sprawl (shown with KS extras such as player boards, card holder, and metal coins)

The female characters are wearing mini-skirts, high heels, and have their cleavage showing.  As stated above, Ares knows what they're doing and taking a guess at their audience.  Unfortunately for them, in today's day and age - I think gamers can accept fully dressed females dungeon-delving.  But Ares wasn't aiming for politically correct and have gone for the more traditional fantasy tropes including the elven wizard wearing lingerie of defense +2 with a push up bra (well, not really; you need to find the magic armor first).
Sword and Sorcery - Optional 3D terrain (doors and chests) shown

The monster miniatures have "unique" poses.  It's not unusual for you to have two or more gremlins that look similar or two or more orcs that are carrying the same weapons, but on the whole, you get a nice mix of figures (two green, two blue, and one red of each of the minions).  The color coding of the monsters (green, blue, red, and purple) indicates their relative strength.  This is a critical feature of the game so those who paint their minis will need to find a way to mark which one is which.

The dice are small for 10-sided but the iconography is clear.  The Kickstarter came with player boards for each character while they're thinner card stock in retail.  It felt like an odd place to cut corners, especially with the soul gem board/assembly that is used for identifying health, and number of actions, abilities, etc. you have.  Fits great with a board while it overwhelms a card.

Value
7 missions for $60 is not great bang for the buck.  If you got the Kickstarter with all the extras, this is starting to look like a better value.  Ares has released an adventure creation kit that could expand the value in this set by providing the tools and artwork for fans to make their own adventures.  Act II and any future add-ons could expand the value (although if you're constantly paying $60 for 7 adventures, the ratio never improves).

Folklore: The Affliction
This game is part story-telling RPG and part dungeon crawl.  Much like Sword and Sorcery, the Kickstarter backers are getting more than double the game of retail, assuming this goes to retail.  Likewise, I'll be talking mostly about the base game with it's six stories.

Folklore is low fantasy set in a fictional medieval European-esque land called Kremel that's been beset by werewolves, vampires, ghouls, demonic trees, and skeletons.  The heroes are common folk who've taken up the fight to people teetering on the edge of abyss themselves in search of dark magics.

Characters
 The characters in Folklore each have their own backstory, class focus, and advancement tree.  So far, the three characters I've tried have all felt different.  The prayer and ritual spells are very powerful, but are one shot uses, so you don't want to waste them too early in your adventure.  Since each character can have positive and negatives effects lumped on them, the rulebook has a small character sheet that you can copy for each character that allows you to track statistics, inventory, experience, etc. much like a typical tabletop RPG.

Stats-wise, there's not a huge difference between characters.  Each one tends to be immune to something awful and have a better chance of saves against some things than others.  This means certain characters will be better against certain opponents than others but I would expect it to balance out over time.

Campagin
Six stories is all that makes up the initial campaign.  Much like Sword and Sorcery, Greenbrier Games has released a adventure creation kit which also helps describe how to make a good adventure as well as more in-depth lore of the region to help creative players maintain consistency in Kremel.

Much like Gloomhaven, there's a world map in Folklore.  But unlike Gloomhaven, you spend a lot of time traveling on this map using a wooden party marker.  Each turn there's either an on-road or off-road event (depending on where you are) and there's differences if it's day or nighttime.  These are like the road and city events in GH, but there's more of them.  It helps immerse you in this dark land.

There's also a of text in the stories that sets up each area and, like Sword and Sorcery, has story moments where you make a choice and then go read what happens before continuing.  Of the dungeon crawlers described so far, Folklore spends the least time dungeon delving but the most time keeping you immersed in the story.

Gameplay
Folklore has both abstract combat, called skirmishes, and tactical combat on maps with miniatures.  The skirmishes are quick dice battles that may only last a few minutes compared to the more drawn out and "tactical" miniatures battles.  Unfortunately, the tactical battles can sometimes be a little bland although the enemies have a neat mechanic for how they attack.  Combat is percentile dice.  The number 1-10 that the monster rolls determines the effect based on what's on it's card usually between two and three different outcomes.

The characters have options too but I found I typically encountered the enemy and then just traded dice rolls back and forth until someone won.  The tactical part is knowing what special abilities to use, and when, as well as how best to use your abilities as a team to take down the monsters faster.  Make no mistake, while Folklore lacks some tactical depth, it can be brutal.  There's some tension in the big affliction, or boss battles due to how the odds feel stacked against you.  The game also features playing as a ghost when you die (which should've warned everyone that this game is hard) but that also helps avoid player elimination.

There doesn't seem to be as many 'reroll' options available to mitigate bad luck.  If the dice hate you (and they do; they told me so), this game gets unforgiving pretty fast.

There's a lot of different monsters cards.  Many of these reuse miniatures or are represented by tokens but there's a pretty good variety for this box.

Each city and other location has special services you can purchase and each character has unique things they can do at certain locations as well.  This allows you repair items, buy new ones, buy spells, etc.

Components
Folklore has beautiful art on it's tiles but they are made of card stock, and unlike the other games, don't link together.  You go from map piece to map piece at time, but isn't unfolded in front of you or start laid out in front of you.  To balance this out, there's quite a few tiles included in the core game.

Overall, Folklore has an amazing aesthetic to it with unique art on most, if not all the unique items, as well as great character and monster portraits.  The characters look believable and the monsters fierce and frightening without being gore-fests or the gelatinous piles of goo with tentacles and fangs that some games go for (looking at you Kingdom Death Monster and Deep Madness).  There's blood splatter on the cards of the fierce monsters and the afflictions.

Some of the core box miniatures
The miniatures look good, a few have bad parting lines and excess flash still on them.  I prefer this style of art over the Sword and Sorcery style but I'd probably give the quality edge to Ares.  So far the largest complaint online has been that they're too big so they're out of scale of a lot of other 28 mm models (For example the Slayer character was slightly taller and more filled out than King Conan).  The character models have excellent detail and match their card art well.  There's a decent variety of enemies and the Dark Oaks (think evil trees) are a favorite of mine.  The vampires, for some reason, have two right hands.  It's a thing but obviously not something to make me want to throw the game out.
Comparing Sword and Sorcery and Folklore characters
The hit point and power point trackers are basically garbage so be ready to come up with your own fix.  People on BGG are coming up with ideas and I abandoned the put next to the enemy card for using the ammo tokens as markers.  Paper and pencil is also a pretty popular solution.

It's an add-on but the ghost miniature pack for Folklore look amazing.  Sword and Sorcery's ghost mini's where a light opaque blue.  Folklore's are a translucent blue that look amazing.

Value
Like Sword and Sorcery, Folklore feels short on content with only six stories.  Now, those six stories will probably take north of 18 hours to play as chapters typically run 1-2 hours each and each story is two to three chapters.  Buying this is also buying into a potential for future adventures created by fans or Greenbrier Games.  Getting this with the Dark Tales expansion basically triples the content to play with (there is also some additional downloadable content) so, like Sword and Sorcery, pushes it towards a much better deal.

Overall Scoring
By the title of each game, I'm going to put my BGG ranking (or planned ranking in the case of Folklore).

  • DDAS (7) is the dungeon crawler when you have 45 minutes and want to kill stuff or you want to introduce non-gamers to this genre.
  • Mice and Mystics (7) is the game to introduce a non-gaming spouse or child to the hobby.
  • Gloomhaven (8.5) is the dungeon crawler for Euro gamers and those who hate dice rolling.  There's a ton of content for the price and it's unique in this crowded genre.  There's a reason it's ranked as highly as it is on BGG.
  • Folklore (8.25) is the game for those who want an RPG-like experience and are more interested in story than mechanics.  This is part story-telling and part dungeon crawl.  
  • Sword and Sorcery (8.75) is, for me, probably the best all-around dungeon crawler combining story, mechanics, and accessibility.  Even if you're forgetting some rules, you can still have a good time once you get past the learning curve.
As you can tell by the rankings, I enjoy all of these games and this genre.  I had a blast with Act I of Sword and Sorcery and am engrossed in Folklore right now.  Gloomhaven is that intimidating box that once it's down and out, I go "oh yeah, I forgot how solid this game is."

So these are all fun and good games in their own right.  Hopefully what I've written can help you find the dungeon crawler that's best for you.  Or you could go full crazy and just get all of them.  As my shelves fill up, I look at these and for the reasons above, can't quite let any of them go.  Each scratches this itch in a different way.  And as such when I see new games online, I question if its something I need or if I already have an equivalently good game.





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