Dungeon Lords is the best game ever, or The Emperor Has No Clothes

Dungeon Lords is the most interesting, engaging, rewarding and fun board game that there has ever been.  It has pathos and irony, plays great with two, three, or four players, the art is wonderful, and it makes you a better person with a deeper understanding of life when you play it.  Of course, I just sort of have to take your word for it because I actually can’t figure out how to play it.  But everyone says it’s awesome! It has a really high ranking on BoardGameGeek (currently 69^th)! It must be the best!

Doesn't this look fun?

At what point is a game not worth playing due to the rules being so complex that the balance of time put into it is not worth the return of “fun” that I am getting out of it?  I’ll let you in on a secret. I play board games because I like them and I find them to be really enjoyable. Enjoyable in the actual moment of gameplay, not because I want to blog about them or to endorse the most obscure game that I can find.  So here’s the deal with Dungeon Lords. I just can’t make sense of it, the game is apparently over my head. The rule book is 24 pages with all sorts of pictures and snarky commentary from monsters! It comes with special boards that have the sole purpose of helping you learn how to play! (So clearly I’m not the only person who has struggled with this.)  I’ve had Dungeon Lords for about two years and not once have we actually played a game through to completion. It’s just too obtuse and far removed from what I want in a game.  I know that this is a personal thing, I’m not damning the entire thing, it’s just not for me.  Actually, I think I might be damning the whole thing.  Who wants to play this? Is it really fun?

I assume that the counter argument here is that once you learn how to play it’s a really great game.  It’s an acquired taste.  But I have so many other games that I really like, so why would I struggle with something in the hopes that one day it will maybe be as fun Ticket to Ride or King of Tokyo? I suspect that Dungeon Lords is actually a great idea more than a great board game.  The concept is awesome.  You take on the role of a monster that owns a dungeon. It is your responsibility to stock the dungeon with traps and monsters, and then adventurers show up and try to take your shit.  And you try to kill them.  Clever and just the sort of role reversal, meta gaming that I really dig.  Except that that the execution of it actually sucks.  There are so many counters and tokens to keep track of, all sorts of different phases to the game that all have their own rules, and the game just seems to move really slow.  Of course, when you have no idea what is really happening it tends to draw your interest away from the actual game. 

After two years I need to admit that Dungeon Lords is just a sunk cost, I will never get anything even close to the $50 that I spent on it back in enjoyment.  I think I may be writing this blog just so I can get some use out of it.  Currently, there is a stack of games on top of Dungeon Lords, it has literally been buried by just about every other game that I have. 

Who Goes First?

Going first in a game usually affords an advantage to that player, though it is not substantial and most likely normalizes over the course of the game. But still, an advantage is an advantage and most games recommend that for the sake of fairness the players roll a die and the highest roller will kick things off. This is fine, and usually the preferred method in the games I play in. However, some games do recommend alternate methods of deciding the first player. Here are some of my favorites, with suggestions to improve them as well.

It makes sense that the starting player of Pandemic is connected to illness, that is after all what the game is about. In this cooperative game the rules state that the player who has been sick most recently goes first. I like this one a lot and in our games we always stick to it. The reason why? It’s always different every time that you play, essentially making it random. I don’t think that this one needs fixing.

One of the stranger methods of choosing a starting player is employed by Smallworld. The player with the pointiest ears gets to go first. Certainly an odd way of picking things, I do like that it rewards such a bizarre personal trait that really may have never come up before in the person’s life. However, like a lot of these methods it winds up being redundant in a group of players that frequently game together. Unless someone is so committed to victory in Smallworld that they alter their ears the same person will continue to go first. Here is my suggestion for an alternate method. Once the initial races are all out on the table the player who most resembles the race in the first spot goes first. Sure, it could cause some hard feelings when trying to figure out who among you most resembles an orc or a ghoul, but really it’s just setting the tone for a game that is all about slaughtering your friends. And if an elf pops up you can still fall back on the pointy ears.

Ticket to Ride rewards the most well traveled of a group of gamers. The initial player is determined by the player who has visited the most places. Like Smallworld this gets old fast, though it does at least have the possibility of changing if you have a long term gaming group. People travel, usually for the reason of improving their chances of going first in Ticket to Ride. Not really, but this game is not really about traveling. It’s about trains. How about the first player is the one who has most recently been on a train? Done.

It’s fun to pick on old people, and clearly the designers of Bohnanza agree with me. In everyone’s favorite game about bean farming, the first player is the player to the left of the dealer. Which is pretty standard fare, however the rules state that the dealer is the oldest player. Ouch. Not only does the elder gamer have to do all of the setup, but then they ultimately wind up going last as well. Not sure what any of that has to do with beans or farming and it also suffers from the redundancy problem, though in a different way (the first player is always changing, but the last player stays the same). My fix is rather simple. Prior to shuffling all the players flip over a single card, the player with the most common bean then has to do all of the shuffling and be the last player. Come on, growing old sucks as it is. Does Bohnanza really need to be against you too?

For a game that is all about being an evil overlord it seems like an odd choice that Dungeon Lords chose to reward the nicest player by having them go first. But I think it is a brilliant way of deciding. There is nothing quite like watching several people argue over who is the nicest among them. It is also the type of thing that is subject to rapid changes based on recent actions. I think that this method is pretty solid, and since in Dungeon Lords players are not really getting a chance to actually kill one another it’s nice to be able to get some animosity out with a healthy argument to start the game.

There is nothing wrong with the random roll of the dice to determine who has the minor advantage of going first, but sometimes a game deserves a little better. Plus, these games all have one thing in common. They don’t use any dice so something else needed to be implemented. (The exception is Smallworld which has the reinforcement die, but it is not a traditional die and could result in a bunch of ties. So we will forget about that one.) I applaud the game designers for coming up with a solution that has some personality to it, even if they are a bit redundant at times.