Welcome to the Dungeon card game

While as a general rule, our family likes to play very complex games (as I’m writing this, we’ve spent the past several days putting together and playing a new game we backed on Kickstarter), occasionally I like to have a short game to play. This could be a great gameschooling game to play with your family or a great game to take with you on the go.

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What is Welcome to the Dungeon? and what do we learn from it?

Welcome to the Dungeon is a press-your-luck game.

What is press your luck, you ask?

I’m glad you did. The idea is you are looking at how likely you are to fail and assessing based on what you know of the remaining cards or the roll of the dice how likely you are to lose everything.

It is a high degree of chance, but it also teaches you to think about odds and statistics. As you look at what is going on and think, “Can I make it, or will I lose?”

This is a good skill for life.

Playing Welcome to the Dungeon

The game is simple. You have four characters you can play and each character has his, or her, own set of tools for the dungeon.

Obviously, the more hit points you have, the more likely you are to survive the dungeon, so while it seems obvious to choose the barbarian, the mage will have more ability to do damage or other special abilities.

Everyone together is playing one character, so who you pick is not this overwhelmingly large difference, it’s just a slightly different flavor.

Play is simple, on your turn you have two choices:

• pass, in which case you will pass until the next round and can’t draw anymore cards
• draw a card, then you
  • put it in the dungeon pile as a possible monster you will be fighting
  • decide you don’t want to fight it, place the card facedown so only you know what it is, and choose a piece of equipment to put on top of that card, that equipment is no longer available to play

Play continues with players choosing to either pass or add a monster to the dungeon until everyone has passed or the dungeon is out of monsters, in which case you automatically pass.

Here comes the next phase of the game

Once everyone else has passed, the last person still in is required to go into the dungeon. They start flipping over monsters and look at their hit points (a combination of the total of points of the gear they still have) and the hit points of the monster. If your hit points are higher, than you win, subtract the points of the monster from your total and flip over the next card.

If any special items are still in the gear deck when everyone has passed you can use it to kill a monster and do whatever the equipment says. Some equipment you can keep, some you have to discard after getting rid of the monster.

You are knocked out if a monster has more hit points than you have left, and you flip your card over to the red side.

If you get through all of the monsters and still have hit points left, congratulations, you got your first point. You’re halfway to winning.

Now repeat it all over again

The player who just went into the dungeon picks the next character to be about to go in the dungeon and is the first to draw the card.

Now, lather, rinse, repeat, and start drawing cards and doing it all over again.

You win once someone has two points, OR they are the last person alive.

That’s right, the game might end with no one officially winning, just surviving long enough to claim the win.

Either way, it’s a quick thirty-minute game, as you can see from this video. I watched three of these, and this was my favorite, probably because he has my sense of humor, but it isn’t too long of a video.

There is a second game!

As I was looking Welcome to the Dungeon up on Amazon, I discovered there is Welcome BACK to the Dungeon, which adds four new classes and more monsters, with a few specialty monsters.

I like it because it can be a stand-alone OR you can shuffle the two games together to make for more gameplay.

We haven’t played our Welcome to the Dungeon game enough to justify buying the second one, but if you like the characters in that one more (Princess, bard, necromancer, and Ninja), then just buy that one.

Some more fun light strategy games

• Tiki Topple
• King of Tokyo– another press-your-luck style game, but it’s dice, or as I like to call it, Yahtzee with monsters
• Smash Up– one of my boys’ favorite games, and they have many expansions for it, SO MANY EXPANSIONS
• Transamerica– this is a sort-of-tile-laying game, but I just like it for being quick and almost always is close so no one feels like they were just not in the running
• Settlers of Catan