The Guild of Dungeoneeing is a deck-building, turn-based dungeon crawler and tile placement iOS/Steam game by Gambrinous and VS. You build the dungeon for the hero to loot and fight monsters. You’re literally luring the hero to their untimely death…you monster!!!
You begin as a chump, the lowest ranking hero straight from Dungeoneering School. Then you start to explore the dungeon and encounter scary spiders and nasty rats, which appear somewhat comical and cute.
Once you’ve leveled up, you’ll be rewarded with better heroes, Shapeshifters, Barbarians and Mathemagicians. But beware, the monsters become less comical, as you’ll start meeting cave trolls and clattering bones!
Whichever hero you choose always begins at Level 1. So in battle, defeating a matching or higher level monster will ensure you level up – not only to the next level, but an extra level of health too.
Heroes are greedy for money and jewels, so throwing down a gem in the same space as a monster you want them to fight means the hero will be lured straight to the monster. This is exactly what you want, as a defeated monster rewards you with cards to attack and defend, such as a cup of tea, the mighty twig (all hail the mighty twig!) and a sparkly headband. What else could a hero possibly need to defend themselves and attack monsters?
You can play a maximum of 3 cards per round, which can be a mixture of dungeon tiles, loot and monsters. Use the ‘Mysterious Fountain’ cards with caution, as these are dungeon cards with a randomized spell that grants either positive or negative effects upon your next turn. As you advance through the game, the ratio of negative to positive effect fountain cards increases.
Each dungeon is split into areas to successfully defeat monsters and bosses. Most have two sections – a challenge, such as defeat 3 vampires or loot 2 chests, then a boss battle. The objective of the second area is to defeat the boss by creating a path to them with well-placed dungeon tiles. It is best to avoid heading straight for the boss, as you can throw down monsters en route to level up and obtain better cards.
Battling monsters is very tactical. You throw down cards to battle the opponent. These cards range from fire blasts to physical damages, from magical attacks to defense cards. But the opponents you face will have some equally powerful cards to throw down too, so you must be prepared to fight against them. You’ll have to consider a number of different factors before you make your move.
The game warns you that sometimes you won’t draw the right cards and you need to keep your deck lean to counteract this. You could even end up drawing a stupidity card, which means you can’t do anything at all that turn.
There’s an infinite numberof heroes, any defeated heroes are condemned to the graveyeard and after a defeat. When this happens, you’ll get a lovely message that might read something like: ‘The end comes for all dungeoneers, chumps and heroes like. Need something to wipe those tears? What about this insurance policy? Besides, they get their very own headstone in your guild graveyard’.
In-game currency can be spent upon purchasing upgrade cards for your characters, and also new classes of characters too. Occasionally, you’ll see an upgrade that requires you to purchase another upgrade first – one that you may not necessarily want, which does get frustrating when it increases the odds of getting a stupidity card.
After demo of the game released a few months ago, there have been significant changes, such as a the ‘Pirates Cove’ expansion. This is a game that possesses the basics of a simple tile placement game, but has a great balance between luck and tactics.
