• Game: Dungeon Run
• Publisher: Plaid Hat Games
• Designer: Mr. Bistro
• Genre: Competitive/co-op dungeon crawl
• Players: 1-6
• Playtime: 60-120 minutes



• What's Hot: Great co-op with a twist concept; good PVP element; unexpectedly good character development



• What's Not: Very player-dependent; combat rules feel clunky; endgame can be volatile/anticlimactic

by: Michael Barnes

Plaid Hat Games could produce nothing but Summoner Wars products for the rest of time and I’d be satisfied, but they’ve just issued their first product outside of that fantastic line. The game is Dungeon Run, a one to six player dungeoncrawl very much in the spirit of classic games such as Dungeonquest and Talisman but with a neat twist that combines competitive and cooperative gameplay concepts. It doesn’t always quite succeed and it’s coming into a market that is quickly becoming oversaturated with “Dudes in a Corridor” games, but it makes a pretty decent argument for itself with a couple of unique features and a solid design that allows for some of the better PVP action in the genre.

The setup is pretty standard dungeoncrawl fare: heroes (and potential villains, this go-round) explore a tile-based dungeon revealing monsters and traps that must be overcome and happening upon the occasional treasure. Each of the eight characters offers a different array of stats and keyword skills that allow them to use certain kinds of equipment, which is a nice little detail. The characters have one or two special abilities but there are also character-specific decks of additional powers that can be earned over the course of the game, which adds a very cool, simple, and rather unexpected development angle that makes for different character builds each game.

Although players can help each other fight monsters and disarm traps by agreeing to add some dice to the active player’s rolls, they can also sabotage actions and attack each other. Some monsters require assistance to defeat, and there is a small award for helping other players- you get to do a Rally action and regain a life point. But only one character gets the kill and the experience, and whoever gets the treasure tends to be the one who gets to it with an action left to pick it up. Deals are often struck for aid, and since not every character can use every item due to the skill mechanic there is an incentive to trade and share.

However, this is not exactly a co-op game and there is no shared goal. The agenda is reaching the chamber containing one of four Bosses, beating him, taking his Summoning Stone, and getting out of the dungeon. The catch is that only one player wins, which means that the player who grabs the Stone is suddenly running a gauntlet of hostile players in sort of a mad scramble for the exit. Holding the Stone also grants the character their special Summoning power, which tends to be a very nasty advantage. The game’s elimination parameters also change once the Stone is seized, with players defeated in PVP taken out of the game rather than losing their turn to recoup. All of those times your goblin made like strange bedfellows with the racist dwarf (his special ability is “Intolerance”) are suddenly moot and former allies become bloodthirsty rivals.

It’s a very fun, original concept that seems to work only if you’re playing with the right kind of players. I’ve played the game with people that didn’t really get the sort of light roleplaying it requires and it was dull, with the incentives to cooperate and temptations to betray falling flat. But played with folks that will do things like walk into the dungeon and lay you out cold on turn one just to slow you down or those that make a career of waiting in the wings for others to kill the monsters and then grab the treasure, the game really comes alive.

It’s something of a volatile game like that, and it can be somewhat unreliable. Games can end anticlimactically, with the guy that wandered off by himself into a remote area of the dungeon stumbling into the Boss chamber, managing to kill it, and getting out without too much of a hassle. It doesn’t help that there isn’t really any kind of shared goal other than running out the dungeon tile stack, and if the players don’t stick together to get the most out of the assistance and sabotage mechanics it can lead to some games feeling noticeably weaker than others. It feels like the game could use both some more points of friction as well as short-term objectives that require players to work together more closely. Leaving the game’s best interaction ideas up to player whim doesn’t result in a very consistent experience.