Dungeon Draft Board Game Review

Overview

Dungeon Draft is a quick and easy card game about hiring heroes, buying weapons, and defeating monsters to earn the most experience by the end of the game. As the game’s title implies, you spend each round drafting cards. However, the act of playing those cards gives Dungeon Draft a dash of engine building and combo play to complement its card drafting ensemble.

You can find a video version of this review on YouTube!

While Dungeon Draft is straightforward and simple to play. There’s quite a bit going beneath its fantasy embroidered cloak that makes the experience an interesting one, and its fast pace really helps keep everyone engaged.

Gideon’s Bias	Dungeon Draft Information
Review Copy Used: Yes	Publisher: Upper Deck Entertainment
Number of Plays: 10+	Designer: Justin Gary
Player Counts Played: 2 & 4	Player Count: 2-5
Fan of Genre: Yes	Genre: Card Drafting, Light Engine Building, Combo Play
Fan of Weight: No	Weight: Light/Gateway
Gaming Groups Thoughts: Enjoyed It	Price: $24.99

Presentation

Dungeon Draft is a small box game that consists of a bunch of cards and a handful of tokens to represent experience and gold. Naturally, this makes the game exceptionally fast to set up and tear down and a potentially easy travel companion.

The artwork maintains a consistent style throughout the entire game and for the most part it’s pretty good. There are a few outlier cards with some strangeness to the artwork. An Elf with his mouth pinned to the side of his face, or a halfling with disturbingly buggy eyes.

However, most of the artwork is quite clean. There are a bunch of artists credited on the back of the rulebook. So the consistent art style between the cards is quite impressive and speaks well of how its art direction was managed. I do appreciate the references too. Such as the right and left hand of Varna, a reference to the hand of Vecna in Dungeons & Dragons.

The rulebook is just six pages long, and the game is simple to learn. So simple in fact, that I broke one of my cardinal rules and learned how to play it together with my group instead of beforehand. Something that has in the past, ended in disaster. It was pretty neat to watch everyone’s faces light up as they understood how everything connected together. The game has clear and well-explained iconography that makes it all pretty simple.

There are, however, edge case rules I would have loved to have seen clarified in the rulebook. For example, some abilities reduce the cost of cards by 1 or 2 gold. It’s not clear if this can reduce a card’s cost to 0. Another instance was when an ability allowed us to reveal the top card of the deck and play it for free. We wondered if monsters could be defeated that way since they cost “attack power” instead of gold.

For the sake of clarity in this review. I played the game as if the answer to both of those questions was yes.

One other sticking point was how some quest cards have the “activate” keyword, which allows its ability to be used once per round. The activate keyword does not appear in the rulebook anywhere.

Some additional examples in the rulebook could have clarified these issues. But the actual nuts and bolts of the game are quite fluid.

What I Like About Dungeon Draft

The Drafting

At the start of the game, each player has 9 gold to spend on cards and chooses a few quests to keep. However, the cards you have are determined through drafting. Each player draws 7 cards, chooses one to keep, and passes the rest to the next player. Once the drafting is over, players take turns spending that gold to play the cards they kept.

There are some interesting choices to be made when drafting. The cards themselves are simple individually, but it’s how you build out your engine over the course of four rounds that matters.

Cards can grant XP that is required to win the game, or ongoing gold or attack power. Every round, players only gain 5 gold unless they have already played cards that generate more. Attack power on the other hand is never spent. But if you have a monster card in your hand whose attack power is equal to or lower than yours, you can defeat them and gain whatever bonus is on their card immediately.

Furthermore. The quest cards you chose at the start of the game can be played during your turn if you have met the class requirements, such as, “Find King Arthur’s Sword” which requires four warrior class cards in play. Cards also have abilities that can combo together. For example, Master Firth is expensive at 9 gold but allows you to play other mage cards for free that round.

There is a lot of strategy involved in what to draft. Playing the right classes to complete your quests can be worthwhile but there are other factors too. Do you try to combine certain cards together for extra XP, such as The League of the Phoenix cards? Do you stack ongoing gold bonuses for a stronger economy on the following rounds? Alternatively, you could simply go hard with attack power and slay monsters to fill your coffers instead.

I also enjoy the fact that there is room to hate draft against your opponents. You won’t always have the ability to purchase every card you draft every round, and that leaves you space to take a couple of juicy cards that the next player in line really needs. That adds an additional layer of interaction to the strategy. It needn’t be an outwardly aggressive act either, since you can do it quietly. Regardless, it pays to keep an eye on what the other players are going for.

There are a lot of moments in Dungeon Draft where I’m handed a set of cards and I face a raging inner conflict. I can only take one card before passing the rest over, and sometimes I want that card AND this card. But I also really don’t want the next player to have this OTHER card.

Do I take the one that helps my core strategy and hope the other one I want makes it back to me? Do I pass up that card in favor of one that’s going to boost my economy instead? But crap, the next player has 10 attack power, and look at this Bomoh monster card just sitting here. Can I afford to hand that player an instant 10 gold and 10 XP?

That kind of agonizing decision-making is exactly the kind of thing I want to see in a game that’s all about drafting, and it’s seldomly seen in a game as lightweight as Dungeon Draft. It does an excellent job of handing you a strategic experience wrapped in a veil of simplicity.

The Combo Play

The cards combo in a fluid way that allows you to feel like you’re on the back foot several times throughout the game, only to have a lightbulb pop into your head as you’re drafting.

For example, you have 9 gold during your first turn. While drafting, you could opt to take the Hidden Dagger of Death. It costs 8 so it’s likely the only card you could play that turn. It does however grant 4 attack and 4 ongoing gold, so while it’s risky, you would have a long-term investment.

But wait, the player next to you handed you a Golem card. The Hidden Dagger of Death would grant you enough attack to defeat it and gain 4 more gold instantly. Now we’re back in business.

The next set of cards has an Anvil in it. It costs 2 gold, and if you play it, it reduces the cost of other weapon cards that round by 2. You grab it as your third card, knowing there’s a decent chance at drafting another weapon since you get to draft four more cards. Huzzah, Thunderbeard’s Hammer showed up next.

After playing Hidden Dagger of Death, and defeating the Golem, you will only have 5 gold and Thunderbeard’s Hammer costs 5, but if you play the Anvil first, the Hammer’s cost is reduced by 2 so you can play both. And just like that, you have a really strong opening turn. That’s only four cards of 7, so you can simply hate the draft the remaining cards.

You don’t spend your gold as you draft, you spend it on your turn. That leaves the entire strategic space wide open for you to plan as you draft, and even change plans mid-draft as you spot new openings with the cards that are handed to you. That makes the combo play super satisfying, and every single time you get into that flow, it feels great.

What I Don’t Like About Dungeon Draft

How it Plays at Two Players

I played Dungeon Draft with 2 and 4 players. The 4 player experience is excellent, and I’d wager it would be just as good at 5. I suspect 3 would also be fine. At 2 players, however, the game felt like it was kneecapped and much more luck-reliant.

You only have a pool of 14 cards to draft from in a 2-player game. And you’re passing them back and forth. This means that your strategy is almost entirely decided from the first card you pick, and honestly, it felt like victory came down to who had the luckiest first or last picks.

The games were close, but they felt stilted. They felt close specifically because we were passing the same cards back and forth. I take this card, so I’m going to get an easy 5 XP, but I just handed you back another card that’s going to give you 5 XP, and so on.

We nearly had the same points one game, but on my last turn, I happened to pull a card that let me reveal another card from the top of the deck and play it for free. I top decked like a champ and pulled Lord Taran who gave me 9 free XP. That victory felt hollow, and I’m sure the other player felt equally unsatisfied by the loss.

At two players the game just feels wholly uninteresting to play, and Dungeon Draft loses the charm and grace it presents at other player counts.

Verdict

I rarely enjoy lightweight games to the point that I refuse to review most of them. Anytime a friend is late, or someone bails out to pick up pizza on game night, I groan at the suggestion of playing a “filler” game while we wait.

Dungeon Draft gives me an option I want to actually play in those moments. Not because it’s a filler game, but because it’s a quick and easy game that’s satisfyingly enjoyable to play. At least at player counts higher than 2.

The drafting mechanism is simplicity made manifest, but offers a greatly enjoyable decision space, plenty of strategic planning, and room to interact with the other players, even if they never knew that you did it.

There is also a degree of satisfaction in managing an epic flowing combo that allows you to play your entire hand, which reminds me of playing a long string of cards in UNO. You don’t get to do it often, but when you do, it’s Nirvana.