Harrowed Halls

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking how great it would be to build your own dungeon complete with special rooms, terrifying monsters (and ghosts), and insanely clever traps. Then you’d sit back and watch the clumsy, ill equipped party of heroes try to survive while searching for your carefully hidden treasures. I am right? Well then Dungeon Lords is the game for you. (And if Evil Mike would figure out why we can’t upload images any longer, there would be a nice graphic of the game box at the top of the post.) In the game each player is the lord of a dungeon. Through the clever use of you minions (administrators) and imp (imps) you construct a dungeon, create traps, and hire fearsome monsters (and ghosts). But don’t think that being a dungeon lord is all gold and lilies. You also have to pay those fearsome monsters (and ghosts) that fill your dungeon. If you don’t, they go rampaging around the countryside mumbling about your horrible administrative skills. Worse yet is the Ministry of Dungeons that requires taxes from all dungeon lords. So you see, you have your job cut out for you. There is also the matter of your reputation, if you get to be too evil, the paladin may come knocking on your door. And I know you don’t want that to happen, so you need to manage your evilness as well. One last note: the rules, although long, are extremely clever and filled with several training dungeons. The training dungeons are so you can get a feel for the nuances of killing heroes foolish enough to delve into your dungeon.

Now let’s talk about our game*. Our game* was a lot of fun. Never have I seen so much inept game* playing. Although all of us had occasions of not being able to afford something we selected during dungeon construction, Ben wins hands down for using awesome strategy to acquire a dragon and then was not able to pay for it. But by far the best (or worse) case was Mike and Ben not being able to pay their taxes to Ministry of Dungeons. You get -3 victory points for every gold you can’t pay. At the end of the game Mike had a -15 and Ben -21 from “fines”. As I mentioned, Ben was on a roll…straight down the tubes. At one point Owen commented, “His (Ben’s) cheating is coming thick and fast now. My head is swirling.” But Ben’s cheating mattered little in our game*. We were doomed, doomed I tell you. Mostly because of the plethora of rules Ben neglected to tell us or just had completely wrong. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not pointing any fingers at Ben. (Yes, I am.) The game* was all the more fun because of our outrageously inept playing and getting so many rules utterly wrong. Our ending scores (in no particular order): Ben -12, Steve +21, Owen +13, Mike -06, and Ben with -12. Ben came in last with -12. I won the game*. We liked the game* and plan on playing it (somewhat) correctly next week.

Chaos Steve, Dungeon Lord, Monster Lord, and Battle Lord (You get titles in this game* too.)

*The guys kept telling me that this game had so many *’s that I thought I should note that.