Kickstarter Alert: Dungeon Roll Dice Game
Tasty Minstrel Game’s latest Kickstarter project has blown away funding goals and, with a week left, looks to be one of the best Kickstarter deals that I’ve seen in quite some time. This game is basically a dice-based dungeon crawl in a box (a treasure box, no less … and a mimic box for Kickstarters!) that has 7 days to go as of this writing (funds at 1:00 am Eastern on March 20).
The basic gameplay (as demonstrated in this video) is that you’re rolling a group of Dungeon Dice to get the monsters on a given level of the dungeon and then the Party Dice to try to get a combination that can beat the monsters. The different faces of the Party Dice get different benefits against given monsters, such as a Wizard on the Party Dice being able to destroy all of the Oozes with a single attack. The Heroes can modify the basic rules (the first 5 Heroes are shown on the video here). The goal is to get treasure and experience, making your way through the dungeon.
For the basic $15 buy-in, here’s everything that you get (as of this moment):
- Basic Game at $5 off MSRP:
- 7 Dungeon Dice
- 7 Party Dice
- 8 Base Heroes: Commander, Paladin, Battlemage, Necromancer, Dragon Slayer, Half-Goblin, Enchantress and Bard
- 4 Player Aid Cards
- 36 Treasure Tokens
- 24 Experience Tokens
- 1 10-sided die (for tracking the current dungeon level)
- 1 Rulebook
- 1 Book of Heroes (Information about the heroes and rules clarifications pertaining to those heroes)
- Free expansion pack #1 (Probably will sell for $5 value)
- Alchemist, Scout, Leprechaun, Treasure Hunter and Undead Viking
- Possible Dwarven Berserker (if next stretch goal reached)
- Kickstarter Exclusive – Guild leader hero and the guild leader’s party die
- Kickstarter Exclusive – Dragon’s Lair card
- Kickstarter Exclusive – +2 Dungeon Dice
- Kickstarter Exclusive Box – The mimic designed box.
A favorite game around our house is TMG’s quick-to-learn dice game Martian Dice (Amazon), which is so accessible that we’ve even taken it to church picnics for an activity – to great success, I might add. Despite the fact that a game with undead is probably not appropriate for a church picnic (at least according to my wife), I’m definitely looking forward to Dungeon Roll as a way of getting my son more into fantasy gaming and dungeon crawls.
I’ve backed a couple of TMG’s Kickstarters. Their tile-based game For the Win (Amazon) was a small-scale game that was delivered quickly and on time, as opposed to their board game Kings of Air and Steam, which took a long time to get fully produced and reach backers. Dungeon Roll seems like a much less ambitious project, though, so I have little doubt of their ability to deliver the game in a timely fashion.
Disclaimer: I’ve already backed the game, so this review is admittedly very self-serving, as I’d like to get as many stretch goals as possible.
Also of Interest:
Andrew Zimmerman Jones is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. He has been a finalist in the Writers of the Future contest and received Honorable Mention in the 2011 Writer’s Digest Science Fiction/Fantasy Competition. In addition to being a contributing editor to Black Gate magazine, Andrew is the About.com Physics Guide and author of String Theory For Dummies. You can follow his exploits on Facebook, Twitter, and even Google+.