DungeonQuest - Tips & Strategies

Around the “castle” we like to keep score.

– We track the name of who made it out
– how much treasure (this includes gold, potions, rope, etc.)
– and who played them that time

It is fun to see if we an beat their own best score or who can get the highest score overall.

On the rare occasion, a character can die outright if they encounter something like a blade trap or a bottomless pit on the first turn. This means that a person who was enthusiastic about playing the game will be sitting out the game while everyone else goes on. That’s no fun.

Players can institute a house rule that a character doesn’t fatally die within a certain number of turns at the start of the game; at the group’s behest, the actual penalty could be the loss of a turn or taking half of your character’s overall health in damage.

DungeonQuest is like a psychopathic Deal Or No Deal. One of the greatest abilities you can have walking into the dungeon, among knowing how to kill skeletons and dodge traps, is knowing when to quit.

Keep an eye on what other players are doing and how much treasure they’ve accumulated, and from where. The likelihood is everyone will be heading directly to the treasure chamber and rightly so. But you’ll all likely gather a tiny piece of loot from searching rooms, and if the route you’ve taken is unbelievably convoluted and tough to traverse through in a race against the sun setting, then it might be best to turn back and claim a win on the tiny trinkets you have. If others seem to be gathering huge amounts of treasure and know how far to push their luck, you might have to grit your teeth and gamble, but if not, you can always just run!

Survival is tough in DungeonQuest, and even if you make it back with small gains, others will likely succumb to greed and fail.

Yes, you won’t have a lot of money to your name. Yes, you may be brandished a coward by your friends. But hey, you’ll be alive…and able to afford a Twix at the very least.

To counter the somewhat cowardly strategy I put up here, we printed out a basic high score table listing players, the hero they played as, the total amount of treasure they have accumulated and the amount of spaces the sun token has moved on the sun track at time of escaping.

If you die, you don’t get to write anything down on the table of fame (although perhaps we should make a graveyard sheet for the unfortunate…).

However, if you manage to escape, no matter how much treasure you have, you’re placed on the high score table! In case of a tie on the board, the player who managed to escape the quickest (The player who leaves the dungeon with the least amount of time passed on the sun track) takes the higher rank.

There is a revised edition for this game now really streamlining the combat. It replaces the monster and hero decks with three cards for the monsters and three for the heroes.

You can just download and print the new cards at
http://voiceofe.com/2014/04/dungeonquest-revised-edition-is-coming-should-you-throw-out-the-old-edition.html

The new mechanic just reinforces the paper / rock / scissor mechanic that was already there, just made ridiculously convoluted by the decks.

You could always just do paper / rock / scissors if you would like. Ties give each player a wound. The cards offer a little more variety, but our group just ended up shuffling them and revealing one blindly anyway.

Get down to those catacombs ASAP. Use them to pop up either in or very near the Dragon’s Lair. Then in the unlikely event you get out uncharred, use them to get as close to an exit as possible. Plus there is the potential bonus of finding that Huge Diamond while you are down there. Of course you could end up as food but hey, this is a dungeon crawl, right?

Since the 1st player doesn’t rotate during gameplay, we use the little key (1st player marker) to cover the stats on the monster card. That way, everyone can at least see the face of the monster who will most likely take those last few hitpoints you have left.