Game Review: One Deck Dungeon

Card Game, Dice Roller, Rogue-like, Dungeon Crawl, Solo or Co-op Play

One Deck Dungeon is a lot of hack-and-slash goodness in a tiny box

My 13 year old son and I finally got around to playing this dungeon crawler over the long weekend. It’s a small-box card game with no board and 30 dice, plus some life counters and potion tokens, super easy to set up and put away. It took about 30 minutes for us to wrap our heads around the rules, and then we were hack-and-slashing away — or just as frequently, fleeing for our low-level character lives (both options are fun, and there’s some good co-op strategy and player interaction in deciding whether to fight or flee).

Games last about 30–45 minutes, if you know what you’re doing — longer if you don’t, as we discovered. The game supports 1–2 players ( I love a good solo game). The rules outline both single session and campaign play, and in the box there’s an optional campaign sheet to record XPs, items and skills acquired over multiple sessions.

Brief gameplay description:

1. Choose your level 1 character (choices are Warrior, Mage, Archer, Rogue and Paladin — I chose Paladin, as usual).
2. Choose the dungeon you wish to assault: Dragon’s Cave (tough), Yeti’s Cavern (tougher), Hydra’s Reef (even tougher) or Lich’s Tomb (Suicidal).
3. Shuffle the dungeon deck, with the “stairs” card at the bottom. Going through the deck represents finishing a level of the dungeon. Once you get to the stairs, you descend to a lower level. After going through three levels, you fight the boss (if you survive that long — this game is tough).
4. Explore: Draw four cards face down. There will always be a maximum of four cards in active play.
5. Enter a room: Flip a card over to “open the door”. This will reveal either a dungeon monster or a trap. You may now choose to encounter the monster or trap, or flee (hysterical screaming adds to the flavor, I find).
6. If you choose to fight a monster, there’s some intricate and fun dice-rolling, and using relevant skills, and counting modifiers, that I won’t go into here. Suffice to say, I think the combat mechanics are swift, elegant and satisfying.
7. In the happy event that you defeat the monster, you can choose how you will take your reward:

a. As Experience points - earn enough of these, and your characters advance in level, making them more powerful and skillful.
b. As Items - these increase your character’s combat, agility, magic (mana) or health points, or a combo thereof
c. As Skills - these give your character enhanced special abilities to make you more badass

As for traps, you have a choice of solving/evading/dismantling it, which is easier but takes more time (represented by drawing more dungeon cards from the deck), or destroying the trap, which is tougher but quicker. Defeated traps can also be taken for either experience points, items, or skills.

Summing up, my son and I had a blast playing this game. It plays fast but not shallow, has some decent strategy, good co-op interaction, lots of dice-chucking, and reproduces the feel of the best PC game rogue-likes in the real world. It’s a lot of bang in a little box, all for around 25 bucks. Highly recommended.