One Deck Dungeon
About
A Rogue like, Single Card Deck Dungeon Adventure.
Shuffle your deck of cards and attempt to make it to the bottom of the deck to face and conquer the boss monster while fighting monsters and avoiding traps.
"One Deck Dungeon is a tabletop version of the popular video game phenomenon of rogue-likes -- dungeon delves where you try and survive as long as you can against increasingly nasty monsters." - From the publisher
- Expansions Include
- Forest of Shadows
- Abyssal Depths
Thoughts
Tim:
4/5 (With a change to difficulty)
So close to great!
The reason it's only a 4 and not a 5? The bizarre "difficultly settings". Hidden in the back of the rules are some rules for the "campaign mode" and they include some difficulty adjustments. All of this seems standard until you see that the highest difficultly is "Veteran" and the "adjustment" if you want the hardest possible experience is "play the game with the rules as written". Errr, WTF? The computer version handles this by defaulting to the easiest difficultly "novice". The change, is to start your hero at "level 2". I HIGHLY recommend this.
Online comments on BBG are mixed so your milage may vary. Personally after dozens and dozens of plays, I feel the chance of winning the easiest dungeon with the rules "as written" is less than 10%. Not very fun in my opinion.
This also leads in the second large problem. The description of the game gives you the impression that you can start any dungeon from scratch, shuffle the dungeon deck, choose a hero, start the game, and have a possibility of winning. After playing many, many, hands of this, I can say, No, this is not what is going to happen. My less than 10% estimate is the "easy" dungeon. As someone on BGG said "If you're not playing a campaign, you're really going to struggle against the harder dungeons though."
With all of that being said, this game really has some great ideas.
Begin able to use the same card as a monster, an item, or experience is pure genius. Most small and simply card games introduce all kinds of small parts to manage this, the choices it forces you to take make for great gameplay.
Update 5/26/2021
After reading the review from Laura, I thought I would give this another look. Since the issue seems to be the randomness and the difficulty, I thought I would play it 5 times for some stats. What I found was, yeah, this is a bit to random. With someone that knows how to play and lots of experience, it's just barely more than a 50/50 shot of wining. I can only imagine how bad the intermediate and difficult dungeons are given this. I don't see how any of them could be fun to play unless you are doing the campaign. I'm going to revise my rating from a 4/5 to a 3.5/5. There is still plenty here to get some enjoyment from, but a bit to random to elevate it to the best of the best.
"Novice" difficulty. Dragon Dungeon. Fighter
1 - Loss at Dragon, 30 min
2 - Win, 38 min
3 - Loss at Dragon, 25 min
4 - Win, 36 min
5 - Win, 25 min
Laura:
2/5
I played One Deck Dungeon both with physical cards and dice, and on the computer. Surprisingly, I am not a huge fan. Maybe I should play it more? I find it just a little too similar to the Create Your Own Adventure War with the Evil Power Master game. Yes, you get to make more decisions, but there were entirely too many times where I was underpowered and nothing could help. Sure, there are plenty of times where in gameplay you shouldn't win every time, but this game seemed to be stacked slightly toward losing, even though I won the overall game. The computer version was better than the physical game, but it just didn't seem terribly fun. Maybe I'm not suited toward these types of games.
Trivia
- Board Game Geek ranking of 671/20,698
5-24-2021