Review Detail

How can life be like a game?

Well, if you lived next door to a pie factory, owned a gun and were immortal, then your life would be exactly like Dungeonquest. Every day you would wake to the maddening smell of fresh, hot pie; you would load your gun and hop the wall only to

get in a firefight with the geriatric security guard and catch a hot one in the neck

make it through the window above the jacuzzi-sized mixing tubs, briefly

get "raspberried" by a robot

And so on, forever, because while guns make you brave, pies make you stupid. And immortality makes you eternally susceptible to both.

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Any game where you can get your head whacked clean off by a swinging blade on your first turn gets an easy 4 stars in my book.*

*I am totally sneaking that card into Agricola. "You want to bake bread? Test armor, jerk sauce!"

First play: The card-combat mini-game was like hitting the pause button on the game proper to do this other thing, breaking the flow of play. It got to where one person was complaining every time combat occurred—since it stopped the game dead in its tracks—and I learned to dread any combat. Not because it was necessarily deadly or scary, which would be nicely thematic, but because it seemed like such an incongruous bolt-on interruption of what was an otherwise hilarious character grinder.

After 11 plays: While the card combat looks weirdly complicated at first, it gets easier with repeat plays. Still, the setup, play, and cleanup just takes too long and feels at odds with the spirit of the game. It is literally possible for the person doing the cleanup to still be sorting & shuffling when their turn comes back around in a full 4p game... Ultimately we ditched it for:

The DQ Combat Die!

Using these rules:

ESCAPE?

Test Agility. If you fail, take damage as below & fight!

Skeleton 0
Sorcerer 1
Troll 2
Golem 3
Demon 1d6

FIGHT!

Roll the Combat Die until someone dies.

COMBAT DIE (1d6)

1-2 — 1 wound hero
3-4 — 1 wound each
5 — 1 wound monster
6 — 2 wounds monster

HERO POWERS

HUGO
Reroll "1 wound hero". Second roll stands.

KRUTZBECK
Do +1 wound whenever you wound the monster.

TATIANNA
At the start of combat, roll 2d6. Subtract the low roll from
the high roll & do that many wounds to the monster.

CHALLARA
If you have 8+ wounds, inflict only 1 wound on "2 wounds monster".

The quick fix that makes the game an easy 5 stars for me.**

**Ditched as in "literally tore the rules out of the rulebook and threw the cards in the trash". We take our DQ seriously around here.

Obligatory DQ Haiku:

stone door grinds open
dead end | dead end | secret door !
starve to death alone