Another Vlaada Chvátil game - Dungeonlords.

Like someone said on the last one, it's always such a bummer to see who has left.

Also, Dungeon Lords is still a bit of a turkey, to me. Great ideas in it, though. When I played it there was way too much work to accomplish modest goals.

Yes, I'm a Chvatil fan but not a fan of this one. You spend a great deal of effort and mental strategy working hard to build out your dungeon and scrape by on limited actions, and then the game comes along and keeps hitting you in the kidneys.

The build it up before we tear it down works completely in Galaxy Trucker because building your ship is stupid fun and watching it get blown apart is enjoyable. In Space Alert it works too because all you have to do is hang on to win.

In Dungeon Lords, it takes quite a bit of effort and care just to build up this house of cards and hope something's left standing beyond what your opponent has. Aggravating and games shouldn't be aggravating.

I think the taxes penalize tunnel-building so much that it's a bad option. I tend to win this one, and I usually have a little cross of 5 spaces, with 2-4 of them being rooms. Keep gold and food flowing. Get enough traps and monsters, and try to weasel your way into getting the right kind of adventurers showing up at your door.

I do like it a little because I like simultaneous action selection compared to watching one person stare and wonder where to put their worker every turn. (Although you do have to wait for one person to finish picking their cards inevitably).

I do think it's kind of funny to turn a game about dungeons into an accounting exercise.

I like Vlaada's games usually, this was the first one I played that I don't want to play again. It took so long to do almost nothing, and it was much more complex than it needed to be. I like the sequel, Dungeon Petz, more, but it also could have used some trimming.

To it's credit it's a very tight and sound design. But the way you get from point A to point B isn't very dramatic. Or fun. Does this game make you feel like an evil subterrainean mastermind? No. Do you ever feel like you made some kind of clever labyrinth or even feel the satisfaction that you've built something kind of cool or unique?

No. It's all just points. And it's all very restricted. A very farty game that does not have any soul.

People fell for this game's pseudo-theme like a bunch of rubes at a carnival.

I don't mind Dungeon Lords, but it's a full-on Euro and suffers from Android-itis, in that it would be greatly improved if it didn't rely on VP to determine a winner.

Dungeon Lords resulted in the closest Table Flip we had in our family. Brian made a small mistake in the first 'year' (or whatever it is) and it resulted in the near-complete destruction of his dungeon. And with only two years (IIRC) it really doesn't have any room for error. And unlike Space Alert and Galaxy Trucker, errors in DL aren't that much fun.

It's a very brittle and unforgiving game that might really reward clever play on a high level, but I don't think many will expend the effort to get to that level.

I think this is an unfortunate mismatch between theme (light and humorous) with mechanics (unforgiving and tricky).