Dungeon Twister

Our Price:  £16.99 Model:  10 Publisher:  Asmodee Playing Time:  45 Minutes Number of Players:  2 Designer:  Christophe Boelinger Suggested Minimum Age:  11 Availability:   No stock, please contact us for availability before placing order.

Dungeon Twister is a board game for two players by Christophe Boelinger. Basically you are in control of a team of eight adventurers who have a range of amazing powers and abilities.

Wizardopoly adds: and that really is just the basics! Dungeon Twister is a marvellously evocative game of dungeon exploration with fairly simple rules and ever more subtle game complexity.

The game starts with eight square dungeon rooms/corridors cards - the dungeon - arranged before the players in a face down, two by four rectangle. These rooms/corridors cards are crowded with traps, portcullises, walls and a strange gearing mechanism (more later). Each player selects four characters from their pool of eight and places them at their end of the dungeon. This leaves four characters and 6 objects which are placed in turn, face down, on the dungeon rooms. As play progresses the characters explore the dungeon, turning up the dungeon rooms/corridors and the characters and objects on them. As extra characters are revealed they enter play under their owner's control, as objects are revealed they become available to be picked up and used by any character. The aim of the game is to get victory points (5 for the basic game) which are won by guiding your characters through the dungeon or by killing off your opponents characters.

A few elements make dungeon twister stand out from the crowd:

• Each turn a player must decide how many actions to take. You have four action cards with 2, 3, 4 or 5 actions on them, and you have to use all four cards (over a cycle of four turns) before you can use any of them again.
• The simplicity of combat: each character has a strength which can be added to by use of a combat card and each player starts the game with identical sets. These cards have different values (adding a different amount to a combatant's strength), but once they're used they're gone, so you have to guess how much your oponent will add to his character and take a gamble on what you play.
• The variety of characters and objects: each character has a different set of abilities, the thief can jump over traps and open portcullises, the goblin is such a wimp that he's worth two victory points when he gets, the wall walker walks through walls (obviously!) etc., a sword adds to a characters strength, a potion gives them four extra actions and the fireball wand allows the wizards character to blast any other character to oblivion (but only once). This all means that Dungeon Twister is ripe for expansions!
• Oh - and the dungeon twisting: a character standing on one of the rotation gears in a room can rotate his/her dungeon card by a quarter turn, or the dungeon card of a matching colour. Very useful indeed!

Dungeon Twister is far more fun than I expected. There is very little luck, but it is far from being an abstract strategy game.