Dungeon Champs (Saturday Review)

In the dark and damp tunnels, creatures lurked. Brave heroes dared to venture deep into the labyrinth, hoping to defeat fiends and undead creatures, while avoiding spells. It was a battle to the death and whoever came out victorious would enter the annals of the Dungeon Champs by Matt Garbutt from Outland Entertainment.

When a talented cartoonist whose style is very easily recognizable, with bright colours and a penchant for quirky characters, decides to design his own game, it won’t come as a surprise that his art features heavily throughout. It also shouldn’t be a surprise that Dungeon Champs is a card game. After all, cards are one of the best ways to show off an artist’s amazing ability to create many different characters.

Cards at the Ready

In Dungeon Champs, players try to score points by winning mini battles. Everyone plays a so-called creature card and the strongest wins the round. All cards have a point value representing their strength. The strength changes depending on the card type of the opponents’ cards. Each type is stronger than one other type, while also being weaker than another one, which creates a circle of relative strengths.

So while you may have played the card with the highest strength value, if your card type is weaker against the other cards, that strength value goes down and you may lose the round or only manage to tie. How each faction is stronger or weaker adds a certain spice to the game. You are never guaranteed to win a round, just because you have played a card with a high strength value.

That isn’t all though. There is another level of uncertainty in Dungeon Champs. There are spell cards that you play alongside your creature card. As you would expect, the spells are a great way of interfering with other players. There are spells for all sorts of effects, including killing the strongest card played, making another card type stronger, allowing you to redraw your hand of cards and many more.

However, spells are also risky. If you have too many in your hand, you need to discard one, leaving you with fewer cards to battle with. At the same time, the spells can also make all the difference when they come up at the right time.

Fast Family Fun

I think Dungeon Champs makes a great family game. It plays pretty quickly and isn’t too hard to learn. The illustrations are also suitable for younger kids and while there is a bit of text to read, with the help of an adult it’ll be manageable. Also, I think kids love battling against their parents and defeating them with their creatures and spells.

Now, while I do think the game is easy to learn, it doesn’t flow quite as easily as some other games. I think part of the reason is the spell cards. They create an imbalance of the number of cards you can play each hand. In fact, the number of cards in the draw deck means that, for the last hand, some players will have fewer cards. It’s not a major thing and Dungeon Champs is still a lot of fun, but it does feel a tiny bit clunky and could have done with a bit of smoothing out.

Overall though, Dungeon Champs is a great card battler. The illustrations really pop and the designer-illustrator Matt Garbutt‘s style really shines. I love how players’ lives are handled via cards and not separate tokens. It makes the game really compact and easily fits in a deck box. The game also comes with a few variations allowing you to adjust the friendliness level of the game to suit your needs and mood.

So there you have it. If you want an easy-to-learn card battler with wonderful comic-style illustrations that is fun for all the family, then you can’t go wrong giving Dungeon Champs a whirl.

Useful Links

• Outland Entertainment: https://outlandentertainment.com/

Transparency Facts

I feel that this review reflects my own, independent and honest opinion, but the facts below allow you to decide whether you think that I was influenced in any way.

• I was sent a free review copy of this game by the publisher.
• At the time of writing, neither the designers, nor the publisher, nor anyone linked to the game supported me financially or by payment in kind.

Audio Version

Intro Music: Bomber (Sting) by Riot (https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/)

Sound Effects: bbc.co.uk – © copyright 2024 BBC

Mystery Of Dandela by Sascha Ende
Free download: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/2979-mystery-of-dandela
License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Playlist

These are the songs I listened to while I was writing this review: