Dungeon Lords, 2 player game

Earlier last week we were supposed to have a miniature wargaming day down at the club, but only me and David showed up and we had incompatible armies. Luckily, I had brought with me some boardgames, among them Dungeon Lords which works well for 2-4 players.

The nice thing about this game is that the "empty spots" are taken by NPC players partially controlled by each human player. So you play with all 4 Dungeon Lords in the bidding phase which helps make the game more dynamic and harder.

David had never played this game before, and I had not played it for a couple of months - but again the makers of this game were smart enough to include "tutorial dungeons" that allows you to learn the battle mechanics which are the main important events at the end of each year in the game.

We were soon up to speed and started playing, David was unfortunate during the first year since he got a raiding party with 2 Thieves which rendered his traps useless. And he did not have enough monsters to kill all adventurers. His entire dungeon including a room was conquered at the end of year one!

During year two he expanded his dungeon with multiple new tunnels and a couple new rooms and made a great comeback. Me on the other hand never really had any luck with my bidding during the second year. For instance I ran out of gold at one point and tunnels at another to allow me to expand with rooms necessary to protect my dungeon and which would provide further victory points. Even worse, I had recruited a fair share of monster and had a couple of traps which made me comfortable - but at the end of the year I got a really tough fighter and two goddamn Clerics that would heal 6 hit points each combat round!

They were impossible to stop, and my vampire could not attack any of the clerics either, I tried everything but in the end I only managed to defeat and capture the fighter while the two clerics conquered the remaining tiles of my dungeon and release a prisoner.

Once we started counting victory points things didn't look too bad for any of us, a fair share of victor points was handed out - before the penalty points set in. In the end both me and David ended up sharing the exact same amount of victory points, thus making the game a draw.

I really like the silly humor and game mechanics of this game, it is more fun with additional human players of course - but it is also quite rare to have a boardgame that works with 2 players and that manages to handle the empty spots well enough to provide a challange.