Dungeon Care is live
Dungeon Care is a 1-4 players cooperative card game in which you play as heroes taking care of young dungeon masters in a dungeon. You only need to get through one night to earn your pay, but surviving these little furies might get you skinned, impaled or roasted, if you don’t fly out of cowardice, that is. The campaign launched on Kickstarter on September 21 and will run for another 28 days.
You first choose your number of heroes, then pick as many “vilennials” to care for, plus one. You then create a deck of Challenge cards, adding 5 cards to it for each vilennial in play. Each vilennial card shows three things: a bane symbol, that may relate to a challenge card to produce a negative effect, a demand symbol, that you must fulfill to preserve the good mood of your vilennial, and a “bad mood” effect that is triggered if you don’t. Challenge cards also show a bane symbol and a number of other symbols that you will have to match in order to overcome them. Heroes have an HP value, a confidence value and a class, that comes with two Feat cards that may be used once per round. When a hero loses all HP, they get KO; if they lose all confidence, they flee the dungeon. All heroes start with 5 survival cards in hand.
The game is played in rounds until you either exhaust the challenge deck, or all your heroes have fled or got KO. First, you reveal a challenge card for each vilennial if they are not already associated with a challenge. If the challenge card’s bane symbol matches that of the vilennial, the bane is triggered: some make you lose HP, others confidence, or make you discard a card. Then, the Survival phase begins. Heroes play survival cards (or exhaust feat cards) to obtain tokens that may match the challenge cards symbol or the demands of the vilennials. Next comes the Bad Stuff phase: all incomplete challenges trigger their bane effect and vilennials whose demands have not been satisfied get in a bad mood, triggering an effect as well. The round concludes with the Camp phase in which KO heroes recover 1 health, and fled heroes come back to their duty and choose between recovering 2 health, 2 confidence, refreshing their Feat cards, or refilling their hand back to 5 survival cards.
At some point, there will be no more challenge cards to draw for the vilennial at the beginning of the round. When that happens, you flip the vilennial card to show that it finally is asleep. However, all Bad Mood tokens that had accumulated on the card over the course of the game trigger the Bad Mood effect once more. If you survive all this ruckus until all the vilennials fall asleep, you win the game!
The solo rules have been revealed (I had "assumed" them while writing the post, the game being a full co-op with no hidden information): you just play as I described, except with two heroes. It makes sense to avoid playing with only one for balance issues, and because heroes can try to revive each other.