Dungeon fodder
Dungeons of Draggmar is a 1-4 players card game in which you hire and gear up Heroes to do some dungeon crawling for your own fame and benefit, and possibly save the world from the return of the sinister Death Mage. The Kickstarter campaign go live on September 27, and the preview page is already up.
The goal of the game is to defeat the Death Mage before he rises to ultimate power. The Death Mage tracker starts at 15. To confront the Death Mage in his Dungeon, you must first kill six Bosses in their own Dungeons, two in each of the three dungeon difficulty levels. Whenever you kill a boss, you rise up the tracker by the dungeon difficulty level, but if your heroes fail to go through the end of a dungeon and defeat its boss, the tracker drops by the dungeon difficulty level. If it ever reaches 0, you lose the game.
In each round, you first select a Dungeon you will visit, and reveal its difficulty level if you visit it for the first time. This level may increase if the Death Mage becomes too powerful (when its tracker reaches some specified steps of the track). Then, you hire a party of heroes to enter the Dungeon. Heroes come in five classes (Warrior, Archer, Paladin, Mage, Rogue), have Attack and Defense stats, and special skills. You may buy a total of 7 cards, heroes, and gear, but no more than three heroes. You cannot see the cards you are purchasing, but if you don’t like the ones you drew, you can discard one and draw another (you will have to keep it though). If you have won Fame during the previous ventures of your hired parties, you may spend it to hire heroes and purchase gear of a better level. Once you are ready, the Dungeon Run begins. It always ends with death: whether it is that of your heroes or that of the boss is up to you.
During the Dungeon Run, you first choose a hero. Then, you try to go through the Dungeon rooms one by one by flipping cards from the Dungeon deck. You may face monsters, fall into traps, or discover some handy loot. Monsters also have an attack and defense value: they will always strike you, but you do not have to defeat them to go to the next room, you only need to survive. If you kill them though, you will gain an item. Your items can be equipped or used at any time. If a hero dies, you can then play another, and keep going, until you defeat the boss or all of your heroes die. In any case, you earn fame for all the rooms you visited, when you slay the boss, and for all the surviving heroes at the end of the run.
When you have beaten two bosses of each difficulty level, it is time to face the Death Mage! You will go through the last dungeon, the most dangerous one of course, but you only get one shot: if your party gets decimated, you lose the game! If you defeat the Death Mage at the end of the dungeon, you win.
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