Guild of Dungeoneering asks you to stop playing the hero and start playing the room he walks into. Gambrinous built a turn-based dungeon crawler where the dungeon is the real character, and Versus Evil put it out on July 14, 2015 for Microsoft Windows and OS X. Android, PC, iOS and Mac are the listed platforms. You draw cards, you lay down rooms, monsters, traps and loot, and then you watch somebody else’s adventure go wrong in front of you.
Trailer, via Gambrinous.
A hero you do not control
The twist is not decoration. In Guild of Dungeoneering you never move the hero directly. The player places cards to build the dungeon around him, and the hero then decides where to go and what to hit. That inversion is the whole game. Every card you play is a small act of persuasion aimed at a character who does not take instructions.
This is a harder trick than it sounds. Most dungeon crawlers hand you a body and ask you to steer it. Guild of Dungeoneering hands you a floor plan and asks you to steer a person with it. The pleasure comes from the gap between what you built and what he does with it.
Cards, rooms, and the turn-based fight
Combat is turn-based, and the card game mechanics carry into it. The game lists Role-playing, Strategy, Turn-based strategy, Quiz/Trivia, Indie, and Card & Board Game among its genres, which is a lot of labels for one title, but they are not all doing equal work. The card layer is the load-bearing one. The RPG layer gives the cards something to spend themselves on.
The perspective is bird view and isometric, which suits the premise. You need to see the room you just placed, and you need to see the hero standing in it, and you need to see the monster you put there too. A close camera would break the joke. The wide one lets you watch the whole mistake at once.
What the decks actually do
Guild decks are the engine. You draw from them, and what you draw decides what the dungeon becomes. Rooms, monsters, traps, loot — all of it comes out of the same card economy. This means the game is less about reflexes or even tactics than about resource management under a constant pressure.
The theme list is Fantasy, Historical and Comedy, and the comedy is the one that matters most in practice. Guild of Dungeoneering is not a grim crawl. It is a game about a guild, which is to say a game about an institution that sends people into danger and then grades them. The Historical tag is the odd one out on paper, but it fits the mock-serious register the game keeps up.
Single player, and no one to blame
The mode is single player. There is no co-op, no competitive ladder, no second player to absorb the frustration when a run collapses. That is a real design choice and it cuts both ways. On one side, the game never has to compromise its pacing for a partner. On the other, every bad draw lands entirely on you.
Guild of Dungeoneering asks you to accept that the hero is going to do something stupid, and it asks you to have built the room that made the stupid thing possible. That is the deal, and it is a fair one.
Guild of Dungeoneering is a dungeon crawl role-playing video game with turn-based combat and card game mechanics.
How it sits against the field
It is worth being precise about what Guild of Dungeoneering is not. It is not a roguelike in the strict sense, though it borrows the run structure. It is not a deckbuilder in the modern sense either, though the decks are central. It is a dungeon crawl role-playing video game with turn-based combat and card game mechanics, and that description, plain as it is, covers the thing accurately.
The comparison that matters is between the two halves of the game — the building and the fighting. One is the pitch, the other is the grind, and they are not equally strong.
| Element | Building the dungeon | Fighting in the dungeon |
|---|---|---|
| What the player does | Places cards to lay down rooms, monsters, traps and loot | Watches turn-based combat resolve |
| Who controls the hero | Nobody — the hero moves on his own | The hero, not the player |
| Where the appeal sits | The twist | The card mechanics |
| Where it wears thin | Once the deck’s shape is known | When a run stalls |
The table is the review in miniature. The left column is why people talk about Guild of Dungeoneering. The right column is why some of them stop.
The score, and what it means
The published critical score is 7.9/10 across five outlets in the IGDB critic aggregate. That number is a fair landing spot, and it is worth saying why rather than just repeating it.
A 7.9 is a score for a game that is genuinely good and genuinely narrow. Guild of Dungeoneering does one thing that almost nothing else in 2015 was doing, and it does that thing cleanly. The card-driven dungeon building is not a gimmick bolted onto a conventional crawler. It is the crawler. Take it away and there is no game left, which is the surest sign that a mechanic is load-bearing rather than decorative.
But the game’s ceiling is set by its own premise. Once you understand the shape of a deck, the surprise drains out of the building phase, and what remains is the turn-based combat and the card economy underneath it. Those are solid. They are not, on their own, enough to carry a long campaign.
The comedy helps more than the genre list suggests. Fantasy and Comedy are doing the heavy lifting; Historical is a tag that shows up in the metadata more than in the play. A game about a guild that sends adventurers into rooms you built is inherently funny, and the humor comes from the gap between the guild’s self-importance and the hero’s actual performance. It never overplays it.
The platforms are worth a note too. Android, PC, iOS and Mac is a wide spread for a game with this much card text and this much board state to read. That is not an accident. It is the kind of decision that makes a small game travel.
So: 7.9 of 10. Guild of Dungeoneering is the rare game whose central idea is also its best feature, and whose central idea is also the reason it runs out of road. If you want a dungeon crawler that respects your hands, this is not it. If you want one that makes you complicit in the dungeon, it is close to unmatched, and the score should be read as an endorsement of the twist rather than a verdict on the length.
Where the 7.9 comes from
Five outlets, one aggregate, 7.9. The interesting question is not whether 7.9 is right. It is whether the score is measuring the right thing.
Guild of Dungeoneering’s best asset is a design idea, and design ideas do not show up well in a number. The card-driven building is the reason to play, and the turn-based combat is the reason to keep playing, and those are two different reasons pulling in two different directions.
What holds the game together is that it never pretends to be bigger than it is. It is a dungeon crawl role-playing video game with turn-based combat and card game mechanics, released for Microsoft Windows and OS X on July 14, 2015, and it knows exactly how much game that is. The restraint is the achievement.
The part worth keeping
If Guild of Dungeoneering has a legacy, it is the inversion. Placing cards to build the dungeon around the hero, rather than steering the hero through a dungeon somebody else built, is a small reframing with large consequences. It turns the player from an action figure into an architect, and then it turns the architect into a spectator.
That is the thing to take from it. Not the loot, not the traps, not the monsters — the fact that you put them there, and the fact that you have to live with what the hero does next. Guild of Dungeoneering is not a great game. It is a good game with a great premise, and at 7.9 of 10, that is exactly what the score says.
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