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Monday, April 02, 2012

Dungeon Lords

I'd say in general I tend to be pretty good about figuring out the way to win at board games after a few plays. Maybe not the optimal line of play, and maybe not something that works every time... But I can find at least a path to victory. Dungeon Lords is a definite exception. I have no idea how to win. We played a game on the weekend and a couple turns from the end of the game I looked at my board and couldn't find a path from where I was to scoring a lot of points...

I was very well set up for killing off the incoming adventurers. Over the course of both invasions I lost a total of 2 tiles. So I did end up scoring 24 of the 28 invasion points. (Excluding paladins, anyway.) But I floundered around in terms of getting any of the other end game points.

I've played the game probably a dozen times now and it feels like it's always the same. I focus on the puzzle aspect of killing off the incoming adventurers to the exclusion of everything else. This is a pretty good way to get a reasonable score but it doesn't seem to be the way to get a winning score. If there was a website to bet on the outcome of board games in my apartment I think betting on me to get 2nd in Dungeon Lords is probably the safest bet right now! And I don't know what I could do to change that. Play more, I guess, and keep reading the end game scoring card each turn?

3 comments:

  1. What's the end-game scoring card read as?

    Each Adv: 2 pts
    Each Pal: 5 points
    Each unconquered room: 2 pts

    Each conquered tile: -2 points
    Unpaid tax: -3

    Titles: (+3 exclusive/+2 shared)
    Most Evil
    Most Adventures captured?
    Most Rooms
    Most Tunnels
    Most Imps
    Most Monsters
    Most stuff

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  2. Monster (not ghost) - 1
    Unconquered room - 2
    Adventurer - 2
    Paladin - 5
    Conquered tile - -2
    Unpaid tax - -3
    Pointscoring room - ?
    Titles - 3/2

    Most evil
    Most rooms
    Most tunnels
    Most monsters (not ghosts)
    Most imps (not trolls)
    Most food, gold, traps
    Fewest conquered tiles

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  3. So playing a near-perfect Battle games expects +12 points from Adv, +12 for tiles, +3 for the title, total 25 points. An 40 is a good score (giving everyone +16 for tiles)

    Points not from battles - 18 from titles, ~6 from rooms, ~4 from monsters - 27 points.

    I don't know - focusing on the battles doesn't seem unreasonable. Especially if at some point you can throw away a couple points on the battles to grab some low-hanging points elsewhere

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