Year: 2024 | Players: 1-4 | Min: 60+ | Ages: 10+
This Dungeon Legends review was made after playing the game eight times. The publisher sent us a copy of this game in exchange for an honest review.
What is Dungeon Legends?
Dungeon Legends is a cooperative fantasy adventure game where you and your fellow heroes fight monsters in the dungeon beneath Avel Castle. Across five chapters, you’ll face unique challenges, from extinguishing fires to recovering stolen crystals. You can play through the chapters as a campaign or jump into a single scenario of your choice.
Dungeon Legends was designed by Przemek Wojtkowiak and published by Rebel Studio.
Rules Overview
At its core, Dungeon Legends is a card-based cooperative game where each player controls a hero with a unique deck of cards. Your deck determines what actions you can take, and you gain powerful advanced item cards to expand your options.
Throughout the game, you’ll explore locations, battle monsters to prevent them from reaching the castle, and work toward completing each chapter’s unique objective.
How a Turn Works
On your turn, you’ll go through a series of steps:
1. Play Cards for Actions – You can play as many cards from your hand as you want, using them for actions like moving, attacking monsters, blocking, and collecting Dust, the main resource in the game.
2. Use a Location (Optional) – If your hero is adjacent to a location, you can activate it once per turn. Locations provide benefits such as drawing extra cards, healing, or setting traps. Each chapter has special locations, like a telescope in Chapter II, where you align moons in a specific way.
3. Activate Your Skills or Fairies (Optional) – Each hero has a skill track that lets you perform special actions a limited number of times per chapter. You can also use fairies you’ve collected to perform one-off abilities.
4. Reveal a Game Card – At the end of your turn, you reveal the top card of the main deck. This could spawn a new monster, trigger an event, or cause hazards to appear. If a new monster is added and the first space is occupied, it pushes that monster—and any in front of it—forward.
5. Draw a New Hand – After resolving the revealed card, you discard any remaining cards in your hand and draw a fresh hand of five cards.
Each chapter follows this structure while introducing different mechanics. In Chapter I, for example, you’ll need to gather water and put out spreading fires.
Winning and Losing
Each chapter has its own win condition, usually tied to completing a key objective.
You lose the game if:
- A monster reaches the castle.
- You need to draw a card but the deck is empty.
- A chapter-specific loss condition is met.
If you win a chapter, you can either continue to the next one as a campaign—keeping one advanced item card per hero—or simply treat each session as a standalone experience, jumping into whatever chapter interests you most.
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Pros and Cons
Pros
- I love the all-around look of Dungeon Legends. The blues pop on the game mat, the fantasy artwork is great, and those shiny advanced item cards are ridiculously nice.
- There isn’t a lot of deck building in the game, but the deck building that is there is impactful and fun. Those advanced item cards are very powerful, so it feels great every time you add one to your deck.
- The fairies are a great way to give players unique one-off abilities. I like that there are always three options available when you earn fairy rewards—it adds flexibility and makes it easier to adapt to whatever the game throws at you.
- Each chapter offers a unique puzzle, making the game feel like five different experiences in one. The core rules stay the same, but new mechanics, challenges, and ways to interact with the board keep things fresh. That’s great because you can find one or two chapters that you like and just stick with those after you finish the campaign.
- I like that there are plenty of cards that allow you to help your teammates. There were multiple situations in our games where having the option to heal our teammates or move them on the track was key to winning.
- Downtime is minimal, even with four players. Once everyone knows the rules, turns move quickly since you typically have a plan in mind before your turn starts.
- This might be the first board game mat I’ve seen that actually lays flat right out of the box. That was a nice surprise.
Cons
- We found the first two chapters to be too easy and a bit boring. After dealing with the first few monsters, we basically just stayed in the same spots, repeating the same actions, or waiting for key monster cards to be drawn. That also happened a few times in the later chapters, but there was more going on to keep it interesting.
- Each hero’s deck is slightly different than the rest, but I wish they each had at least one card that gave them a totally unique, powerful ability. That would help to make each hero feel more distinct and special.
- The rulebook is just okay. Rules are scattered throughout and sometimes key rules are only mentioned once in random paragraphs. This game definitely needs a separate rules reference sheet to make those first couple of games go smoothly, especially for less experienced players.
- Minor nitpick: The health track would be much easier to manage with a single token moving up and down, rather than juggling five separate tokens.
Final Thoughts
Dungeon Legends looks great on the table and I had a good time playing it, but it wasn’t a big hit with my group. We all felt the heroes were a bit too similar (I really wish they had unique powers), and the gameplay was too repetitive and predictable, even with the different chapter mechanics and objectives. That’s not a huge knock, though, since it’s not aimed at experienced adult gamers, but that stuff lowered the fun factor for us.
I wouldn’t turn down a game of Dungeon Legends if someone wanted to play it, but there are other light co-op fantasy games I’d pick over this one.
I think Dungeon Legends would work best for groups looking for a next-step cooperative game after playing some gateway games. It could also work well as a slightly more advanced family game or an intro dungeon crawler.
Dungeon Legends Links
BGG | Amazon
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