2007.06.11
First Impressions of Dungeon Twister
Jason and I tried Dungeon Twister for the first time last night. The rules are well laid out, if a bit lengthy, but we still got started reasonably quickly. Since neither of us had played before, we did the game setup completely randomly, just picking characters for our starting line at random and distributing the other tokens randomly into the rooms.
As we figured out the game a bit more, I started to enjoy it a bit more. Jason took an early lead, getting his wizard safely out of the dungeon, and I started to figure out my initial priorities. I had the Thief and the Goblin together on my starting line, and there was a rope in the first room, so I used the thief to run and grab the rope then gave it to the goblin so he could progress on his own without the thief helping him over pits.
Things slowly started to click for me as I shifted a couple of rooms around and made some more progress into the middle of the board with my thief and goblin. I had my goblin make a run for it and get the hell out of the dungeon as fast as he could, earning me 2 points and bringing the game to 3-1 since I had slipped another character out a few turns earlier. My Thief stuck around to support my other characters, notably my Mechanork. Jason uncovered some treasure and grabbed it, starting a run for my end of the board with it. He also started advancing his goblin up the board towards my end. I managed to give his cleric a good thumping in the mean time, earning a fourth point, and then had my troll smash his goblin right before the finish line to end the game.
Even though it was our first time and I had very little grasp on the strategy of the game, I still enjoyed it a lot and want to play again. A couple of things stuck me as being very interesting features of the game:
1. The ability to rotate rooms, even (in some cases) rooms that you do not currently have any characters in. This proved key to my success as I managed to trap a couple of Jason’s characters in such a way that it would have taken him ages to rotate them out.
2. The way that you place your opponents pieces when rooms are revealed. This is very key, as it’s also how I managed to trap some of Jason’s characters – I simply started them out in a bad position.
3. The need for judicious combat. My Cleric was surrounded by a number of Jason’s characters, yet he didn’t attack my Cleric. In my mind, he should have – it would have been an easy point. I wouldn’t have even tried to put up a fight, so hopeless was the situation.
Jason also made the observation that the game feels a little like RoboRally. The games do have similarities in that you have to pay attention to the board and the way your characters can maneuver around it, although for me at least the games feel different. When I play RoboRally I spend a lot of time focusing on small details of the board layout, since they make a huge difference. In Dungeon Twister, the board is somewhat more benign (though there’s still lots going on), and I’m able to look a little further ahead than the current turn. For a two-player game, I would prefer Dungeon Twister to RoboRally, although I have trouble imagining how chaotic a 3 or 4-player game of Dungeon Twister would be. RoboRally works well with 4 people, with an appropriate amount of chaos.
I’ll have to play Dungeon Twister at least a couple of more times to get a better feel for the game, but so far I like it.
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