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So
What is a dungeon crawler. How does a board game version of this differ from its digital counterpart?
This in this type of game, players move through a series of rooms and obstacles in order to accomplish a goal. This could be finding treasure, defeating enemies, defeating a boss, or even just finding the exit to the dungeon.
The dungeon itself is usually (but not always) implented in such a way as to be progressively generated over the course of game play, using a stack of room tiles, dice or some other method of randomization to determine what the next room of the dungeon is, and what elements appear in that room.
Consider the game House on the Haunted Hill. This game starts with a few initial tiles to represent the main entry to the house, its stairwell to the upstairs and the hallway that connects them. If the players leave these rooms, a tile is selected from a tile deck associated with the floor they are entering. This tile is the new room that they have entered. If they leave this room and don't return to an existing room, another tile is added to the mansion (the dungeon stand in for this game). In this way the mansion is always a little different every time players play.
This game type adapts well to the digital format as randomization can be handled by the game itself rather than extra components such as decks, dice, or bags. Additionally, the randomization can be more complex since the players don't have to manage and implement its outcomes. This said, like many digital implementations, the style favors (but is not relegated to!) more solitary play, and requires a bit of extra design to predicate social interactions.
Consider the game Pokemon Mystery Dungeon. It follows the basic formula of the dungeon crawl, creating a full campaign of randomly generated dungeons for the player to explore, with them returning to a home base to gear up before returning to the dungeon. However, as it is presented as a single screen adventure it requires a little more work to be multiplayer capable (the current version of the game is only one player). The developers would need to add link connectivity, figure out what to do if one player wants to exit the dungeon before the other, create a system to ensure the under leveled players are able to survive or at least be matched up with other player of the same level and how to ensure that players aren't waiting on each other for too long when they return to the home base and begin preparations. (With the amount of customization and leveling activities players can do there it could take a very long time) To evade dealing with all of these quandaries Nintendo (perhaps smartly) opted to make the game single player.
Let us consider a different digital implementation of the dungeon crawler: Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles for the Gamecube. Now this game was extremely innovative for its time, a single screen multiplayer dungeon crawler before the advent of online play. They navigated this in two ways. Firstly they implemented a safe zone system that required players to stay within a certain proximity of each other (as they were canonically traveling through miasma infested realms) making the single screen restriction a little more reasonable. This combined with the fact that players had incentive to stick together since they could do combination attacks made the restriction feel more like a play feature. Additionally to get around inventory time, players used link cables to attach their gameboy advances to the console, thus allowing players to manage their own inventories without interrupting play for their compatriots (although that would usually mean they were standing still for a little while)
Much of the innovations in that game are more trivial to implement now that online play is so ubiquitous. It is to the point that MMORPGS are ridiculously common, supporting upwards of 30 players in a single session. But in this world of digital dungeons, does the OG board based dungeon crawler still seem necessary?
I say yes. This comes back to the social aspect of these games and the concept of accepted rules versus imposed rules On the social angle, playing in person predicates a different social interaction than playing online, and creates a different experience overall. Additionally, the board based dungeon crawler is more flexible than its digital counterpart by dint of the fact that the rules are accepted and therefore extremely malleable as the players can fill in the gaps where necessary or make their own house rules on the fly to accommodate their players. Digital experiences require modders or preconstructed editing tools to do this same thing, which is a bit of extra work (although it reaps great dividends for the lifespan of the game)
Returning to the House on Haunted Hill for a moment, the game is extremely variable, as it cues up many different scenarios based on what the players do in the mansion. What items the players grab, and the rooms that have appeared match up to different scenarios in the rule book that can drastically change everyone's roles, sometimes turning one player into the villain, generating a new big bad, or even making the house itself become the villain.
This type of play could very well be done digitally, (and perhaps with more variability involved) but the expansion model for this type of game is cheaper in the board game space, as the generation of components and rule sets may take less overall cost.
In the end, there's room for both kinds of dungeon crawler. It really comes down to your preference and what kind of play experience you're looking for.
So how about you, dear reader? Have you played a dungeon crawler before? Do you have a favorite one? What do you think are the strengths and weaknesses of the play format?
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