Dungeon Drop is a lean, mean dungeon crawling machine. The game is a wonderful combination of strategy, chance, skill and gambling in an arena of colorful cubes. You drop, flick and knock the bouncy, devilish little blocks and they are eager to do exactly the opposite of what you wanted. Hilarity ensues.
You play as a competing heroes traversing a dangerous dungeon, battling foes and collecting treasure. If you’ve ever played games like Clank! or Gloomhaven you know this style of game well. Likewise, if you’ve ever participated in a game of Dungeons and Dragons, you will feel right at home in this world. But Dungeon Drop ditches the towering stacks of cards, the character sheets and the board and opts instead for a streamlined system of cubes that offers a huge amount of variability with very minimal rules. And the result is a game you can easily play three times in a row without getting tired of it.
Each party member creates their character by selecting a fantasy race and class (i.e. Warrior, Rogue, Mage, etc.) which give the player awesome abilities to help them in their quest.
The dungeon itself is a series of cubes which you drop (get it?). Start the game dropping from a high height in an empty space to play a giant game (I would suggest using makeshift walls for this as the cubes are easy to lose). Drop from a low height to create compact chaos with palm-sweating tension. Each type of cube has a unique color scheme which tells you what it does (Goblins are small green pieces; trolls are large green pieces; gold is, well, large and small gold pieces… you get the idea.) On your turn, you create a ‘room’ by pointing out three pillars and loot everything that falls inside including fighting any monsters this includes.
Every player also receives a random quest card which, for me, represent the game’s replayability. The concept is cute (really cute, I love the art), and sometimes you get cool combos to play with, but the quest cards really represent the game’s underlying strategy. You see, there are two kinds of treasure in the game which score you points: gold and jewels. Gold has a mostly static value, but jewels will score according to your unique (and secret) quest. Likewise chests add another element of chance as you don’t know what they will score til the end of the game. Each is a six-sided die you roll to determine it’s value. These twists make it much more difficult to predict a winner. Dungeon Drop is a game that you play to the bitter end, because you don’t know if that last cube will be the difference between victory and defeat. You can choose to play it safe with treasure you can measure or gamble it all on chests but having the largest pile of stuff does not necessarily mean you’re winning.
Conceptually this game is very simple. It is so easy to learn, set up and play it feels like nearly instantaneous fun. But there is also a lot of attention to detail that makes the game both engaging and replayable. It’s a game that creates a lot of options for its players, from the abilities you use, to the rooms you loot, and even the way you form the board! It’s a great family game and another in a long line of winners from a company that has brought us many a best-seller.