Dungeon crawlers are always popular with the Board's Eye View team but they're often mostly more of the same: it's getting harder to distinguish games that introduce their own novelty to the genre. Certainly Shuffle Dungeons has plenty you'll recognise: a randomised modular dungeon peopled with traps and monsters, a Boss Monster at the centre and a selection of adventurers, tho' not all of these mirror the standard tropes. With Shuffle Dungeons, however, Jeremy Stark, Kyle Talbert and Isaac Serafini have designed a puzzle optimisation game where players are pushed to make the most effective use of the tile cards in their hand.
Shuffle Dungeons from Zero Strategy Games is a light fully cooperative game for up to four players, and it's also very playable as solitaire. Having selected your adventurer standee and the tile card showing your character's special ability, you place out a face-down Boss Monster tile that shows the number of paths equal to the number of players. Entrance tiles with three exits on them are placed three tile lengths away from the Boss Monster, and each player draws three tile cards. On your turn, you draw more tile cards for each open exit on the tile you're on and you play as many tile cards as you like.
The USP here is that all the tile cards are double-sided: on one side they show a dungeon path but on the other they show an item or artifact that you can equip or use. That means you are always having to weigh up how best to use the tile cards you draw: as paths through the dungeon or as equipment. You'll need to gear up before you reach and face the Boss Monster but you won't necessarily reach the Boss Monster in just three tiles because you may end up on a meandering path. It's a cooperative game so you can expect it to be advantageous to be adjacent to your allies, but for that to happen you'll need to lay paths that meet...
Some tiles will set traps and some, of course, will confront you with more monsters to combat using your character's stats, any relevant items with which they've equipped themselves and dice rolls (the game uses standard six-sided dice). Beat a monster and you can collect loot but if you take damage then you'll stand even less chance against the Big Boss...
Shuffle Dungeons is an easy-to-play game that four players can play in under 60 minutes. Expect solo games to be much shorter (15-20 minutes). We've been playing a pre-production prototype but Zero Strategy Games are bringing the game to Kickstarter. Click here to can check it out.