Dungeon Twister - First Play!

27th August 2022

It's a Saturday night and were logged in Board Game Arena for some gaming fun.

Now that I think about it; a crossover game of Dungeons & Dragons and Twister would be pretty interesting.
Unfortunately, that's not what Dungeon Twister is about. Instead we get a 2-player sort of chess-like game about manipulating dungeon tiles and running around them.

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Caveat: We have only ever played this online.

What's in a game?

• Tiles: There are several types of tiles.
  • Room tiles: The game comes with 8 large square tiles. Each one depicts a dungeon 'room', although it looks more like a intricate series of corridors and passageways than anything else. There are also items and obstacles such as portcullises and rotation gears.
    On the back of each room tile is a number, this determines the maximum number of tokens that can be placed on that tile during setup. More on this below.
  • Starting line: This long tile is the width of 2 room tiles and they are placed at either end of the playing area to form starting areas. There are spaces to place 4 characters on each tile.
• Screen: The physical game comes with a dungeon master style screen for each player to hide their standees and tokens.
• Tokens: Dungeon Twister uses several types of tokens.
  • Equipment tokens: Players have 6 tokens for their respective equipment.
  • Character tokens: Players have tokens for all of their 8 characters.
    These are generally the classic characters you might find in a fantasy themed game and include, wizard, fighter, thief and so on.
    Different characters has a combat and speed value, additionally, each character also has unique abilities they can make use of that are themed to the character. E.g., the thief character can pick locks and disarm traps.
  • Tracking tokens: There are also a number of tokens used to track certain actions.
• Standees: As well as tokens, The physical game also comes with 8 standees for each player depicting each of the 8 characters a player has on their team.
  Standees can be used in place of their corresponding tokens.
• Cards: Each player has their own deck of 16 cards which consist of the following.
  • Action cards: These confer 2-5 action points (APs) when played.
  • Combat cards: During combat, these are played to grant a bonus of 0-6 combat points.
  • Jump cards: These allow a character to errr... jump! Mostly used to circumvent pit traps.

Dungeon Twister has bright and colourful artwork. The room tiles don't feature much in the way of illustrations but do have clearly delineated features. Artwork on the tokens and standees is that sort of chunky and cartoony fantasy style that has been used on a lot fantasy themed games over the last few years, it's a little bit of an unoriginal art direction - but to be fair, it's a style I quite like, so for me it's good.

There isn't too much in the way of iconography in Dungeon Twister and I don't imagine it would provide any obstacle to playing.

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How's it play?
Setup

• Board: Create the playing area by shuffling the room tiles into a face-down stack and while keeping them face-down deal them into a 4x2 grid.
• Starting line: Each player should take a starting line tile and place it along the short edge of the playing era. These are the 2 'ends' of the board.
• Players: Give both players the cards, screen, standees and tokens in their colour. All the tokens and standees should be placed behind the player's screen.
• Starting team: From their selection of 8 characters, both players choose 4 to be their starting team.
  Take the 4 tokens for these characters and place them face-down on the 4 starting spots on the starting line. The standees are not used at this time and each player's selection remains secret to their opponent for the time being.
• First player: Determine a starting player.
• Populate board: Beginning with the first player, each player should alternately put one of their 6 equipment tokens or 4 remaining character tokens on to the face-down room tiles.
  These can go on to any tile, provided it does not increase the number of tokens on a room tile higher than the number shown on the back of that room tile.
  Continue placing tokens until both players have put down all their tokens.

On to play
The objective in Dungeon Twister is to accumulate 5 Victory Points. A player can achieve this in 2 ways; by defeating opposing characters or by getting their own characters out of the opposite end of the dungeon from their starting side.
Players take alternate turns becoming the active player, playing action cards and resolving them. This is done over 3 phases.

• Play action card phase: When an action is played, it is done so face-up and in a stack, so only the last played action card is visible.
  The active player receives a number of APs equal to the value of the action card they played. APs are then spent to carry out actions, APs can be split between characters as the active player sees fit.
• Use APs phase: APs can be spent on the following.
  • Movement: Each AP spent allows a character to move a number of spaces equal to that character's speed, all movement is orthogonally.
    Additionally, there are some restrictions on how a character move or end their turn.
  • Reveal room: If a character is adjacent to a face-down room tile which they can enter, the active player can then spend 1 AP to flip that room tile face up.
    Flipping a room involves sliding it out and flipping it back into position but face- up.
    The active player then places any tokens that were put on the face-down tile during setup on to spaces or their choosing. However, they cannot place tokens of their own colour, instead the opposing player does that!
  • Rotate room: Each room tile will have a rotation gear. If the active player has a character on the same space a rotation gear. they can spin the tile! Each AP spent can spin the tile 90', the room tile will indicate whether this goes clockwise or anticlockwise.
    The corridors on the room tiles have been put there in such a way that they can trap characters or create new passageways when a room tile is rotated. Rotating room tiles can even be used as short cuts.
    Any tokens on a room tile that is rotated, also rotate along with the tile.
  • Combat: If an active player's character ends movement adjacent to an opposing character, the active player can choose to trigger combat by spending 1 AP. A fight can include more than 2 characters if more are also adjacent.
    Combat is resolved by each player playing a ingle combat card face-down. When this done, both are revealed.
    Each player totals the combat value of all their characters who are participating in the fight with the value on their played cards to get a final combat value.
    These 2 final values are then compared, if it results in a tie, there is no effect. Otherwise, whoever has the highest value wins the encounter.
    All participants on the losing side are wounded.
    Wounds: The combat value of a wounded character drops to 0, furthermore, a wounded character no longer take any actions. Healing can reverse all of this.
    A wounded character who receives a 2nd wound is instead killed and removed from play.
    Cards: Finally, the combat cards used during the fight are discarded out of play, except for the +0 card which is always returned to the player's hand.
  • Use ability: Some character abilities require the active player to spend 1 AP to activate them.
  • Use Item: As with abilities, some items require the active player to spend 1 AP to use them.
    • Other rules: Without going into detail, there are rules for picking up and using items, carrying wounded characters and the such. Encountering pit traps and using jump cards to avoid them.
    • Point scoring: There are 2 avenues for scoring points. The first is eliminating the other player's characters which earns 1 VP per elimination. The other is for a player to get their characters out of the other side of the dungeon, this earns 1 VP per escaping character, bonus points can be earned for getting certain characters/items out of the dungeon.
• Recycle phase: When a player has used their last action card, they draw off them back into their hand.
• Next player: Once the active player has completed all 3 phases play moves on to the other player.

Endgame
When any player earns 5 VPs, the end game is triggered. It is possible for the inactive player to score VPs in the active player's turn by winning combat which means the inactive player can potentially trigger the endgame.
In any case, the active player finishes their current turn and the game goes to scoring.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

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Overall
​Dungeon Twister is a fairly straightforward game but despite this I feel the game is a little cumbersome, there's quite a bit of exception-driven rules here.

For example:
No character can stand on a pit trap space except the thief or except a character with a rope token.
If a thief standing on pit trap is wounded, they are killed, except any character carrying rope will not be killed, except if an opposing character comes and takes a rope - in which case the wound character is then killed.

These are not gamebreakers by any means but they feel counterintuitive and may be obstacles to play. Until players are familiar with the rules, they'll be hunting through the rulebook to get clarifications, it's also likely players may forget some rules even exist!

Players will need to employ quite of lot of tactics in Dungeon Twister and generally that's a good thing. Since there are 2 ways to score points, players will need to constantly assess the viability of both approaches.
It means playing close attention to the positions of all characters, every one of which will have their own strengths and weaknesses. Characters that are strong in combat will tend to slow at movement. Players will need to exploit the strengths and special abilities while minimising exposure of weaknesses. This is especially true of combat.

This neatly brings me to the game's main schtick, that is; rotating room tiles. Well planned use of rotating the tiles can be a game changer, it can trap or free characters, create blockages or short cuts, it can be used to move gear or move a correctly positioned character across the board, etc.
It keeps the gameplay fresh and to a degree, unpredictable. It can be tricky to see the outcome of rotating of all tiles to all position.

The rule where a player gets to place their opponent's tokens is quite interesting, it allows canny players to exploit the situation to trap opposing tokens but they will need to remember that a twist of the tile can change everything.

Dungeon Twister provides players with meaningful decisions when choosing their actions and tactics.

​Yet somehow, I found it unengaging. Despite fairly extensive rules and a clever premise, Dungeon Twister felt a bit like a simplistic grid based wargame that involves direct confrontation and to be honest, it's not what I look for in a board game.

Obviously, you mileage may vary, maybe a fantasy themed 1-on-1 combative game is right up your street but Dungeon Twister is not for me.