Dungeon!

Overview

Dungeon! is a competitive board game for up to four players (later editions allow more), in which each player's single adventurer descends into a six-level dungeon printed on the board, fights monsters, grabs treasure, and races to be first back to the starting chamber with enough loot to win. It was designed by David R. Megarry and published by TSR, Inc. in 1975, the year after Dungeons & Dragons.

Because it shares so much with D&D — dungeons, elves and wizards, fireballs, magic swords, a trove of gold pieces — it is the clearest way to see what makes a roleplaying game different. Dungeon! has every trapping of the RPG and none of its open-endedness.

Origins

Megarry was one of the Twin Cities gamers who explored Dave Arneson's Blackmoor dungeons from 1971. Inspired by that experience of descending level by level through a monster-filled underworld, he designed a board game version and had a prototype ready as early as 1972.

He hoped Guidon Games, the publisher of Chainmail, would take it, and early in 1973 he and Arneson traveled to Lake Geneva so Megarry could demonstrate it to Gary Gygax, then a Guidon representative. It was on that same trip that Arneson ran Gygax's group through Blackmoor, the session that set Dungeons & Dragons in motion. Guidon never published Megarry's game; Gygax's new company did. David Ewalt described the 1975 TSR edition as the company's most ambitious production to that point, with a color map, custom cards, tokens and dice in an attractive box.

How it plays

The original edition came with a folding vinyl-cloth board showing a six-level dungeon of corridors, rooms and larger chambers; four colored pawns; two six-sided dice; and small monster and treasure cards color-coded by level. Before play, treasures are dealt face down into the rooms, a monster is placed on top of each, and stacks of monsters guard the chambers. Deeper levels hold bigger treasures and tougher monsters.

Each player chooses a class. The original four were the Elf, the Hero, the Superhero and the Wizard. The Elf is better at finding secret doors (a 1–4 on one die instead of a 1–2). The Superhero is the strongest fighter. The Wizard can cast fireballs and lightning bolts into rooms without entering melee and can teleport between chambers. To balance them, each needs a different fortune to win: 10,000 gold pieces for the Hero and Elf, 20,000 for the Superhero, 30,000 for the Wizard — which pushes the Wizard down to the dangerous sixth level.

On a turn, you move your pawn, enter a room and fight whatever is there. Each monster card lists the number you must meet or beat on two dice to defeat it. Win, and you take the treasure beneath. Fail, and a second roll decides your fate: a standoff, a retreat dropping treasure, a lost turn, a wound that sends you back to the start without your loot, or — on a roll of 2, a 1-in-36 chance — death. A dead player starts again with a new character after losing a turn.

That is the whole game. There is no referee, no hidden map, no negotiation with monsters, no character who grows from session to session. Everything that can happen is printed on the cards and the board; the game ends when someone wins. In a roleplaying game like D&D, by contrast, a Game Master invents and describes the world and players can attempt anything. Dungeon! is a race; D&D is a campaign.

Reception & impact

Reviewers valued it as an introduction to the hobby. Fred Hemmings in White Dwarf #4 gave it 8 out of 10 and called it "a game in its own right and a good one," while Jon Freeman in The Complete Book of Wargames (1980) recommended it as a fine introduction to roleplaying games "understandable by almost anyone," though he found the classes unbalanced. The game was a steady seller: new rules and classes appeared in 1976, and revised editions followed in 1980 and 1981; The New Dungeon! (1989) and Classic Dungeon! (1992) offered six classes including the Dwarf, Paladin and Thief. An Apple II adaptation appeared in 1982.

Legacy

Wizards of the Coast reissued Dungeon! under the Dungeons & Dragons brand in 2012, restoring the original rules with the classes renamed Rogue, Cleric, Fighter and Wizard, and again in 2014. More important is the genre it founded. The line of fantasy board games in which heroes explore rooms, fight monsters and collect loot — Talisman, HeroQuest, Warhammer Quest, Descent: Journeys in the Dark and Gloomhaven — starts here, as the Dungeon-Crawler Board Games tradition. Writing in Black Gate, Bob Byrne called Dungeon! "the ancestor of all dungeon crawler board games."