I love Mage Knight, and the puzzle that brings in to the table... but I need a lot of table to play it. Dungeon Crawler brings me the same feeling, solving encounter after encounter with the deck on my hand, with a smaller footprint. I can just, 30 mins before making dinner, shuffle the dungeon cards, the crawler cards, put my adventurers on line and go for a run (I DO love shuffling, I have all the cards sleeved, it adds extra satisfaction).

I like having options, making decisions NOW. Playing LOTR LCG is fun too, but the mechanic of only to draw a card per turn kills me. Give me more!! Dungeon Crawler allows me to draw more cards, and discard them if I don't like them. Of course, I am making my crawler deck thiner and If I can't get more cards from it, I lose. A risk I have to take...

The resources, I was confused with this mechanic, but worked well. I can feel the oppression when my resources low because some of my heroes perished. And when the first hero falls... I know that I am doomed, but I keep going. I still have hope. Normally In other games I would just give up.

The tension of what is coming now. The Dungeon deck is full of nasty things and challenging combination of cards that could take you out in a blink. I do enjoy revealing the new cards, putting them in line and evaluating the new threat and puzzle I have to solve.

The quests are very generic, but I found them (after the initial frustration with them) good enough and they make their job. "Put a unique character in the grave" -> "Go through the dungeon and kill the boss" or "Put 30 characters in the grave" -> "Go nuts in the dungeon and kill everything".

So after 7 years of this game being out, I just discovered it and I am enjoying it like crazy.

My recommendation, if you like puzzle deck building games, with tons of replayability (only with the core box) in a fantasy world. Give Dungeon Crawler a try. Go through the painful process of getting annoyed by the tokens or some of the art of the cards. Put effort in learning it.

It will pay off.

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- jbeerdev

It's really a fun, great game and I have enjoyed it a lot and hope my video ultimately conveys that, so thank you for designing it and giving me hours of playing fun.

I own all you publish regarding this game (and helped fund Thorn) so I'm sure I will be buying whatever else you put out there related to this game.

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- adm1

I have spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours in the past playing and building decks and researching The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game. It's an amazing game with mechanics that are still fresh and innovative up to this day.

At some point, however, I sold my entire set for around $350. Why?

While I loved building decks to do neat and creative combo's, I found that the game did not allow you to do this in a way that was very successful in practice. The adventures required you to design decks to specifically defeat them. They often required drawing specific cards in your opening hand to win. It just got to the point where the game was so big and there were so many missions that I grew tired of the process of playing it.

Flash forward a couple years and I came across Dungeon Crawler.

I can't say that I was expecting a whole lot from the game after watching a few videos and looking over the card art and rules. After a beginner difficulty playthrough, I was "meh". After normal playthrough, I was "hmm". Then after spending about an hour of building a Crawler deck and then another creating a thematic Dungeon deck, with specific Quests to go with it, I began to see the brilliance of the game.

Imagine LotR: TCG if you could create your own adventure to take on. You could pick the enemies, the locations, the events, the traps, and win conditions. And then imagine you create a deck to defeat it, with the heroes of your choice that combo well with the cards in the deck. This is Dungeon Crawler.

• • Satisfies my itch to create custom decks, something only MTG and LotR did before that.
• • Has a very cool system of building the dungeon during a turn that balances each situation thrown at you.
• • The keywords, while there are a lot, are extremely clever and thematic. Brilliantly designed.
• • Learning curve. Since there are a ton of Keywords and some of the turn order can be a bit confusing, it takes quite a lot of work on your part to learn.
• • The art. At first it can be pretty off-putting. But after a while it sort of grows on you. Overall, it satisfactorily presents a dire, dark, and dirty Dungeon for you to Crawl through.
• • The tokens that come with the game are very poor quality and hard to read.

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- Greg Mahler

I've played a few more games with the starter set and a few more after the Delve Packs turned up a couple of weeks ago (super fast delivery to the UK, cheers Jey). I also managed to find a box of booster packs on ebay from the initial release which has given me more copies of cards.

The additional dungeon cards give much more scope for creating thematic dungeons as well as being able to build & play the scenarios on the website. The crawler cards, new adventurers and quests let you build a much better crawler deck, more streamlined to suit how you want to play or how you want to be able to react to your dungeon deck. If you enjoy the deck building side of things, you can spend quite some time fine tuning the two decks to work well both with themselves and together.

The sessions I've had have been equally thematic as the first play and more immersive as I've not had to keep going back through the rules. I now just play with the reference guide and glossary of terms printed off from the files section on BGG.

It doesn't take too long before you start remembering the more common abilities and play becomes much smoother. I have a dungeon & crawler deck built and stored in a double deck box so I can just shuffle, draw my starting cards and get playing. I can usually run through a dungeon in about an hour making it a great game to sit down with of an evening and relax without it taking up too much time.

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- Paul Kellett

"I have to admit I was scared off by the "confusing" and "rule heavy" claims some people were making, still, I just couldn't shake the feeling that this was exactly the kind of game I would like. Well, turns out I was wrong... I freakin' love this game!

Every game has a learning curve, every great game has depth. Yes, you will need to learn how the different keywords effect gameplay but the dungeoncrawler.com website is literally PACKED with info and tutorials, and developer response to questions is nothing short of stellar. I spent an evening on their website learning the game, then an evening playing the game using a crib sheet (courtesy of BGG user garybrooks, thank you!) for quick reference of the keywords. I'm now completely comfortable with the rule-set and eagerly awaiting my next opportunity to get Dungeon Crawler to the table. My only regret?

Why didn't I get this sooner!"

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- Damian M

"I'm one that has found lots of depth in this game. Learning curve aside, this game is loads of fun. I very much like the various quests that give you something to work towards. My last standard game (80 cards in both decks) came down to one final battle. I lost and it was glorious!"

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- Joshua Nash

"With Dungeon Crawler the set up is quick, the rules, once engrained in the head, flow a lot better and the cards deliver some fun combinations. Even as I expand with the Mines of Khurgan and other Delve packs I know that there is no "magic" card waiting for me that I must have, no recipe that will get me through the dungeon every time. It's too unpredictable for that. For now, this has replaced my time with LOTR:LCG and we'll just have to see how that goes over the next few months."

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- Wilson St.James

"I've been giving 3 adventurer 60 card decks a try. It's really challenging! I pulled off one lucky win when the Stars Aligned and then I finished Greenknee off the next round. It's really nice to see that the difficulty of the game can be increased or decreased in this way, and I can certainly see how customizing the Dungeon and Crawler decks can provide a lot of replay value. Seems like a big sandbox of fun. This game is a hidden gem for the solo gamer who likes dungeon crawls. The rules are actually pretty simple, and I rarely need to reference the attributes in the rulebook to play. Super excited to get the delve packs."

"With the help of the resources at DungeonCrawler.com the rules were easy to grasp, and after a few games I rarely needed to reference them to play."

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- George Leoniak (awesome quote taken from a later post)

"As a serious gamer (take a look at my extensive collection on the Geek) I highly recommend this game. There is nothing else quite like it currently out there. It is a great solitaire game, not just a game with a solitaire variant."

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- Swampfox01

"It's a video about the CCG Dungeon Crawler. It's in english, even if I'm french native... so please don't be rude on me!!! It'll show you some of the basics of the game :-)."

Watch video...

- Cigal