One Deck Dungeon Torrent Download [PC]
Elis Riebow
Adventure calls... but you don't always have time to spend hours setting up hundreds of pieces! One Deck Dungeon lets you jump right in to bashing down doors, rolling dice, and squashing baddies with style. By utilizing cards in four different ways (as an encounter, XP, a skill/potion, or a stat-boosting item), all the experience of dungeon delving has been fit into a compact package. You can choose to venture in alone, or bring along a friend. The dragon doesn't care, he's happy to eat both of you! And don't even think about trying to spare him, that's the wrong game entirely.
One Deck Dungeon is a 1-2 player cooperative game. With two sets, you can play with 4 players. Once you know your way around the dungeon, a game takes 30-45 minutes. It might take a little longer if you're learning, or a lot shorter if you jump into a pit of spikes.
HELLO! Would it be impolite if I were to nom on your armor and weapons? That shiny metal looks oh so delicious. Oh -- pardon me, how rude of me not to introduce myself! I am Glooping Ooze, one of the many extremely polite denizens of the dungeons in this area. I even have my own card:
One Deck Dungeon has an uphill battle to capture either of these play experiences, though it tries for a bit of both. Announcing his high concept intentions upfront with the title, designer Chris Cieslik tries to encapsulate as much of the roguelike dungeon-crawling experience as possible in a deck of cards. And some larger cards. And some dice. And tokens.
I've spent the last two weeks playing by the default rules using the "veteran" difficulty (aka no starting buff/debuff) and despite making slow and calculated decisions I found myself losing 2/3 of the games I played. Often it felt like my dice pool was just too limited to counteract the randomness of dice rolls, and despite my attempts to build up my items and skills in varying ratios I often ran out of time and was forced deeper into the dungeon under-prepared.
Variation 1: Before entering the dungeon I would play a "journey" round. Basically a round as if I were in the dungeon, but covering the "Floor 1" portion of the dungeon card so that my only requirements were the challenge blocks on the monster/perils themselves. This created a sort of warm-up round that allowed me to upgrade my character a bit before descending into the dungeon, but also required 4 rounds to be completed before the boss encounter.
Variation 2: This was a more enjoyable variation as it allowed me to "explore" a bit more at my pace. The game rules remain unchanged except that once you descend to the 2nd/3rd floors you have the option to revisit a previously completed floor and replay that floor with only the cooresponding dungeon challenge boxes exposed. E.g. if you go from floor 2 back to floor 1 you move the turn reference card to cover the challenge boxes from floor 2.
The only requirement being that in order to ascend a floor you must roll and place your dice using only colors represented on the exposed dungeon card challenge boxes. Once you place your die according to the game rules you suffer consequences, and if you're still alive you ascend to the previous floor.
If you defeat the Big Bad, you win the game and then you get to record your progress on the accompanying campaign guide! You can level up not just within the dungeon, but between dungeon trips. Every adventure ends up with you striding into the darkness as a freshly minted level one traveller, but you can still give yourself an edge that you build up through your activities.
This is all handled wonderfully via a set of monster/obstacle cards which make up the dungeon, timer tokens which get spent to perform any action and finally via rolling dice for combat, lots of dice! As you explore the dungeon you will turn over cards to reveal monsters or objects which you can choose to face. Each monster or object has a specific requirement of dice, both colour and number, you need to roll in order to defeat it. Any dice you fail to roll will lead to loss of either health, time or both. However surviving the battle gives you the chance to upgrade your character card, be it adding more dice for you to throw, giving you skills to help you convert the dice you have into the dice you need, giving you one time use potions to add even more options to your dice rolling or simply to increase your characters XP enabling you to do even more of the above.
Each level of the dungeon has a time limit in which you have to explore and loot your defeated pro until you have completed 3 levels at which point you will face a boss, hoping that you have upgraded sufficiently to deal with whatever dastardly powers you are up against. Once you have beaten the boss you can move onto the next dungeon, or change character, or redo the dungeon with the same character but using a different skill set. The options are seemingly endless with One Deck Dungeon and there in lies the true success of the game.
The biggest success though for One Deck Dungeon is just how much is included with the app and how much is available as DLC. The base game includes 6 characters and 5 dungeons, each character can be levelled up in 5 different ways which means you can potentially try to crawl the same dungeon with the same character using a different skill set 5 times. Now multiply that by the 6 starting characters and you begin to see just how much there is for you to do with One Deck Dungeon. This is all before you even consider the downloadable expansions which add 8 new characters and a bunch of new dungeons, which is a tonne of new content for an already stellar line up. This game has me coming back time and time again as I try to complete every dungeon with every character and it is a sign of how enjoyable the game is that each time it feels fresh.
The mobile version of One Deck Dungeon unfortunately lacks one feature that its physical counterpart has: Tracking of which of the game's playable heroes have successfully completed which of the game's available dungeons. This feature of the physical game adds a lot of replayability, as you can work towards having a particular hero fully clear the game.
To address this, I've created a digital score sheet for One Deck Dungeon! Based on Google Sheets, it tracks which dungeons you've completed with which heroes, on which "challenge tier" (difficulty level), and displays your overall progress clearing the entire game with each hero. Here's my current progress, as shown on the score sheet:
ODD (One Deck Dungeon) lets you play as adventurers going deep into the levels of a dungeon, getting loot and items along the way as you fight creatures and avoid traps, to end with a big boss fight on the last level.
Mechanically, the game is pretty neat. The dice rolling feels a bit random, but items progressively bring mitigation and it gets more tactical as you dive into the dungeon: with each level, monsters get a bit stronger, but your character as well, with more and more options to mitigate the randomness of the dice.
The fun of One Deck Dungeon is building up your character with different items, skills, potions, or adding levels and seeing if you built the perfect killing machine to make it to the boss monster on level 4 of the dungeon. Kill the boss, you win. Anything but, you lost.
Finally won with the rogue; I clicked quick game just to see what would happen, and apparently it throws you a random character in a random dungeon. Still wish this lived on my phone, but otherwise a great game.
Based on first impressions most people will likely think that One Deck Dungeon is just a simplified dungeon crawler. In many ways you would be right as that was the goal of the game. The final product is so much more than just a simplified dungeon crawler though which is one of the main reasons I think it is a fantastic game.
At its core I would say that One Deck Dungeon is a dice rolling game. While the game is also a card game and has dungeon crawling elements, the gameplay ultimately boils down to rolling dice. The ultimate goal of the game is to roll dice in order to meet the various challenges presented by each of the encounter cards. Generally speaking the higher you roll the better. The game allows you to combine dice in various ways though as well as use special abilities in order to re-roll or improve dice rolls. These can be used to improve your chances of completing all of the challenges. In a way the game kind of feels like a Yahtzee style game. Ultimately much of your success relies on rolling the right numbers on your dice.
Where the game really differentiates itself from most dice games is in the fact that you grow your character as you explore. This creates a really interesting element to the game as time actually plays a role in the game. Time is represented by discarding cards from the encounter deck. Managing your time is important as you have to balance between making your character stronger while also not hanging on for too long that you take too much damage or possibly even die. When you choose which action to take each turn you need to balance between trying to make your character stronger while also avoiding taking too much damage.
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