Guild of Dungeoneering Lets You Doodle Your Own Dungeons - Preview
by Jake Weston , posted on 18 June 2015 / 4,136 Views
Out on E3’s show floor today I had the chance to check out Guild of Dungeoneering, a unique blend of dungeon crawler and trading card game, with an equally unique doodle-inspired art style that would look right at home in a bored high schooler’s notebook (and I mean this in the best possible way).
Guild of Dungeoneering puts players in charge of the eponymous guild, selecting people to venture forth into dungeons on a quest for loot to expand your guild. However, dungeon-spelunking isn’t done in the traditional manner - instead players draw cards with new path layouts, and players can choose which ones to place to either get them to treasure more efficiently or put him or her in the path of enemies to level up.
Combat is also carried out in a card-based fashion. Players fight one enemy at a time, and during each turn both the player and enemy draws three cards. The game tells you which card the enemy will play, so strategy comes from attempting to choose the best cards to counter or minimize the effects of your opponent’s move.
For example, your opponent may play a card that does 2 damage, and you play a card that blocks 2 damage, resulting in a net of 0 damage. Easy enough. However, where the risk/reward factor comes in is when there’s no clear obvious choice of one card over the other. Do you do 2 damage to your enemy and take 2 damage yourself, or do you attempt to block their attack? While the mechanic sounds simple at first, you end up finding yourself making hard choices as the cards in your deck begin to dwindle and enemies start getting stronger.
Once you’re done exploring dungeons you are taken back to your guild headquarters, where you can use your spoils to expand. While I didn’t get much time to examine this feature, it appears that you can expand your guild to include new rooms, such as an armory and also a graveyard for your fallen dungeon explorers (death for your guild members is permanent).
Guild of Dungeoneering definitely looks like it will appeal to those looking for a unique spin on a tried-and-true genre, and I’m looking forward to seeing how development has progressed when it releases for PC on July 14th.
