Dungeonology: The Expedition Review

Dungeonology is not your typical dungeon crawler. You're not going to be fighting monsters, you'll be studying them. Each player takes the role of a scholar and their students/monster fodder. On your turn, you'll expand the map and do actions. When you move, you'll flip over a tile and add knowledge cubes to it and then do whatever the tile says. These can add more levels to the dungeon or trigger the boss or just force you to sacrifice one of your students. Normal scholar stuff. When you do actions, you'll have the option to add cubes from the tile by beating the stealth score or you can do an espionage action by stealing from another player. When you play for stealth or espionage, other players have the option to play cards to increase the value to force you to play more cards to beat that score. You can also play a card from your hand for its action. These will typically let you move students to the bonfire or pull more from the bag in order to complete the action to let you get interns or cubes without the hassle of your "friends". The main objective of the game is to gain enough knowledge in order to complete your thesis. The thesis acts as a semi-secret objective that you will only learn about when you reach a certain amount of knowledge. The thesis can only be completed when you've gathered enough knowledge and you'll score based on the card. If enough red students are pulled, the game will end as well. Whoever has the highest score is the winner.

The Good: The overall concept of the game works really well. Instead of fighting, you're learning and trying to avoid the enemies as much as you possibly can. It's hysterical that you're essentially throwing a student in the path of the enemy to protect yourself instead. You're the hero of this story, right? The overall quality of the components is very nice. Every tile and player board is double layered and the minis are really unique.

The Okay: The general concept of stealth to gather cubes is fine but I can't say that I'm sold on the concept of other players being able to effect it. The espionage action is fine because you're intentionally screwing other players over but being able to mess with other players who aren't anywhere near you is somewhat unfair. Having the boss only activate on certain tiles is cool but he was mostly non threatening when I played even to the point of benefitting the player being attacked at times.

The Not So Good: Completing your thesis first means you're done for the game. If you're playing with a larger group, you may be sitting for a while. This also doesn't stop other players from padding their score even more and gathering knowledge. The only risk is pulling too many red students. It's like player elimination without the actual elimination. Overall, the rulebook was a bit of a mess as well. It's thorough and provides nice examples of how to play the game but it was really hard to follow in the way it was laid out.

Final Thoughts: Dungeonology was a rare miss for me. There are some really interesting elements at play but there was just not enough action for me. I don't particularly care for the take that element being so prevalent throughout the game and the player elimination concept is always tough to power through, even if you win. I do think that there is a lot of clever card play that can be done and you can make some huge moves. I personally don't care for the game but I can definitely recommend it if you're someone who likes those elements.

Thanks to Ludus Magnus Studio for providing me with a review copy.