Tiny Epic Dungeons Review

Tiny Epic Dungeons is by far the most ambitious Tiny Epic title that I've played. In this cooperative dungeon crawler, you control 1 of the 8 heroes all with varying stats. You'll set up the dungeon and randomly select a boss. You won't know who it is until you reach them however. When you've set up the dungeon, you can use your movement points to discover new rooms and move throughout. When you discover a room, it may be filled with goblins or other monsters that you'll need to defeat to keep going. Combat is pretty simple. Roll the set amount of dice and the enemy die and if your attack value is higher than the defense value, you'll do damage. Then the enemy counters from their die. There's also rooms filled with traps or treasures that you'll need to perform skill checks for. Once you've defeated all of the minions, you can unlock the bosses room (if you've found it). The boss fight plays similarly to the rest of combat with some changes depending on who you fight. You'll need to lure them out of their lair and over to the altar tokens so you can continue to deplete their health. Once you kill the boss, you've won. Sounds easy, right? It's not. If at any time there's too many goblins on the board, you lose. If you run out of turns, you lose. If you can't explore because there's no open corridors, yep, you lose.

The Good: Gamelyn Games continues to blow me away with how much they fit into such a small box. There's a bunch of cards and wooden bits. Oh, also there's minis! How they managed to fit 8 minis in this box is insane to me. There's also a mini expansion in there as well. Also, there's another expansion that gives you 8 more minis and some more bits and bobs. This is a lot of game that can be played in a relatively short amount of time once you know what you're doing. Obviously, with as many characters and bosses there's a ton of different games you could end up playing.

The Okay: The manual is really hard to follow. I don't know if it was the layout or if I was sleep deprived when I played it but I had a really hard time with this one. Gamelyn did partner with Dized to have a much more interactive manual but this isn't something that I can use as a go to any time I want to play.

The Not So Good: I'm not the biggest fan of the torch track. I didn't think the game really needed to be on a timer with the play time for the game. I understand that it's what causes enemies to trigger but I think it could have just been removed. I'm not sure I was sold on luring the boss out to get them to the altars so you can continue to do more damage. It's not the worst mechanic in the world but I wasn't sold on it.

Final Thoughts: This for me was a rare miss for the series. I've only played a handful of these games and I've enjoyed them all. I didn't hate the game at all by any means. There's a lot of really nice elements at play and the quality is incredible. I find myself still wanting to play this using a different combination of characters and fighting different bosses. This is a really nice dungeon crawler with a bit of a learning curve but it's also very satisfying when you win.