Dungeon Alliance is a strategic card drafting and deckbuilding game, where you take four heroes from a large pool to explore and plunder a dungeon within a turn limited scenario. It is designed to be a competitive game where players are aiming to get the most experience points by the end of the game, however there is a really good built in solo challenge too, which seems the best way to play it.
Selecting or drafting four heroes from a pool to play the adventure, you have a starting deck of twelve cards, three unique cards for each hero. During the game as you defeat enemies you will earn experience which can be spent on drafting better cards, which again are only useable by certain heroes types, so planning your deckbuilding becomes important over time. Heroes and monsters come with statistics for movement, attack, defence and health, and monsters can have modifying abilities on their card. It is the hand of player cards that provide heroes with their unique skills and theme.
Games are normally played over four rounds, and each round has four turns where you will active one of your four heroes by drawing a hand of six cards, until all of your characters have activated. Selecting which hero you can make the most use of and then combining heroes abilities is at the core of the game, and as such it becomes a tactical puzzle. As you explore you will choose new room tiles to add to the dungeon which come with pre-set monsters to fight and earn experience from, and some have challenges to unlock with locked chests and traps. This certainly has the feel of a strategic puzzle, more than a random surprise exploratory dungeon crawl. There are extra quests you can add into your game and a choice of final bosses to fight such as the goblin, undead lich, dark sorceress and a dragon, and each come with their own set of action cards to vary up their turn responses.
The general component quality is pretty good with models that are relatively small and functional but do have decent detailing, and the artwork is also mostly great, although in places some of the monster artwork feels slightly below the general standard. The edging used for the board is also just functional really, and i usually chose to play without it.
Why i chose not not keep it …
The tactical card drafting and playing is the real high point of the game and is a great mechanic as there are many choices each round. Overall the game flirts with greatness as a solo dungeon game, provided you realise it is more a puzzle than a dungeon adventure, and it can be quite a brain burner too. The adventure expansion packs help to add encounters and more theme, but their integration becomes a choice against taking some of the upgrade cards you need, and i would have preferred the story to progress alongside character upgrades. So whilst not quite perfect, this does provide an interesting strategy game, and card drafting is really good, but some of the mechanics overall are on the fiddly side.
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Expansions
There are expansions you can add to enhance or change the gameplay (my additions highlighted green = own, blue = part owned, red = not purchased) :
Champions
A box of four new heroes, a final boss room tile and a new titan enemy to defeat. A good expansion if you want more content or variety without changing the original game much.
Adventure Packs
A series of 4 different adventures which provide a more narrative storyline to your game or campaign. You can draft these story cards with your experience instead of upgrading your character cards. These will add interest to the game and provide new tasks and enemies to defeat. I found i preferred to cheat the rules a little to allow more flexibility on drafting.
Accessories
A painted miniature set was available during the kickstarters, and a neoprene play mat which would be quite a good addition given the rather flimsy jigsaw border of the core box.