I’ve started work on a new board game, this time with a collaborator. The game, Dungeon Rancher, is a push-your-luck game about raising monsters in a dungeon. It involves mining for resources and monsters, building your dungeon, and providing for your monsters. Monsters can be kept or sold after each round – if you keep them, they double in value, but it becomes harder to satisfy their needs.
I used to be indifferent to push-your-luck as a genre, but my mind changed after playing The Quacks of Quedlinburg. I think the great thing about push-your-luck is it provides decisions without an obvious solution; sure, you could compute the probabilities if you tried, but the optimal move is often fuzzy.
Currently, Dungeon Rancher pushes players’ luck in three ways:
- During the mining phase, the player chooses how deep to mine. As they mine they reveal monsters. If they reveal too many, the monsters attack their dungeon.
- When deciding where to house monsters, there is no limit to how many monsters may be housed in the same room. However, if any monster in the room rampages, the player loses all the monsters in that room, so cramming monsters into 1 room is risky.
- Monsters double in value every round, but the risk of them rampaging, damaging their room, and escaping also increases.
One possible issue with this is that both dice and cards are sources of luck in the game, whereas it is generally recommended to use only one or the other. Dice provide a straightforward way to represent an escalating risk. The player needs to roll above a threshold for each monster each round, and that threshold increases along with the monster’s level. Cards are a convenient way to have random encounters with monsters that can then be captured.
Right now, after one playtest, housing monsters has proven to be not that risky since players have little trouble caring for them and are able to build large dungeons. Monsters also do not rampage as much as predicted. The mining phase push-your-luck mechanics are working well, however.
One dynamic of Quacks that we borrowed is that pushing your luck too far is not completely punishing – it offers the player a choice of consequences. In this case, if monsters attack the dungeon the player can either defend the dungeon – abandoning any loot they collected – or keep the loot and allow the monsters to destroy a few rooms. I think this choice is important to lessen the sting of getting unlucky.