What do you get when you take Skull and add monsters, heroes, stats, and dungeons? A significantly worse game, apparently. Welcome To The Dungeon is a shallow attempt to add theme and additional flavor to a classic game that needs neither. Nerd versions of good games like this are embarrassing. Not every design needs a fantasy action re-theme, people. Worse still, every mechanical change Welcome To The Dungeon makes to Skull‘s system hurts the experience. So not only is it a lazy re-theme, it’s also a massively inferior design. Not the best combo!
To begin a game of Welcome To The Dungeon the players collectively choose 1 of 4 brave heroes and lay them and their unique set of equipment tiles in the center of the table. Then, a deck of monster cards is shuffled and placed nearby. That’s it. Hey, at least the set up is quick! Players take turns by drawing cards from the deck and deciding to either add the monster to the dungeon, or keep the card and remove one of the hero’s equipment tiles. If a player doesn’t want to draw a card they may pass instead. When all but one player have passed, that player must send the hero into the dungeon with whatever equipment tiles are left. One at a time, the monster cards that have been added to the dungeon are flipped and resolved. Monsters deal specified amounts of damage to the hero unless a piece of equipment is still in effect that can dispatch them safely. If the hero makes it to the end of the dungeon without dying, the controlling player wins a point. Otherwise, they take a hit. Two points get you the win, two hits get you eliminated.
Welcome To The Dungeon takes the system of a pure bluffing game and adds a bunch of crap to it that turns it into a boring probability puzzle. It even provides you with a little reference card listing every monster in the deck, so you can calculate your odds to your heart’s content. You will know a certain percentage of the monsters in the dungeon, depending on player count and also how many times you opted to remove a piece of equipment instead, so it really just boils down to a simple press-your-luck decision every turn: keep going or bow out? The removal of Skull‘s bidding phase, which already functioned as a dedicated press-your-luck pivot point with naturally increasing stakes, is sorely felt. Here, the placing and bidding phases have been merged into one, muddying the clarity of intent that keeping the decisions separate provided. And although you know some information in Welcome To The Dungeon, it’s never enough to do anything very tactical or interesting. You might dump an extremely powerful monster in the dungeon then on your next turn remove the only piece of equipment that can safely take care of him, anxiously hoping the game gets back around to you so you can pass. Unfortunately, that is the absolute apex of the game’s decision space. I just mapped out the most interesting thing you can do in the entire game in a single sentence, and I’m not exaggerating.
Where the game truly falls flat on its face is the end-of-round dungeon crawl sequence. Watching a player flip and resolve monster cards while mumbling about which equipment they’re going to use is a snore. Compared to Skull‘s galvanizing tile-flipping round finale, this is an unmitigated failure. In Skull you are enticing the player to flip your tiles, playing with their minds, bluffing, socializing. In Welcome To The Dungeon you sit there and wait for it to be over because there’s no way to affect it. What the heck, man!? Why would you take the most exciting and social part of a game and swap it out for a crappy, almost entirely deterministic solo run? Talk about misguided design decisions, geez.
Nerd Skull never needed to exist, especially not in such a debased and distorted form. These designs that are just worse versions of games that already exist with themes tacked on really get on my nerves. If a theme does not heighten the social impact or meta of a game or make its mechanics more intuitive then it is pointless. Do the designers of these games really think they approved upon the originals? There’s no way. So why make a new version of something if it’s not an improvement? You don’t. Or at least, you shouldn’t. I’m sure Welcome To The Dungeon was a cute prototype, but it is way too half-baked to stand on its own in the crowded tabletop space. Everything about it that works was taken directly from Skull, and everything about it that’s actually its own doesn’t.
Welcome To The Dungeon gets a rating of TWO out of FIVE, indicating it is NOT RECOMMENDED.