Dungeon Petz/Dungeon Lords

This will be a double barreled review that, along with expressing my views and opinions on the two games, will also attempt to compare them to each other in order to show some similarities in designs, along with some theory in terms of how strategy games can work at different levels depending on what kind of mechanisms are central to the game. I have been playing these two games a heck of a lot recently and I through the course of the review I will try to answer one question that seems to be omnipresent whenever I ask someone if they are interested in playing the games: Which one should I play first/Which one is easier for beginners?

First of all, a little bit of history: Dungeon Lords came out first, followed by Dungeon Petz and finally by Dungeon Lords: Festival Season (which I will also touch upon). All of these games were designed by who I pretty much consider to be the Boardgaming Jesus, Vlaada Chvatil, designer of other hits such as Space Alert, Galaxy Trucker and one of my all-time favourites, Through the Ages. Both Dungeon Lords/Petz have art from the same artist, David Cochard, which most agree has done a wonderful job at giving both games a real sense of character. Both game are, at their core, worker placement games, but both games provide a unique twist on this basic formula.

Dungeon Lords has the players choose their actions all at the same time and then revealing them in turn order one by one, with only three spaces per action, which means in a four player, someone can get locked out of doing their selected action. On the other hand, Dungeon Petz has the players secretly dividing their imps/gold into groups, with the larger groups going first, although the actual placement of actions is pretty similar to the bog-standard "one worker per space" methods of most other worker placement games.

While in many other worker placement games the action selection is largely the entirety of the game, both Dungeon Lords/Petz make you collect resources/choose actions in order to help you perform damage limitation/prevention within a seperate second phase: in Lords this is the end-of-year combat rounds, while for Petz it is the assigning and fulfilling of needs for the aforementioned pets.

These tend to be largely solitary phases, in which you worry about your Dungeon/Pet Shop and don't worry too much about the actions the other people are doing: this is not to say that the games can be played Solitaire, especially for Dungeon Lords, which is a cut-throat affair, especially within the action selection stage since you can REALLY screw other people if they don't plan correctly. Everyone knows that a large part of the fun of worker placement games is the fun in screwing over other people (something that Caylus has managed to distill down to a fine art) and this aspect is actively encouraged within both games.

Concluding my brief explanation of the basics of the games, how do the games ACTUALLY work when analysing them at a higher level? In order to do this analysis, it will be necessary to take a look at the games in isolation. First of all, Dungeon Lords.

Dungeon Lords attempts to mix several different aspects of gaming genres/rulesets: although the use of worker placement is obviously one of the larger influences on the game, the selection of orders is more akin to role-selection games such as Puerto Rico or Race for the Galaxy, although it mixes elements of both since roles can be both chosen by several players while at the same time only providing limited numbers of slots.

This allows a player to experience an agony of choice (which in extreme cases can cause analysis paralysis) since not only does the player need to work out what immediate/long term needs he has, but he has to track what the other players need as well. Further adding to the complexity of choice, the order in which the actions are chosen also has importance, since all actions are more beneficial if you land on the third spot rather than the first.

This choice is somewhat alleviated by the fact that a player has two action cards 'locked out' each round, but even this mechanism is used to add further complexity, since only the first action chosen will return to your hand, with the other two being locked out next round. It is indeed quite masterful how Vlaada has managed to make the choice of 3 actions out of 6 have such far-reaching implications both in terms of your game and the game that the other players are experiencing. One thing that newbies have often told me when playing the game for the first time is that it's relatively easy to play, but agonizingly hard to actually figure out what to do.

As well as the worker placement/role selection rulesets noted above, Dungeon Lords also features elements of puzzle solving in the form of the combat round, in which it is up to players to work out what the best way to defeat the heroes is. The puzzles are created organically through the course of the game in terms of the choices that you make in regards to monsters/traps/dungeon layout/rooms and the type of heroes that attack your Dungeon. In order to keep things from descending into a straight mathematical puzzle there is one random element that is in place to keep you on your toes in the form of different spells and different levels of damage that the heroes simply get for wandering around the dungeon (called fatigue in game).

One last feature of Dungeon Lords which is worth mentioning is the possibility of death spirals: much like Agricola, certain events can happen that force you to lose resources or lose points/monsters. This can catch out people that aren't prepared for them quite substantially and can cause newbies to pretty much lose if they aren't careful about how they manage their scant resources.

At first glance, such a multitude of different type of concepts would make you think that the game is a mess, an untidy pastiche with little to tie the different mechanisms together (Android, I'm looking at you), but you'd be wrong: they all seem to work seamlessly together. The role selection/worker placement aspects work well together and the way that they are a mere prelude for the puzzle elements later works in often unexpected, wonderful ways.

Dungeon Petz, in some estimation, has much more the flavour of the classic worker placement games, although as mentioned earlier, the group selection allows a much better control of the game's turn order, so people that are last in the turn order don't necessarily get screwed out of something they absolutely need, although  it will likely cost them the ability of selecting other actions they need if they splash heavily on just a couple of large groups.

The group selection also has elements of group-think: I was certainly surprised at the difference in group selection within my regular gaming group and the Play-By-Post game I made of Dungeon Petz. The other part of Dungeon Petz is more crisis management rather than anything else and is hard to describe in terms of other mechanisms since I haven't seen anything much like it in any other game.

The types of needs you play on a pet both determine what they will need (food, pooping, playing etc) and thus the resources that you need to use in order to keep your pet happy, but as well as that, they determine how much your pet is worth and how many points you can get out of that pet. Since you always know what's coming up in the next few rounds, there is an element of control in terms of what pet you get/what cards you play, but there is a strong element of random chance within Petz that is present in order to emulate the simple unpredictability of a pet. People that like the almost deterministic aspects of Lords can be put off by the higher level of random chance that can occur within Petz.

Referring back to my first paragraph, I mentioned that I would explain how different strategy games can work at different levels and this ties in with the fact that I am much, MUCH better at Petz than I am at Lords. This is due to the fact that Lords rewards long-term planning: both in terms of what monters you get, what rooms you get, the heroes you face, the traps you buy etc. Petz, on the other hand, rewards making snap decisions based on the situation at hand, and it is certainly easier for me to do the latter rather than the former.

I tend to make snap decisions which usually are good on the short term but can suffer in the long term and largely this means that I am able to deal with the emergencies that occur within Petz much more easily than the ones within Lords: this is largely because within Lords it is difficult to dig yourself out of a hole that you placed yourself in, with the aforementioned death spirals being possible, while within Petz, although you might lose points, there will never be a situation in which you can lose what you worked for entirely.

In terms of pure psychology, it is clear that the two games attempt to make your brain think and work in different ways, which is why I enjoy both equally: they provide different challenges. As well as that, they both manage to add limited random elements that don't feel as unfair as the profession/minor improvements cards that are present within Agricola, thus increasing the replay-ability of the games.

Responding to the initial answer within this review, it is impossible to truly say which one should be played first since they both utilise their mechanism in such structurally different ways, but at a push, Dungeon Petz would have to be chosen first, simply due to the fact that it punishes slightly less for screwing up, although largely both games can give severe blows (to the ego) if you don't plan your turns properly.

If asked about my own subjective view of the two games and which one I prefer, I couldn't honestly answer at this stage anymore. I used to love Petz because it was the first one I bought and because it felt easier for me to play, but since I have started playing Lords more often, I couldn't decide anymore. They both feature cute, endearing art, boards which look seamless art yet are completely functional, solid rules that reward both elements of strategy and tactics, indirect conflict that can really impact other players and remarkably different gaming experiences contained within a single game.

I couldn't recommend either of them enough. The theme of the games is also strongly tied to the rules of the
game, with both games having flavourful rules that still affect the game by a very large degree. As well as that, the expansion for Dungeon Lords, which basically adds more of everything works well with the game, adding both new features which don't just feel tacked on to the main game.The expansion does, however, make a difficult game into a even MORE difficult games, with some of your decisions having even more of an impact.

There are, however, issues with the games: first of all, the sheer number of components means that it usually takes a long time for both of them to setup. The number of different tokens/pieces/boards is truly staggering and rivals the best efforts by Fantasy Flight Games. As well as that, although both games are solid in terms of rules, it is necessary to have an up-front understanding of them in order to really know how to play: within Lords, it is necessary to explain how the combat works in order for someone to figure out what he needs to be doing within the previous turns. Within Petz, assigning/fulfilling needs of pets is likewise important. It can feel overwhelming to have to learn so many rules up front: I personally prefer to play full games of something from the get-go, although I know that other groups simplify combat rules the first year in order to further ease in newbies to both games. As well as that, and this is one of the constant criticisms I have of Vlaada, the rules for the game are fun to read but aren't easy to use as reference, although the rules in this case aren't as bad as Through the Ages, which has appalling levels of incomprehensibility so far unmatched by any other Vlaada game.These faults, however, are very minor for me and largely don't detract from the gameplay of either game, although it is likely that newbies which don't have anyone to teach them the game might struggle the first couple of times they attempt to play the game.

In the end, it is difficult for me to express just how much fun I have playing these two games. They provide me with the necessary complexity, the strong theme tied to good, solid rules, the visual narrative and the the antagonism/interaction between players that I need in order to like a game and play it over and over again. For these reasons and many of the ones I have outlined above, I give both games 4.5 angry scowling King Philips, with Dungeon Lords reaching 5 if the expansion is included.