Guild of Dungeoneering Preview

On my flight to the first ever PAX South I flipped through the pages of the latest (yes I still get the magazine, sometimes 10% off used games is just worth the paper) and perused the latest indies that were being featured in some of the earlier pages of the magazine. Guild of Dungeoneering was one of them, spoiler alert and warning, the magazine does not sell this game well enough. So, since I managed to get first hand experience with it at PAX South, let me set the record straight with you, Guild of Dungeoneering is amazing.

The short, if you can explain Guild of Dungeoneering in short, it’s a dungeon building RPG where you create a dungeon in hopes that your hero will eventually make it to the end goal, the coveted chest full of loot goodness. The more detailed explanation is where Guild of Dungeoneering really shines.

Random cards with room pieces, enemies, and loot are dropped for each move, and this is how your dungeon is built. The building aspect of Guild of Dungeoneering is an homage to the old D&D dungeon master creating with graph paper. Pipe-Dream like gameplay then comes into place as you attempt to map out a perfect path to the end of the dungeon. Sounds interesting I know, but it gets better.

As I watched my dungeon grow into a labyrinth of walls and monsters I noticed my hero wouldn’t move where I was attempting to click him to. I then spoke with Colm Larkin the developer of Guild of Dungeoneering and this is where he dropped the bomb on me, you don’t actually control your hero, you influence him. My brain exploded. You drop loot in rooms you think he would traverse to and maybe drop an easier enemy below a harder enemy to influence his decision on who he’d rather battle. It’s quite brilliant and adds to the old luck of the dice RPG style gaming. Colm was also quite humble also, I’m telling him how amazing his concept is and he points out I should put on my headphones because the soundtrack is pretty good to. It is.

Guild of Dungeoneering is highly addictive with a fantastic new concept and classic soundtrack, expect it on PC and MAC in May with plans of hitting tablets later in 2015, something I’m hoping for because it would run beautifully on tablets, like it was just meant to be.