Dice, Dice, Baby! (Review of One Deck Dungeon)

Total Plays: 20 solo, 2 cooperative

This was a game I picked up because it was making a lot of noise on the solo guild at boardgamegeek.com.  This is a dice pool building game - you start with certain dice and as you play the game you add new dice to your pool.  You use this pool of dice to perform various actions.

In the case of this dice pool building game, you will be venturing into a dungeon and encountering two types of cards: monsters and traps.  You will choose to open a door and then you will have an encounter.  Whether its a monster or a trap, the encounter card (along with the dungeon card that is a part of every encounter) will identify what type of dice you need to roll to defeat it.
There are four different types of dice in this game: strength (yellow), agility (pink), magic (blue), and wild (black).  After you place your dice on an encounter and defeat it, you can either use the card as experience (which helps you level up and gain wild dice and more potions), a skill (which allows you to manipulate dice after they've been rolled), or as an item (which adds more dice and health to your character).

The deck of encounter (door) cards also doubles as the timer.  Every action uses up time, which causes you to discard cards.  When the deck is depleted, you must venture to the next level of the dungeon.  After three levels, you will encounter the boss of the dungeon which you will use your beefed up dice pool to defeat.

There is a small campaign mode you can play where you gain points from defeating different types of dungeons and adding special abilities and cards to your character for subsequent quests.

COMPONENTS
One of my favourite things about this game is that the characters you get to choose from are all strong female characters who are not hyper-sexualized.  Two of my biggest pet peeves in board games (and the world) are a lack of strong female protagonists and an overabundance of boobage when females are included.  Very happy about the direction they took.  The artwork is nice as well, I like how they've represented everything else, although it seems a little plain.  The cards seem like ok quality, but I'd like to see them a little sturdier.  I really like the tiny little dice - they're so cute! 4/5

RULES
The rulebook is short and sweet and laid out pretty nicely.  The rules are easy to grasp and it only takes a few minutes to get into the game.  It takes more time to master how to win than it does to understand how to play. 4/5

GAMEPLAY
The main point of the game is to acquire more dice and also find ways to manipulate your awful dice rolls.  Sometimes, the dice just suck and you die.  Since you're rolling a handful of dice they usually aren't all bad, but, it happens (screw you probability...).  Then, when you defeat a card, you have to choose how to use it: skill, item, or experience.  The gameplay is simple and easy to pick up, but there are some choices to make about what kind of player you're going to be.  Focus on one attribute or spread it out?  Focus on items?  Focus on skills?  I haven't played many dice pool building games, so I don't really know how this one stacks up, but I feel like this game falls a little flat.  I feel like the gameplay takes you out of the mood and it doesn't seem very thematic. 3/5

REPLAYABILITY
This game should have a lot of replayability because there are several characters to choose from with different skills and stats, five different dungeons to choose from, different encounters each game, and different ways you can level up/modify your character.  But, for me at least, it starts to feel pretty same-y quite quickly.  The first handful of plays were really good, but it started to feel old.  But, that could just be me. 3/5

FUN
I had a lot of fun playing this game at first, but it's worn off on me.  Maybe I've just found more games that I like better or maybe it just doesn't have the longevity that other games have.  This is a solid game with good rules, components, and gameplay.  But, as I mentioned before, I feel like I get taken out of the them, I don't feel immersed in the dungeon.  That lessens the fun for me. 6/10

TOTAL SCORE: 20/30

While this game didn't scratch my itch, I love the direction they took with their artwork.  I hope more fantasy games take a page from their book as to how to represent women.