Guild of Dungeoneering: you build the dungeon, the hero decides the rest

Fans talk up the luck and the humour as a package deal; detractors say chance calls too many of the shots for anyone to label it strategy.

The dungeon is yours. The hero isn't.

You don't pick where the hero goes. You lay the dungeon out from cards — rooms, monsters, blessings, curses, treasure — and then the adventurer decides whether to push on, back off or fight, making their own calls while you just watch to see whether the trap you set was worth anything.

Between dungeons, the game changes hands: you run the guild, build new rooms to draw in different adventurer classes, and stock the decks with stronger items. That is where the strategy lives — in the other half, luck and the adventurer are in charge.

This edition gathers into a single package the content that used to live in separate expansions, Pirates Cove and Ice Cream Headaches, plus classes, monsters, quests and chests that were missing from the original release on 14 July 2015. There are also hairstyles and accessories for dressing up the adventurers, victory traits to make them last a little longer, and a new soundtrack with new lines — the bard still has a dry word for anyone who marches their adventurers to their death.

The studio has its eye on the next game

Colm, who founded Gambrinous, wrote in person to mark the game's 10 years. The same piece let slip what comes next: a new game, Eyes of Hellfire, already in production.

The piece after that brought the first look at the project: Eyes of Hellfire arrives in early access in August, and the studio is working with horror publisher Blumhouse Games — a pairing Gambrinous treats with some amusement, not yet sure it will work out.

Earlier, on 14 March 2022, Gambrinous was still tinkering with this game: it added a harsher mode in which each adventurer exists only once in the guild — lose one and it stays lost. That was the last big change the studio announced for the title; the energy in its more recent posts sits elsewhere.

The bard, a kind streak of luck, and players glued for hours

On Steam, where the game sells and where these reviews come from, a player at 58 hours describes a blend of chance and board-game thinking: characters who don't survive forever, wrapped in a cartoon look that recalls the paper on a tabletop RPG table, with a bard whose songs follow every win, every loss and every recruitment. It is the same soundtrack that hooked a player past 60 hours, alongside oddball recruits like a drunken pirate and an ice cream monk — a cast as strange as the very idea of letting the hero make its own choices.

One person with 28 hours on the clock finished the base material alone in about 12 hours and would rather not measure the game against heavier card games: for them it works better as a way in than as the high point of the genre.

Not everyone who recommends it leaves it there. For a player at 37 hours, the trouble isn't luck, it's the guild: there is no convenient way to look at each adventurer's deck outside the dungeon, characters grow little beyond battle scars, and you can neither dismiss the ones who have outlived their use nor undo a room you built in the wrong place. You feel it quickly: the urge to reorganise the guild runs into a game that won't allow it. The recommendation stands all the same — with a caveat.

Where one player's charm turns into another's despair

The same decision left to the hero that thrills some keeps others awake at night. At 3 hours played, one person reports watching their own adventurer die without ever having drawn a defence card, and finds the attacks stay weak even after levelling up — for them the idea is good but wasted, because both laying out the dungeon and fighting in it hang on luck alone, never on strategy.

The complaint isn't about the humour or the art — nobody argues with those. It is about the core of the game: if you don't choose the hero's path and the battle cards come shuffled, what exactly are you controlling? For those who like it, the answer is the guild and the preparation. For the person who quit at 3 hours, the answer is nothing — and watching isn't playing.

Who a self-directing guild is for

Anyone who enjoys setting the stage and seeing what happens — picking classes, testing card combinations, laughing at the bard's lines — will find hours of entertainment here, provided they ask it for no more than it promises to be. Anyone who needs to decide every move their own character makes will hit the same wall as the player who quit at 3 hours: here, control ends where the dungeon begins.

Worth keeping in mind, too: the most recent attention at Gambrinous goes to another project, Eyes of Hellfire — which changes nothing about what this game delivers, but does explain why fresh material for it has stopped coming.