Dinky Dungeon

• Designer: Shun Taguchi, Aya Taguchi
• Publisher: Jelly Jelly
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 10+
• Time: 15 minutes 
• Amazon affiliate link: 
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

You are an adventurer who came to this island under the king’s orders. Unfortunately, you are a pretty lame adventurer. While in a tavern and having a hard time finding the courage to enter the dungeon, you come up with a good idea. “Let’s hire other adventurers to go in my place !”   Dinky Dungeon is a simple card game where a turn consists of drawing a card and playing one of your two cards.  Use your best judgment and employ cunning tactics to outperform your opponents, conquer the dungeon, and earn its riches – but be careful! Earned rewards can be stolen by others…

The game is made up of two card decks – an 18 card Adventurer deck as well as a 36 card Dungeon deck.  The Dungeon cards are shuffled and placed in a face down deck.  The Adventurers are shuffled and each player is dealt 2 cards, and each chooses one to keep and the other is randomized back into the deck.  This new deck is placed on the table and a 4 card display of Adventurers is then made.

Each turn consists of three steps:

1] Choose one of the four adventurers from the display to add to your hand

2] Play an adventurer from your hand. Announce the character that you are playing (as some adventurers attack other players and the Scapegoat card can defend against it) and then discard it.  Then resolve its card effet (written at the bottom of the card); each card has its own ability:

• Draw dungeon cards as rewards
• Gain cards from the discard pile
• Take rewards from other players
• etc

3] Refill the display to four cards

The game continues until someone reaches the specified victory point barrier (16pts for a 4p game) or the dungeon deck is depleted; at which point the player with most points at that time wins.

My thoughts on the game

Shun and Aya have made a number of small games that I adore (Little Town, Sheep and Garden), so I was very interested in seeing Dinky Dungeon. The premise here is simple – from your hand of 2 cards, try to figure out how to get the best treasure out of the dungeon deck.  All of the characters have actions that can be powerful at the right time, so it’s all about timing here.

You’ll need to keep an eye out on what other people are doing, what cards have been played and discarded, etc.  Many of the cards manipulate the discard pile, so it’s good to know what is in each of those.

The game plays out super quick. An individual turn rarely takes more than a minute, and those Dungeon card points add up quickly – so it’s not long before someone is in striking distance of the VP target. In my games so far, we have always had a winner on the VP criteria; though a late Magician or Assassin could definitely cause the game to make it all the way through the Dungeon deck.

The game is quite simple as you choose your adventurer for the turn and then do it.  We had some slow going in our first few games due to some card typos (some of the monsters do not have their level printed on them, etc) – but once we got the hang of it – this is a ten to fifteen minute deck diving experience.  Given the small physical size of the game, it packs a pretty good density of gaming fun.

Until your next appointment

The Gaming Doctor