Dungeon Kart

• Designer: Michael Xuereb
• Publisher: Brotherwise Games
• Players: 2-8
• Age: 10+
• Time:  30-60 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link:  https://amzn.to/3YDVpbe 
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Race your way to victory with Dungeon Kart, an all-new game set in the world of Boss Monster. Dungeon Kart transforms the multiplayer mayhem of kart racing into a turn-based tactical tabletop experience. Play as one of the baddest Bosses around while using Spells to disrupt other racers, grab coins, and power yourself up! With a lot of skill and a little luck, you can cross the finish line first and show your opponents who’s Boss!

Unique dashboards allow players to rev up their engines and increase their speed. Be careful though…if you go too fast then you have more chances to run into hazards and obstacles that will cause you to crash or spin out!

Use spells to ensure victory! Spells are items that you can use to power your Boss up or to disrupt other racers! The power of Spells depend on the place of your racer…so be careful as you move along the track since other players are trying to sabotage you!

To start, each player gets a Racer and a dashboard. The dashboard tracks your speed and each has two special abilities on it (different combos on each dashboard).  Additionally, each Racer card has two unique powers that are activated by spending coins. Then, the players decide on a race track, either building one themselves or using a prebuilt one from the instruction manual.  All of the tan tokens (hazards) are placed into the cloth bag, unsurprisingly called the Hazard bag.  Now draw out one of these Hazard tiles for each of the hazard hexes on your track.

Players take turns until someone has crossed the finish line of the track. On each turn, there are four steps:

1] Set speed and gain MP – at the start of your turn, you MUST change your speed one step up or down. You gain the MP indicated by your new position

2] Spend MP to move and do other actions – all the MP must be spent on a turn or else the Racer crashes (your speed is reset to the lowest setting). 

• Move – You can move one hex (cost based on the dots on the terrain being entered). If you run out of MP during a movement, it is OK and you still get that last movement and end your turn there.  If you move into a hex with a coin in it, you gain a coin.  If you move into a space with a Hazard, something bad will happen to you. If you enter a hex with a spell book, you will gain a spell (based on your current position on the track) – as long as you don’t already have one. You can only have one spell at a time.
• Drift – You can drift (one space forward and one to the side), again for the MP on the hex you are ending in
• Turn – You can turn 60 degrees for one MP
• Bump – if you are in the same space as another racer, you can spend 1MP to move them forward or diagonally forward. You can only bump each particular opponent once a turn.  If an opponent is bumped into a terrain or a hazard, that is immediately resolved. 
• Brake – spend 1MP to move your speed setting down 2 spaces.
• [Spell cards] – usually do not cost MP, but at appropriate times, show the spell card and resolve it
• [Racer effects] – each racer has two special effects which are triggered by spending coins

3] Adjust speed due to terrain, braking and obstacles – at the end of movement, you must reduce your speed setting to the level of the most difficult terrain you entered on that turn.

4] End turn

Once all players have had a turn, the round ends. Any triggered Hazards that resolve at the end of the turn now happen. Now, the racers are ranked by how close they are to the Finish line; first by large tile, then by the number of hexes it would take to reach the edge closest to the Finish line.  Any player who has a spell token now claims the appropriate level of Spell Card based on their current standing.  The first player now rotates one position clockwise.

The game continues until the round when someone crosses the Finish Line.  When this happens, finish the current round so that all players have the same number of turns. If multiple players are able to cross the finish line, ties broken in favor of the player with the most MP leftover.

My thoughts on the game

So looking at this game (and the cover art), it is immediately evident – to me, at least – that this game is heavily influenced by Mario Kart, the classic Nintendo video game.  In this analog version, you race from one end of the track to each other, both trying to go as fast as you can as well as wreaking havoc on your opponents with weapons, spells and whatnot.

If you’re into games with customizable tracks and characters, you’ll like all of the possible options available to you.  You can use the prebuilt tracks that come in the rulebook or you can experiment and make whatever sort of convoluted course you like!  In addition, as each character and steering wheel have their own abilities, you can combine things in so many different ways – or let it be random so that you have to learn how to deal with things differently in each game!

The gameplay works fine, and unlike many racing games, play does not go in current racing standing but rather it goes clockwise from the player in front (though you do calculate standings after each turn) – instead, the start player merely goes clockwise and then play continues clockwise.  It works in this game because everyone has spells, weapons, bumping abilities, etc – so it’s fun to have a last placed car rush up and bump the leader off the track!   (Let’s face it, if you weren’t interested in the chaos, you’d be playing something stuffy like Formula De).

Being attacked or bumped off the course is what you should expect for the game.  You can try to plan your turns – but you should also expect to have to change things up on the regular.  If you’re left to your own devices, there is a fair amount of strategy needed to make sure that your speed is in an appropriate range for both your current turn as well as your next turn – as you generally only modify your speed 1 notch from the previous setting.  Of course, you might be planning on a dash down a long straightaway at max speed only to be spun out by an opponent’s spell and have to start your turn down at the bottom of the speed dial…

The components are pretty amazing, and it looks great on the table.  The boards have a bit of shininess to them, but you’ll get used to it – and everyone liked the way the acrylic standees looked as well as the whole steering wheel/player board apparatus.

The rules are…. Well not as good.  I mean, they look great, but they are long winded and not organized in a way that my brain could handle.  It took me multiple reads of the rulebook just to figure out how a regular turn was going to go.  Now that I’ve played it, it all makes pretty good sense, but it definitely took a full playthrough to turn the sixteen pages of text into a working outline in my brain.  (A number of people have told me that it would have been easier to watch a rules video – but this is not something that I regularly do).  After the first game, we also discovered there is an online FAQ which is being updated regularly: https://www.brotherwisegames.com/dungeon-kart-faq

As with many of these games that are inspired by a video game, the question I ask myself at the end of the day is “would I rather play this than the video game”?  For me, it’s a hard no.  A race of Dungeon Kart took over an hour for the amount of action that I would have had in a ninety second race on my Nintendo. For the amount of chaos involved in a high player count game; you really don’t even get to do much planning and strategizing as you’re going to be bumped or spun out more often than not between turns.  For me, if I’m investing this amount of time into the game, I’d rather be able to flex my boardgaming chops a bit more.  If we’re going for chaos, let’s just play Mario Kart on the screen.  That being said, a number of people that I played with loved Dungeon Kart – both for the gameplay as well as the incredible production quality.  Though the game isn’t for me, I’ve already had a number of people give me offers to trade for my copy – so the game clearly has its fans.  As we’re playing a game with karts, the usual statement is more apopros than usual – YMMV. 

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3YDVpbe 

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Justin B (two plays): My five-player game of Dungeon Kart lasted 85 minutes…and none of the other four players would play this a second time. As Dale mentions, great components (and a great storage solution, and the Mario Kart reminders are everywhere. But this didn’t go well with the review group nor with my 8-year-old, who won our two-player game and immediately wanted to do a different game afterwards. It’s hard to get up to top speed in a game where the leaders are always getting sniped from behind, leading to the extra-long playtime.

Mark Jackson (one play): This is yet another game that I would have fallen in love with 30+  years ago, when I had huge chunks of time to play games AND we would play games over and over. (I think some of the speed problems with the game would subside with a regular group of players who understand the system.) But in our world of 2024, with much better racing games available (examples: Downforce, Heat: Pedal to the Metal, Das Motorsportspiel) the game doesn’t move quite fast enough.

Until your next appointment,

The Gaming Doctor