I am pleased to present to you the newest game from Star Frog Games – Dungeon Quest! It’s (current) tagline is “The Cooperative Deck Drafting Dungeon Crawling Card Game,” which is a pretty thorough description of what the new game is.
In Dungeon Quest, a team of 1 to 3 players use a character of their choice and starting deck to fight through a series of encounters and eventually defeat boss monsters. After each encounter, they are given the option of add more cards with different powerful abilities in order to tackle increasing challenges.
Now, if you’re asking yourself, “wait, so instead of developing a video game where players play against the game, you’ve developed a card game where players play against the game?” The answer is, yes. Yes we did. Original designs had an option to go head to head, but those didn’t really work out. It wasn’t fun. The best fun was finding new interactions of different abilities, and working with your co-op compatriots to solve the monster encounters before they take you all out.
Dungeon Quest is the first public tabletop game from Star Frog. I’ve spoken about other tabletop projects in the past, but this is the first one that I’ve been happy enough with to continue to develop. It’s part of the “new” direction that I spoke about a few posts ago, and it’s been in continuous development since then. So yes, dear reader (hah!) we did not do the normal Star Frog Games modus operandi of speaking about every little thing that cropped up along the way. Instead I’m going to do a series of Developer Notes posts that walk through the thinking and development of the different game systems. After which we will continue our regularly scheduled programming.
Also, because this is a Star Frog game, well, you can go play Dungeon Quest right now and read the design document if you’d like.
Yesterday I took it out to EsCon to be played by people not involved with its development, and the response from the board game community was enthusiastic. Which, considering the placeholder art / layout and incomplete card set / rule set was good. I also got to put it in front of other game designers, and their comments were really rather helpful, but I’ll talk about that more when we get to those particular Developer Notes entries.
In the meantime, it feels good to be where we are with Dungeon Quest. There’s been a lot of work that’s gone into it already, and a lot more between where we are, the finish line, and the Kickstarter. But I, as always, remain confident. And you, as always, should stick around for the trip.