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Dungeons

Every rule of a dungeon, in one place. Back to the Compendium

Entering a dungeon

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  • Dungeons live inside a game: there is no dungeon to play on its own, away from a game.
  • In a Dungeons game, when a hero steps onto an unexplored ruin, the game asks what you want to do instead of fighting it for you.
  • The prompt has three choices: Play it, Auto-resolve and Not now.
  • Play it lets you pick who goes down: your hero and up to 3 more units from the stack on the ruin, 4 in all. Everyone you leave behind garrisons the ruin tile. The party goes down onto the dungeon's own level of the board.
  • No more units can be sent down to a party already below: a ruin cannot be entered again while its party is down there.
  • Auto-resolve plays the whole dungeon at once with the party the game picks, the strongest units that fit with a hero first, and your turn goes on. Your hero can still die.
  • Auto-resolve fights a room only when the party is at least 1.3 times as strong as the guardians there, and it goes down a floor only while the party has at least 60% of the hit points it started with.
  • The player that plays for you under Auto-resolve is the same one that plays AI seats.
  • Computer opponents never walk a dungeon: they always auto-resolve it.
  • Not now walks away without ending your turn and without using the ruin up.
  • While your hero still stands on the unexplored ruin, you can choose again.

The dungeon level

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  • A dungeon is a second level of the same board, drawn on the same screen. There is no separate dungeon screen and no room-by-room crawl.
  • Each ruin has its own map, separate from every other ruin's, and each of its floors is a level of its own.
  • While a party is below, one labeled button moves you between the ground board and the dungeon: Go to the dungeon on the ground, Back to the ground board in the dungeon. With parties in more than one place, the button names the ruin, and the floor too.
  • How deep a ruin goes is its tier: from 1 floor to 3 floors.
  • Walls stop every unit, flyers included.
  • Guardians stand still at the centre of their room. Marching onto them is a fight, with the same battle report as any other.
  • There is no torch and no flee: the party moves on its own movement, a turn at a time, and walking past guardians, or away from them, costs nothing.
  • A party below stays there when your turn ends, and moves again on your next turn like any army.
  • A room's chest, its sage, shrine or forge, the stairs down and the way out are tiles on the board. March the party onto one and stop there to use it; a march that only crosses one on the way somewhere else leaves it alone.
  • A chest opens only once the guardians of its room are beaten. Stepping onto it earlier tells you so and leaves it shut.
  • The stairs open once the guardian of the stairwell is beaten, and take the party to the entrance hall of the next floor.
  • Every floor's entrance hall has a way out. Stepping onto it brings the party back up to the ruin, where it joins the units it left on the tile.
  • There is no end screen: what the party finds and how the dungeon ends are told in the game's log and notices, like anything else.

Your army below

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  • The party below is controlled exactly like an army on the ground: you select it, march it, fight with it and give it the same orders.
  • You split it the same way: pick the units that march, and they become an army of their own on the level.
  • March one part onto another to merge them, up to the 8-unit limit every army has.
  • Disbanding below works as on the ground: the units are gone, and a disbanded hero's items pass to a hero in the same army or are sold.
  • A standing order below walks the army on toward its rally point at the start of each of your turns, and halts short of guardians as it halts short of an enemy on the ground.
  • Heroes cast below as they do on the ground. A Scrying Eye reveals the dungeon around the tile you name; a bolt has nothing to strike, because guardians are neutral garrisons; a Gatestep needs a city, and a dungeon has none.
  • Parts of a split party can stand on different floors. One that follows another down the stairs joins it at the bottom if it is still standing there.
  • One part can take the way out alone while a hero still leads another below; the dungeon goes on. When the last hero comes up, the rest of the party comes up with them.
  • A dungeon needs a hero below to lead it. When no hero is left below, because the last one fell or was disbanded, everyone still down there climbs back out with what the party won.

Dying

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  • If an army below loses a fight, every unit in it dies. When no part of the party is left below, the dungeon ends on the spot.
  • Dying forfeits the loot: everything the party carries is lost with it.
  • A wiped party does not use the ruin up: it stands unexplored, and another hero may try it.

Banking and forfeiting

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  • Gold, items and allies the party finds are carried, not banked, until it leaves.
  • Leaving banks everything you carry.
  • You can leave at any time, even with guardians in front of you, by marching onto the way out.
  • If the whole party dies, everything you carry is lost.
  • The gold you bank is paid into your treasury.

Auto-balancing

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  • The guardians' strength, how much each floor deeper adds to it, and the gold in every cache all follow the points of the party you take in: a small party meets weaker guardians and smaller caches, a strong one meets stronger guardians and richer caches.
  • A party's points are the gold cost of its units, plus what the hero has gained over a fresh level 1 hero in levels and carried items. A fresh hero is worth nothing, and so is an ally won from a ruin.
  • A party worth 60 points meets guardians at 0.21 times their unscaled base strength and finds 0.72 times the gold; a party worth 300 points meets 0.45 times and finds 1.20 times.
  • Scaling leaves the layout, the room kinds, how many guardians stand in each room and the floors alone, and a party is still at most 4 units.
  • It follows the party you choose for Play it; the numbers on the ruin prompt describe the party Auto-resolve would send.
  • Scaling does not make a dungeon safe: a party can still be wiped.

No score, no leaderboard

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  • Dungeons have no score, no ranking, no leaderboard, and no replay or review of any kind.
  • A dungeon cannot be shared or played again: it lives only in its game, and there is no code or link to send anyone.