Guild of Dungeoneering operates on the synthetic edge of a few game design trends. It has the mechanical heart of a roguelike. It has a progression of “out of dungeon” upgrades that augment its roguelike core. The combat is driven by a deck of cards that you build through gathering equipment within the dungeons, and yet your initial deck is determined by what kinds of upgrades you have built up in your Guild, that “out of dungeon” system I mentioned above. Sometimes going into a dungeon isn’t a pure roguelike experience, and instead you are presented with a turn-based time trial or a tile-based puzzle that you need to solve.
Oh, and you also build each dungeon turn by turn.
Guild of Dungeoneering is complex. I’ll admit to bristling at that complexity. Despite my love of obtuse mechanics and obfuscated controls in action games, the spiraling multitudes of strategy or tactical games has always frustrated me to no end. I will bounce off of Crusader Kings II all day long, but I’ll stick it out for 3rd person tank controls like you wouldn’t believe. I have a frustration threshold that I reach fairly quickly with some genres of game, and Guild of Dungeoneering could have easily surpassed it and rocketed off into the orbit of Planet Whocares.
Importantly, it didn’t. The game patiently and quickly explains all of its major systems to you, and anyone with a passing familiarity with upgrade systems in games should be able to see how in-dungeon equipment works or how the Guild building upgrade system functions. At the same time, anyone without that passing familiarity could have a hard time. In a purely experiential way, I had trouble identifying the gain and loss of benefits with equipment initially, and the Guild menu will tell you that you’ve done things like “unlock the Apprentice” without telling you up-front what that actually means. It all takes a bit of patience.
What the Apprentice (or the Barbarian, or the XYZ) is is a class that you can choose to enter a dungeon with, and this is quite important. Classes are not merely clusters of weapon or magic proficiencies. The key difference between each class is their starting deck of abilities, and those abilities determine how they will fare against certain kinds of enemies in combat. Combat operates through an enemy choosing a card and the player choosing a card from their hand that plays best against the enemy’s card. Magical and physical attacks are different, you’re each swinging against each other’s health, there are cards to block with, and wait there is also the ability to use cards to draw more cards, and there’s also the ability to strike before your opponent… [… The screams of the damned are heard…]
It’s a tactical system that is intuitive and color-coded and any attempt to explain it through language is wasted because two minutes actually fiddling with the systems make them incredibly apparent. It is excellent design. It feels like Rock Paper Scissors melded with a version of Magic: The Gathering that someone dreamed up after reading the basic rulebook and then playing a game of telephone for about a decade. It works, and it is fun, and there’s some real nail-biting seriousness about it when you and your enemy are both down to a small amount of health each.
Like I said, Guild of Dungeoneering does a great job of synthesizing mechanics that we see getting developed in the current roguelike, post-roguelike, roguelike-like era, but one of the main draws of the game (and the first thing that made me vaguely aware of the game around a year ago) is the core mechanic of building a dungeon as you progress through it. You have a set of cards, and you can play three of those per turn. You can place a dungeon tile (usually a room or hallway), put a piece of treasure in a room, or place a monster. You have to carefully balance these three things in order to get loot, kill monsters to get items and levels, and connect already-existing dungeon tiles to one another to either solve a puzzle or get the Big Bad at the end.