I picked up a copy of Super Dungeon Explore a few days ago and I’m here to tell you this game is hot! It’s not cheap though and so I wanted to break down some of my feelings about the game for you guys.
First of all I was very surprised to open the box and find all of the pieces un-assembled.
You are honestly looking at hours of building before you can even think about playing Super Dungeon Explore.
This was a project I tackled with my son Gabe and together we spent two nights (maybe 5 hours) assembling everything. Especially frustrating was the fact that a few of the models including the big Dragon Boss simply did not fit together correctly. I’ve read online that lots of people are having the same problem. In the end we got everything built except the dragon. I’ve heard you can run him under hot water and then try and bend his bits into place but I have not done that yet.
Honestly at this point I was pretty sick of Super Dungeon Explore and didn’t really have any interest in playing but Tycho told me he’d seen a very good review and so I decided to give it a try. Imagine my surprise when I played it and thought it was well worth the hours of frustrating assembly!
The point of Super Dungeon Explore is to re-create the feeling of a video game hack and slash in a table top game. So one person will play the “Consul” and control all the bad guys while the other players pick up the role of classic heroes like elven ranger, Human Paladin and Dwarf Warrior. The job of the Consul is to assault the party with wave after wave of beasts the way you might feed branches into a chipper shredder. The entire time hearts and potions are popping out of the baddies and the players are racking up treasure.
Mechanically the game uses opposed rolls and multiple sets of dice. You’re trying to get more stars then your opponent and so blue dice are decent but red dice are better and green dice are incredible just because they have varying numbers of blank sides and sides with more stars. A characters attack might tell you to roll 2 blue dice while a monster's armor might be one red and one blue dice. This makes gear super fun as you get a sword that lets you add one red die to your attack roll or maybe a shield that adds a green die to your armor. The system is so smart and easy to pick up that my son Gabe who is seven had no trouble grasping it but it also kept a table full of adults entertained.
Beyond the fun mechanics the design is just incredible. Once you get all these little bastards built you’ll be amazed at how awesome they all look. The characters all come un-painted and there is nothing stopping you from leaving them that way. Already though I am hungry to paint some of these heroes. They just look so awesome!
If you are looking for a more complete review of SDE I highly recommend checking out this great video review. I think in the end we both came to the same conclusion. Building all the models sucks, but the end result is well worth the time investment.
-Gabe out
