SNAP Review – Shovel Knight: Dungeon Duels

In 2014, Yacht Club Games released Shovel Knight. This 2D 8-bit side-scroller reminded all of us older gamers of the amazing games of our youth in its graphical style, its silliness, its difficulty. And I loved it.

Since then they’ve put Shovel Knight on practically everything. Honestly, at this point I feel like our new refrigerator might be able to play Shovel Knight.

But today, we’re talking about a specific place where they put Shovel Knight, specifically, the table top.

This is a SNAP review for Shovel Knight: Dungeon Duels.

Game

Shovel Knight: Dungeon Duels is a dungeon crawl with action points and dice rolling published by Panda Cult Games in cooperation with Yacht Club Games. It says it’s for ages 10+ and a game lasts for about an hour.

Art

Elliot tell us about the art in Shovel Knight: Dungeon Duels.

The art in Shovel Knight in general is awesome and everything in Dungeon Duels uses or copies the original art from the game. It looks great.

Plus, they’ve made a ton of 3D figures for all of the knights, bosses, and enemies. It’s so fun to just sit and look at these.

They do a great job in this game making everything look like the 8-bit video game. Even the text in the rulebook looks like what we saw on the screen. The character cards are clear, the boards are easy to understand, and the dice are high quality. I think the way the board works is super cool too, but we’ll talk about that in a minute.

There are nine bosses out of the box and each one has its own special art, figure, and setup. That’s part of why this box is so huge!

Mechanics

Speaking of setup, let’s talk about setting this monster up and how to play. Time for some mechanics!

Setup

Each player takes a knight and their hero card, plus three coins. Then decide on a boss to fight. Each boss has their own AI deck, so shuffle that and put it aside with the Boss’s stat card, miniature, and special Dungeon Tiles.

Shuffle the Equipment, Spawn, and Loot decks separately too.

Get the tile track out and put the START tile on the left side. Put the stack of boss Dungeon tiles on the right side with the four Plains of Passage tiles on top. Then deal those out onto the tile track.

Put treasure tiles face down in a checkerboard pattern on the tiles. And put enemy minis on the spaces with skulls. Draw cards off the spawn deck to find out which minis to put there.

All right. That was a lot. But, now you’re ready!

Rounds in Shovel Knight Dungeon Duels have three phases: The Hero phase, the Enemy phase, and the End of Round phase.

Hero Phase

During the Hero phase, each player takes up to three actions on their turn. They can move (orthogonally only), attack, jump, stand up, or purchase items from Chester the merchant. (He lives in a chest!)

Moving is just what you think, moving one space. If a player moves over a coin or a treasure mound token, they get to flip it and take the reward.

When a player attacks – either melee or ranged – they roll dice equal to their attack. Count up the shovel symbols, subtract the enemy’s defense, and hopefully deal enough damage to kill it! Then they get coins according to the enemy type. You can also attack other Knights, but we won’t cover that here.

Sometimes there are spike pits so players have to jump over them. To do that, move next to a spike pit and roll dice equal to the number of the Knight’s jump stat. If the player gets enough jump icons to jump over a pit, they jump it! If not, they’re instantly defeated. Good grief!

We mentioned Chester the merchant. Sometimes players can use coins they get from killing enemies to purchase items like equipment from Chester. Then players can “slot” their equipment to make their Knight more powerful.

There are also Loot cards which players can get from any chests they find, *or* as something they get when they die as a little helper. These can be played any time for their bonus.

There’s a lot that we’re not really covering here, but hopefully this gives you the gist of what players do on their turns.

Enemy Phase

But, once all of the players go, the enemies get to move. And if they can reach the Knights, they’re gonna attack them.

Evaluating their attack is similar to the way a Knight’s attack works. A player rolls dice equal to their defense value and compares the number of armor symbols they get to the enemy’s attack. If they don’t have enough, they take damage.

End of Round Phase

Once all the enemies have gone, the round is finally over.

Remove the leftmost tile from the board. Any Knights or enemies on it are instantly defeated.

Slide the other three tiles over and put the next tile from the tile stack on the right side.

Put tokens on the new tile as appropriate, including enemies on the spawn points.

Start it over, until you get to the Boss!

It just keeps going, huh?

Yep.

Boss Fight

Once the tile stack runs out, wait in the boss room for everyone to catch up. Then it’s time to fight – who else? – the boss.

Every boss has special movement rules and patterns, explained with “AI cards” and a boss stat card.

We don’t have time to go through them all, but suffice to say, it’s gonna take everyone’s best combined effort to take the boss down!

It’s super rewarding to finally do it, but more than once, we’ve been just mentally exhausted when we finally won.

Again, we are handwaving a lot, but that’s because there is a ton of variety in this game, along with all of those incredible minis.

Expectations

So. What did we expect? The huge box meant we had expectations coming into this, so let’s talk about those.

Asher, you go first. What did you expect from this giant Shovel Knight box?

Well, this was a really big box, so I expected the game to be pretty complicated.

I expected it to be like an RPG, maybe, because when we saw it, there were so many add-on characters.

And with a name like Dungeon Duels, I expected it to be more about fighting each other and less about fighting the enemies.

I personally am not really a huge minis gamer, so the huge box, to me, just meant a lot of plastic. And that’s true, but I really do need to admit it helps the game feel more alive. I also expected a pretty big rulebook, and I got one.

C’mon Dad, it’s only 58 pages!

And I expected it to be hard – because it’s Shovel Knight – which it is. So I guess in all those ways Dungeon Duels really did hit my expectations.

Surprises

But I also had some surprises. Like I said, I figured there would be a lot going on, but I was actually surprised at how much the rules finally did make sense once it all clicked together.

There aren’t really that many models of scoring here. Attacking is like Defending. Jumping is like both of those. They just have different icons for the different things you’re doing.

I also really liked the way the game handled defeat – you lose half your coins but you get a Loot card and you “respawn” on your next turn. The first time we played we didn’t understand this rule correctly, and we thought that if you “died”, you were done. And the game was just super punishing (which kind of lines up with the intellectual property, to be honest).

But anyway, since we only ever played this as a co-op, we always celebrated together, so dying felt like less of a big deal.

I was surprised at the sheer amount of minis. There’s so many!

And also, I was actually kind of surprised that it was so hard.

I was surprised at how short a game can be, once you know how to play.

Honestly, I feel like setting up takes longer than the game would. Because playing the game only takes half an hour to an hour!

Recommended?

Let’s talk about recommendations.

There’s no doubt that if you love Shovel Knight, you should take a look at Shovel Knight: Dungeon Duels. It’s not inexpensive, but there is a ton in the box, and there is a ton of variety. Remember, Shovel Knight is a hard video game, so it makes sense that Dungeon Duels is a hard board game.

But it’s hard in a way that helps you eventually get to the end, even if you feel like you’re banging your head against the wall on your way there.

But if your family loves this 8-bit style of video game or board game, or if you’ve got family who you’re desperately trying to get to the table and they are big video gamers, definitely consider a video game themed board game, and that’s exactly what this is.

Plus, you can’t forget the super cool factor of all of these amazing minis.

It’s true! And there are some expansions too if you somehow run out of things to try in this giant box.

The rules are a lot to figure out to start, but it will make sense once you get there. So we do recommend a parent or someone who loves teaching games start with the rules, or maybe find a how-to-play video. Then you can get to slaying propeller rats and boneclangs! Oh, and look out for Tinker Knight. His tank is rough!

We’re going to give Dungeon Duels 3½ inevitable deaths out of 5.

And that’s Shovel Knight: Dungeon Duels in a SNAP!

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The Family Gamers received a copy of Shovel Knight: Dungeon Duels from Yacht Club Games for this review.

SNAP review music is Avalanche, provided courtesy of You Bred Raptors?