Dungeon Crawls contain multitudes. At least, that’s what I tell myself as I send my thief to knife another player in the back. Normally constrained to co-op experiences, branching out into the player vs player vs monster world can bring a sharp, often hilarious, dynamic to your table. A little while back, we covered Arcadia Quest, an excellent semi-co-op dungeon delver. The games in this piece, starting with Pathfinder Arena, follow a similar template, where everyone’s out for glory, and the easiest way to get it is to remove your competition.
A Sword and Sorcery Slugfest
Another high fantasy hack-and-slash-and-spell game, you might say? Well, Pathfinder Arena (Flavio Anzidei, Giorgio Serafini, Roberto Tibuzzi) doesn’t hide its fantasy origins, being part of the huge Pathfinder D&D universe, but this game departs fast from familiar confines. First and foremost, Pathfinder Arena dispenses with giant rulebooks, campaign-oriented play, and reams of lore. This is a game that gets onto the table and starts playing fast, with a ruleset easy enough to grasp and a sub-two-hour playtime to encourage easy run-backs.
And you’ll want to give this one a few shots, at least, because Pathfinder Arena presents a wide decision space. Your goal is to get victory points, but not through collecting gold, fulfilling recipes, or rebuilding some ruined city. Instead, you’ll be slaying monsters and getting the beasties you don’t slaughter to do your dirty work for you. See, Pathfinder Arena lays out its labyrinths on a grid of shifting tiles. Those tiles might have obstacles, traps, and treasure, but if
you’re doing it right, they’ll have monsters too.
On your turn, between thwacking creatures, upgrading your hero, and pondering just who built all these dungeons in the first place, you’ll be able to zip tiles here and there. That hulking ogre might mash your buddy’s mage, so why not shift the brute over? When the ogre attacks, you’ll get points based on how much damage the monster deals. Simple, satisfying.
Combat here could be a dice-chucking fest—something of which I am quite enamored—but Pathfinder Arena swings different, preferring abilities, equipment, and stats to drive a deterministic damage model. Given how crucial damage is for getting points, this all makes sense, and you shouldn’t wander into a fight wondering how it’ll play out. In other words, our poor ogre might get immolated on our buddy’s turn, but we’ll score a few points first.
Then again, if our pal knows he’s no match for the ogre, he can sprint away rather than pray for dice luck and have a miserable time when the rolls go sour.
Players don’t directly attack each other outside of monster mauling, making Pathfinder Arena less of a direct battle game and more a puzzly dance. Can you get the gear, the stats, that you need to start slaying the monsters before they obliterate you? With two players, planning out moves isn’t too bad, with the battle becoming a duel on shifting terrain as you send creature proxies after one another (or slip vulnerable creatures away so you can score points for their slaughter instead). At a full four, though, Pathfinder Arena embodies dungeon chaos, where the board state will change enough to encourage wild whimsy rather than analysis paralysis. Which you’ll prefer is subjective, but both beg attempts.
There are secondary bits and bobs here too, like a pure cooperative variant—which allows for solid solo play, ability card drafting, and asymmetric heroes (as you’d expect). Expansions bulk up the monsters, abilities, and heroes on offer, though I’d always recommend getting a feel for the base game before diving deep on extra content. After a few plays, you can pick your direction: more monsters, big final beasties, or fresh traps and tricks to make every bound into the labyrinth feel unique.
So who ought to snag Pathfinder Arena? Anyone who likes Clank! but wants more direct confrontation and unique heroes. Folks who like Ascension Tactics but prefer more interaction with the board itself. Lastly, anyone who checked out Dungeon Twister and wanted its spiritual successor.
Dungeon Twister, you ask? Like Twister, but you set the mat in a creepy lair full of spiders and skeletons?
Almost, my friends. Almost.
A Head to Head Mix and Match
First heaved into our collective dungeon-delving consciousness in 2004, Dungeon Twister (Christophe Boelinger) twists—sorry—the usual dive for treasure, monster slaughter, and glory by turning your adventure into a head-to-head clash. You’ll be facing off with another player with your respective questing teams, burning actions to skip about the dungeon doing classic fantasy shenanigans. Or, and here’s the twist—sorry again—you can shift the dungeon’s rooms around.
Because both sides sport the same forces and combat is deterministic, Dungeon Twister and its fancier sequel, Dungeon Twister 2: The Prison, are similar in some ways to Chess. It’s less about luck and more about strategy. Success will mean getting in your opponent’s way while bluffing them as to where your thief’s 
heading next, or just how you plan to throw that fireball. You have options aplenty at your disposal, so you’ll rarely feel quite as pinned down as a losing side does in Chess, and the ever-changing board ensures no game ever plays out the same.
And Chess doesn’t fight like this.
Combat keeps it spicy, like Pathfinder Arena, with cards doing the damage. Your opponent’s not going to know what’s in your hand, making every conflict an exercise in poker-style bluffing, trapping, and crowing victory as you slap your killer sword stroke on the table and, cackling with manic glee, sweep your opponent’s pieces from the board. Or you could nod politely as they accept their loss and carry on, but where’s the fun in that?
At its core, Dungeon Twister occupies a narrow niche of fantasy strategy delivered without dice, and with 1 v 1’s crunchy goodness. This is a game you could play with someone, like a partner or a sibling, over and over, creating your own personal meta with one grudge match after another. Like Pathfinder Arena too, Dungeon Twister has a few expansions available to build out your scenarios, heroes, and other flavors. It’s all been designed to work together too, so you can start with Dungeon Twister 2 and slowly add in the stuff from the original as you like.
Oh, and if you’re a solitaire player, Dungeon Twister 2 adds a solo mode, perfect for puzzly dungeon action. For travel friendly clashes, you can grab the card game variant too, because who doesn’t want to dungeon delve on the go?
So You Want To Be An Overlord?
So far, we’ve only had one perspective: the goody heroes. Both Pathfinder Arena and Dungeon Twister give you the saintly shoes to wear, but that’s not the only way to play. Dungeon Lords (Vlaada Chvátil), a venerable game originally from 2009 but buffed up over the years with new editions and expansions, asks you and your pals to compete in the best way: building the most murderous dungeon in the realm.
The game runs with card-based worker placement, with your hand dictating your options to drop minions to do things like dig tunnels, mine gold, or set
traps for the heroes. Two played cards get locked for the next turn, forcing a little planning amid blocking other players from their most desired deadly designs. These cards are played through 8 total ‘seasons’, split in half to make two ‘years’ for the entire game. Events and heroes correspond to their season, and you’ll have a little sneak peek of which paladins might wander your way at the start of every round. Heroes will stake out your dungeon, and at the end of the fourth round (or year), their nefarious party will invade and do battle with your monsters, traps, and insidious plots.
Doing the work to attract those heroes and then do them in makes Dungeon Lords an immersive euro. Theme drips everywhere, and engaging in a group-wide cackle as one adventuring party after another meets their well-deserved end is part and parcel of bringing this game to the table. While not a simple game—between planning card plays, navigating minion placement, and constructing a dungeon capable of slaying the most valiant hero, there’s decisions aplenty—Dungeon Lords doesn’t overstay its welcome. You’ll get in and out of your crypt keeper costume in two hours, making this a perfect evening romp or a double-feature for weekend plays.
If you’re digging the dungeon master vibe but want something a little lighter and a lot more portable, consider Boss Monster. Like many card-only games, Boss Monster (Johnny O’Neal, Chris O’Neal, Christopher O’Neal) carries the weight of a thousand expansions, but there’s a reason: it’s easy to pick up, interactive, 
and finding that perfect hero-culling combo always gives me the warm fuzzies.
Like Dungeon Lords, you’ll build a dungeon full of monsters and traps, enticing heroes to their doom to score points. Victory isn’t timed, but rather reached when a player and their evil avatar nabs ten hero souls. Or, and this is Boss Monster’s secret sauce, is the last one standing after the heroes destroy every other player. Because, in Boss Monster, you are the literal Boss at the dungeon’s end, and your unique abilities will drive how you build your lair, and whether luring heroes right to your doorstep for a satisfying munch is the right play.
Boss Monster gives you a whole journey in under half an hour, a perfect lead-in to the games above or a bigger adventure later in the evening. Or, you know, an easy way to munch some heroes on the train or plane. If only dungeons themselves were so portable…
The Final Room
Getting your dungeon crawl on doesn’t have to mean a multi-session campaign, a giant collection of minis, or cooperative gaming. You can get your swords, spells, and deterministic tactical combat with Pathfinder Arena. Dungeon Twister gives you a head-to-head fantasy dueler perfect for repeated partner play. And, if you’re feeling evil, you can flip the script with Boss Monster and Dungeon Lords, collecting those heroes in a race to see who’s the baddest overlord of them all.
There’s multitudes in these dungeons, y’all.
