Rooms are laid out in a 4x4 pattern over the game. Each year we lay out a row of 4 rooms so that the dungeon gradually gets deeper. The difficulty now is that we don't yet know what's coming up in the next few years and yet we want the rooms to be as interconnected as possible. First of all: this is almost impossible.

But let's take a closer look at the rooms first: These rooms show paths that should be connected if possible, each room belongs to one of two different room types, and there are elements on the cards that are important for fulfilling the building plans and tasks that we will receive each round in the game. In addition, each room has a certain gold value, which can be collected after all cards for the round have been played.

The construction phase is carried out in a drafting phase at the beginning of each round. For this, each player receives five cards, plays one of them into the row of the current round in his dungeon and passes the remaining cards on to the next player. This continues until each of us has played four new cards into his own dungeon.

After that, we collect the gold from all the newly played cards plus 1 gold per treasure chest (one of the elements on the cards) in the entire dungeon. With this money, we can then visit a market and buy market tiles. These are, in particular, further elements (in addition to treasure chests, there are monsters, traps and stars, the latter also contribute to victory points at the end), which we use to improve our rooms (and thus perhaps fulfilling some of the conditions on the building plans and orders). There are also secret passages that create connections between two rooms where there were none before, which is also quite important for fulfilling victory point conditions.

As you can see, the game is easy to explain and can also be played quite quickly. Nevertheless, it is labelled as a connoisseur game, because meeting the various conditions is a bit tricky. Finally, in addition to the victory point options already described, there is also an overarching goal for our master, which is drawn at random at the beginning of the game.

I think Dungeon Designer will inspire, as the other games from the role-playing universe have already done. The game looks great, has high-quality game materials, the rules are excellently explained and a certain amount of interaction with the other players is also required due to the drafting mode and the selection phase at the market. Finally, a great solo mode should be mentioned, which rounds off the game.