Dungeon Lords is a 2-4 player strategy game where players take on the role of Dungeon Lords in training. As a Dungeon Lord you will be trying to build the best dungeon to defend from the adventurers. You'll need to make sure you hire the right mix of monsters, buy the right traps, and build a defensible dungeon to make it all go together. While this game is 2-4 players, it really is best with four players.

The game is played over the course of two years, during each season you will use action cards to take turns getting gold and food, hiring imps to work in your tunnels, hiring monsters to fight off adventurers, digging tunnels, building rooms, buying traps, or improving your reputation. At the start of the game you will randomly select two of your eight actions which will be inaccessible for the first season. During each season you will use these action cards to make your selections, and you will get to play three cards each turn. The first card you use will be available for your next turn, the other two will be moves to your inaccessible area. There are only three spots for each action available, so the 4th player won't be able to use the action. You can see each players inaccessible cards in order to help you determine which actions to play. The 2nd and 3rd players usually get the best rewards, so your action order is very important.

Some of the actions you'll need to pay for with food or gold, some you'll have to take the rewards by force which will bump you up on the Evilometer. The Evilometer determines which dungeon will face the most powerful of the adventurers. There are four different adventurer types, including Warriors who have high health and push their way to the front, Thieves who prevent damage from traps, Priests who heal, and Wizards that cast spells. How powerful they are is determined by the complexity of the glyphs on the adventurer's tile. The most evil dungeon lord will get the most powerful adventurer in the three seasons which adventurers are assigned. If you get too high on the Evilometer you will attract the attention of the Paladin. He has the abilities of all four classes, but fear not, if you manage to defeat him you'll get more points than capturing a normal adventurer.

Each year you'll also have to pay taxes on your dungeon, if you don't you'll get a red mark for each unpaid gold. These are worth -3 points each at the end of the game, so that's not a wise idea. Your monsters will need to be paid, if you don't pay them they will quit and rampage in the local village. This will bump you up on the Evilometer, as this is doubly bad since it might attract the Paladin, and you'll have one less monster to face him with. In the advanced version of the game there's also a random event, which has a fairly negative consequence and will usually make you regret playing the advanced version of the game. To give a higher replay value, paying taxes, payroll, and the random events are all in a random order each turn. You'll have some warning as to when they are coming, but they are always nasty.

After all the building that goes into the dungeon you'll then have to fight off the adventurers. You will have four rounds of combat in which you will choose which traps to play and which monsters to send each round. In a tunnel you can use one trap and one monster. However, in a room you have to pay to use a trap, but you can send in two monsters. A different type of monster, a ghost, can also be sent into a room and doesn't count against the number of monsters you can send. The combat turns into a logic puzzle where you are trying to maximize the damage of your traps and monsters. As each round of combat ends, if there are living adventurers they will take fatigue damage when they conquer the room.  Then you play another year! The monsters get bigger, but the adventurers do, too. At the end of the game you'll score points for your monsters, your rooms, the adventurers you defeated and for seven different titles, including being the most evil Dungeon Lord!

This game provides a lot of strategy, and the rules are well written and a pleasure to read. The game does have a lot of rules in it, but it's a medium weight game with lots of thematic elements in it, making it a fun game to play. Vlaada Chvatil has another hit on his hands and is well on his way to becoming the next big name in strategy games.