Dungeon Petz

I always wonder why Vlaada Chvatil, perhaps the best known Czech board game designer, chose to spell the name of his successor game to his earlier Dungeon Lords with 'z' in the word Pets. In my opinion, using 'z' instead of a 's' is a cheap way to convey craziness and zaniness, and to target child audience. The original name – Příšerky z podzemí (literally Little monsters from the underground) strays from the cheap area of misspelled words and still carries the message of cuteness and being set in the same universe as Dungeon Lords – Vládci podzemí.

And yes, Dungeon Petz IS a cute game. The illustrations are very well made, the little monsters themselves are adorable and the game manual is written with so much wit and humour that the whole package makes you want to hug the box and squee in delight. However, the stark contrast between the light-hearted facade and the deep, complex (complex but not complicated) gameplay is what makes the game unsuitable for kids. Or kidz.

Each player controls a group of imps who decided to try their luck in the monster breeding profession. The backstory goes that the dungeon lords get their monsters from somewhere and the imps see this as an opportunity to make their name in the business and while at it, earn some "easy" money.

Going through the "can my parents play it?" test. It passed.

Little they knew that breeding monsters is far from easy. A monster needs to be bought first, then placed in a suitable cage and fed when it's hungry, played with when it's being playful, calm down if it is aggressive or prevent it from getting sick when its cage is dirty from monster poop. On the other hand, a monster that is taken good care of can score well at periodical contests that can add big to the imps' fame. Eventually, as it grows older, it gets harder and harder to efficiently satisfy all its needs and it's time to sell it to a customer. For that imps get paid in coins and their fame can rise again quite high. After all, the fame is what makes some imps winners and other losers.

The game itself is a half worker placement (with a twist) and half combinational puzzle. Each player starts the game with a group of 6 imps. Secretly, they each put their imps into groups and after everyone's done and the groups are revealed to other players, the groups with the most imps are placed on the main board to perform actions first. You need to find the right balance between being able to perform the actions you want (placing your imps before other take up the spaces - making groups of a lot of imps) and performing multiple actions (either snagging the not-first-choice actions or leaving your imps at home to play with a bored pet or clean an empty cage - making groups of couple or just one imp) because there is A LOT to do in a round. Sending imps to the market (main board) lets you:

• buy a creature 
• get a cage 
• get a cage upgrade
• get two magical items
• get food - either meat or veggies or both
• call for more imps back home
• pick up imps from a hospital (should they get injured while catching a raging pet) / get a sleep potion
• put an imp on a podium to sell creatures more efficiently and getting more fame points from the sale
• rigging the jury of the periodical competition and giving you a headstart in points awarded in the competition

My very first game of Dungeon Petz

Some actions can be performed more than once (e.g., you can buy up to three pets in a round, in a 4-player game) but it is not enough for everyone and someone will always come short of a pet, food or a cage. For a round at least. Next round you can count on them spending a lot of imps to get that one thing they were missing.

Once you have your imps placed in the market tiles, your pets sitting in cages and the food in the pantry, it's time to take care of your pets. Each pet comes with a predetermined set of coloured squares corresponding to the colours of four need decks. The green, yellow, red and purple decks represent primary needs of hunger, playfulness, rage and magic affinity. Each deck has roughly a half of its cards of their primary need but they contain some other needs as well. Those predetermined sets tell you which coloured cards the pet will need to be assigned but the specific kind of need itself is up to you. Some pets have a lot of green and yellow in their set - you can imagine that it will need to be fed and played with a lot, other can have red and purple - you can guess that this pet will need to be placed in a durable cage as it will be prone to rage fits and magic outbursts. However that all is up to you to decide. You will always have one card from each deck on default and then you will draw one extra card for each coloured square showing on all your pets (plus some extra cards from magic books if you manage to snag them at the market). This way you will always have choice what specific needs you can assign to your pet: Imagine having a pet with two green squares and a yellow square - it needs to be assigned three cards, two green and one yellow. You would hold three green cards in your hand (let's say hunger, poop and rage) and two yellow cards (playfulness and hunger). Depending on your actions in the imp placement phase, you might want to choose to give your pet two hunger needs and one poop need if you collected appropriate food from the market, or if your pet is placed in a durable cage, you left some imps unassigned and lack the food, you might choose to give your pet the playful need, the rage need and, what the heck, the poop need.

Each need must be satisfied or bad things happen. Ranging from scarring your pet emotionally for life (I'm not joking) to magic-induced mutation, you must carefully choose how to meet the needs you have in your hand with the resources you built up in the previous phase:

Petz in the cagez with their needz

• the hunger need is satisfied by providing your pet with food (carnivores only eat meat, herbivores only veggies, omnivores don't care)
• the poop need produces one poop
• playfulness needs to be satisfied by assigning a free imp to play with the restless pet
• the rage need is automatically resolved by keeping the pet in a durable cage
• the magic "radiation" is automatically resolved by keeping the pet in a magic proof cage
• the disease "need" is not really a need but if your pets stays in a filthy (read poopy) cage and gets the disease card, it can get permanently unhappy.

Actually, failing to satisfy most of the needs results in a permanent unhappiness in form of a black cube you put on your pet. Such pets then get lower scored in competitions and earn less fame points when sold to a customer. Speaking of competition, they come right after the need satisfaction phase. Every turn there is a new competition which you know about one turn in advance so you can properly prepare for it.

Competitions range from a beauty contest to a fighting arena. Usually you choose one pet from your pack (sometimes you take all of them) and count certain assigned needs to make your score in the competition. Arena competition would award most points to the pet with most rage need cards assigned to it, the Kid's choice would give the most points to the most playful pet and take away points for any rage cards that it had. Scoring in a competition places players in an order according to which they will be awarded fame points. If a player rigged the jury, he/she starts with 2 extra points, allowing them to score higher.

The round is not finished yet. From the third round onwards customers start to appear at this point and each of them, much like the competitions, have certain wishes and expectations from their future pet. The Dungeon Granny wants a hungry and sick pet that she could care for and spoil, so the best pet to sell to her would be the one that was given the most hungry and disease cards in that turn. However, she doesn't like magic at all so every magic card on that pet would detract a point from the final score. Also, since every customer wants a happy pet, each black cube of permanent unhappiness will detract points from the score as well. The final score is then doubled (or tripled if you put your imp on a podium in the first phase) and that is the final amount of fame points you will be getting as well as couple of coins depending on how old the just-sold pet was. Each customer will buy only one pet from each player so you better take that in consideration too as you are assigning need cards.

Afternoon in the park with the Petz.

As in real life, as a pet grows older, it gets more and more difficult to take care of it as it has more needs you need to satisfy. At the end of each round, pets both in players' cages and at the market grow older, their pet markers show more coloured squares and they will need to be assigned more cards in the next round.

However, you might want to take care for more than one pet at a time since you cannot sell a young pet - it needs to grow a bit older before that and to keep a steady income and acquire fame points, you might find yourself having up to 4 pets at the same time. On the other hand, that could be a bit risky though because the needs of pets grow really quickly (there is a very noticeable difference between satisfying a pet with two needs and a pet with four needs) but the number of your imps don't grow steadily - only when you call for them and they come in a bulk (one for each round that's passed). There is always the chance of you gathering certain resources but eventually drawing need cards that you cannot efficiently satisfy and unfortunately making your pets unhappy in the end. Some cages are equipped with a toy that can automatically satisfy one playful need or there's grass in them which a herbivore can feed on and many cage upgrades can help you with satisfying other needs too, but at the end of the day, your imps are the most important resource that you need to manage properly. 


The game goes on for 5-6 rounds (depends on the number of players) and the player with the most fame points at the end is the best monster breeder. You accumulate the fame points over the span of the game but before the very end, players count their gold coins, items, remaining pets, imps, etc. and add a certain amount of points to their final fame. All this is clearly explained on the board.

Cthulie

Which brings me to the board itself. It may seem quite cluttered at the first sight. However, I appreciate the artist's effort to make the board seem like a large picture and not only a map of tiles (Hello, Agricola. You could learn something here). There is a lot of funny things going on on the board and it is a treat to carefully examine it. What I really want to say though is that amongst all the cluttered colours on the board, lay a lot of functional hints. The two levels of monster pens show how old unsold pets go where (with imps holding signs with two or three need squares), the imps riding a lizard next to the jury's stand hold up numbers saying how many fame points will get a player in the 1st, 2nd, (3rd, 4th) place in the competition, the parasols at the food court show where veggies and meat go separately... The main board is packed with jokes, art and function. I don't remember ever seeing anything like this before.

You can clearly see that there's a lot to Dungeon Petz. Under the cutesy illustration (check the pets roster here in English) lies a deep management strategy gameplay that might be a bit too much for some players. At the same time, the game's rules are carefully streamlined, everything makes sense (pet poops - too much poop can cause uhappiness if disease comes along - customers don't want to buy unhappy pets - poop stays in a cage even if the pet is moved - cage can only be cleaned if it is empty, etc.) and there's enough complexity to make the game challenging and competitive between the players. I've played it with first-time, casual and experienced players alike and not a single time anyone said the game was too difficult and was generally enjoyed. I've noticed however that if someone is doing well, they continue doing well as opposed to those who get slowed down by an unlucky hand of cards and they don't seem to get out of the rut for the rest of the game. Sometimes the game may even seem that it is not about who wins the game but who loses the least. Then again, despite winning some games and losing others horribly, I still want to play it again and again and it might even eventually succeed Galaxy Trucker as my favourite Czech board game.