Shadowgate: The Living Castle Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Shadowgate: The Living Castle, a semi-cooperative dungeon crawler published by Trick or Treat Studios. Based on the video game of the same name, Shadowgate has players working together to try and take down the final boss.

Dungeon crawlers are great. Everyone loves dungeon crawlers, right? Right? Ok, that maybe overstating it, but they are a popular genre. There are many examples that have been, or continue to be, popular over the years: HeroQuest, Descent, Gloomhaven, and more. If there is one thing that makes people hesitant to pick up those sorts of games, though it is the potential complexity of setup and lengthy game time. What if those issues could be solved by making the dungeon crawl based on cards? That’s what Shadowgate: The Living Castle tries to answer.

Based upon the Shadowgate video games and novels from the 1990s onward, it is a semi-cooperative game for 2-4 players, which takes 45 minutes to an hour to play. The best experience is with 3 players.

As I alluded to, Shadowgate is a take on the dungeon crawler genre, but played entirely with cards. Throughout the game, you will acquire items, equip them to power yourself up, gain more magic, and complete encounters and quests. All the while, your party delves deeper into the dungeon, uncovering greater challenges, and ultimately, the final boss. This seems like it should be a cooperative endeavor, but is in reality only semi-cooperative, as you are ultimately competing for a higher score at the end of the game.

As you might expect from a dungeon, you cannot confront the final boss right away. You have to work your way down to it. As you complete quests from the “first level” you will eventually unlock a second set of more challenging quests. This