Shovel Knight: Dungeon Duels Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Shovel Knight: Dungeon Duels, a board game published by Panda Cult. A semi-cooperative side-scrolling dungeon crawler where you compete against your fellow knights of shovelry to defeat the dungeon bosses and prove your worth.

Popular video games seem like a natural place to look when looking for new board game themes. After all, they are already a game, and the themes have proven popular in their original medium. The road to adapting a video game to a board game, however, has proven to be a rocky one, as such adaptations have a spotty track record. For every Boss Monster that knocks it out of the part, you can find a game that struggled to make the transition, like Shadowgate: The Living Castle. With a big box footprint and an equivalent price point, Shovel Knight hopes to be the former, but is it more like the latter?

Shovel Knight: Dungeon Duels is a game for 1-4 players and it plays in 90 minutes.

In a game of Shovel Knight, you are competing to prove your worth as the one true Shovel Knight by collecting treasure and defeating enemies on your way to defeating a dungeon’s final boss. The game is technically a competitive game, but you cannot attack your fellow Shovel Knights. Defeating the boss at the end of the dungeon also takes a group effort, so there are some elements that feel cooperative. However, while you can’t directly harm other players, you can be quite…rude and push them into enemies, traps, and other unfortunate situations. If something bad happens to them, it isn’t your fault, after all.

The most unique aspect of the game is the board. There are two primary stages of the game: the dungeon (and the plains surrounding it) and the final boss. During the first stage, the tiles function like a side-scrolling video game. At the end of each round, one of the four tiles slides off to the left and is discarded (woe to any players or enemies still on that tile), the remaining three are moved to the left, and a new one is placed on the right