Game: Dungeon Petz
Publisher: Czech Games Edition
Year: 2011
Four years I worked
for that dreadful dungeon keeper, “mine here” he’d say, “Go trigger that trap”,
“Hold on let me possess you, you’re not doing it right”. Enough I say! Enough
of his hero slaying dungeon full of red-horned devils, smelly fat-demons and hungry
spiders! So I left, but not before noticing how much he liked monsters. Those
monsters he had he got for free, but why shouldn’t he pay! Why shouldn’t all dungeon
keepers pay for the finest quality monsters? The best of the best, the fartiest
of demons, the hungriest of spiders the horniest of devils! And that’s why I’m
the proprietor of the first ever imp-run pet store! Now my old dungeon keeper
pays me, well... he paid me before... but it’s different now okay! I’m my own
imp and no-one can take that from me without a really big whip or a big enough bag
of gold!
Dungeon Petz is a
2-4 player worker placement game in which you control a group of imps who are trying
to set up a pet shop full of various forms of monsters. Firstly a pet shop is a
wonderful idea for a board game and I don’t know why more people haven’t made
pet shop games, secondly this game is simply adorable! The manual is written
with a hint of cheek which really suits the theme of crazy little goblins
running a pet store, and perhaps most importantly the rear couple of pages have
descriptions on all the pets and buyers so you start to feel that little bit
attached about ensuring your mutant eyeball plant goes to a good home!
The game is a worker placement and as such you can guess
half the gameplay, you place your imps on the board and use them to collect
resources (food), money (leaving them home to work), steal new cages, buy pets,
steal artifacts, steal cage upgrades, smuggle their imp relatives into the
country, bribe judges of the pet show, steal medicine from the infirmary... did
I mention imps are a little mischievous? The interesting part of the worker
placement comes from the turn order, which is determined by how many imps you
send at once. Every player has a little screen to hide their decision behind
and then they reveal. All groups of 3 go before any groups of 2, which all go
before any single imps etc. However you can improve the imps abilities by
giving them money, apparently paying for goods takes less time than stealing
them because a shiny gold coin is worth the same as sending an extra imp.
 |
| A selection of need cards, the top row from left to right is playfulness, sickness, pooping, magic and hungry. Different colours have different ratios of needs, a purple-heavy pet is far more likely to mutate then disappear into a void of unimaginable horror that a yellow heavy one. |
Ultimately you are running a pet shop so you need pets,
these are my favourite part of the game, the pets are all cute in their mutant-monster
kind of way, they come on little egg-shaped bits of cards with a dial. When you
buy a pet it’s either size 1 or 2, but the longer you own it the more it grows.
Any pets not bought do grow up, but once they get to big they have to... live
on a farm? The manual explicitly says that the meat added to the food vendors
is entirely unrelated! Pets have needs which are represented by the rotating
part of the dial, the bigger a pet is the more needs it has so they become
harder to keep, especially to keep happy. For each needs represent the mosnter’s
personality, some pets need to eat more, others like to be played with a lot,
others thrash about and try to break free etc. For each need you draw 1 card of
that colour and add it to your hand (which is normally 1 card of each colour)
then you assign them 1 card of the correct colour for each need they have. Then
you have to use your imps to play with/contain the pets, feed them, hope they
don’t magically mutate or poop everywhere etc.
The pets can break free, or mutate, or simply just suffer
enough from not being fed/getting sick that they outright die, this costs you
points, because honestly, what kind of inhuman monster are you? Oh... right, an
imp I guess, but still, even imps have standards! So before you lost control of
your ever-growing pet you may want to sell it on to a dungeon lord, but before
you do that display your pet at the pageant. These are the main 2 ways of
getting points, The factors needed to win the pageant change per round, some
reward based on all your monsters, some only on one. One round you may have a
pageant for the most well-fed pet, but then have a lich come to the shop who
wants to buy the most diseased pet he can find. It’s important to play the
relevant cards to make the most points, but remember, if you can’t beat your
opponent, you can always cheat by sending your imps to bribe the judges!
 |
| The game board, pets for sale are in the center, food is to the right, cages and cage accessories are to the left. Depending on player count you may have neutral imps wandering around and blocking certain spaces. |
Dungeon Petz is a wonderful game, I’m not normally a huge
worker placement fan, but this one hits the nail on the head. The theming is
brilliant, the manual is cute, the art is wonderful, including all the little
imps scurrying around on the board! The game makes me feel downright sad when I
fail my pets and that’s an accomplishment in itself. If I had to point out a
flaw it’s that selling pets can sometimes work so much in someone’s favour, if
they get a lucky card draw, that they can pretty much win the game in one fell
swoop, but that’s a rarity and ultimately everyone did have the same
opportunities, they just weren’t willing to put down enough imps/money to get
the right pet/artifacts/whatever they needed first. I can’t sing this game’s
praises enough, it’s up there with X-com and Pandemic legacy on my favourite
games list.
9/10
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