If Fantasy Forest is the first step in indoctrinating your child into Dungeons & Dragons, the next logical step is Dungeon (the name is technically Dungeon with an exclamation point, but that looks super weird if I can’t like, italicize the title, so I am going without). This is the New Dungeon from 1989, probably the most common version. The game originally came out in 1975 (and existed as early as 1972 – before D&D!) and saw a bunch of different editions in the years between. New Dungeon was a significant overhaul of the game, expanding the playable classes and revising the rules. It would be followed by Classic Dungeon in 1992 and a couple of modern versions from in the 2010s.

Dungeon is kind of a terrible game? As with most of the games I’m looking at this week, it is a dungeon crawl experience that is incredibly unbalanced and relies on randomness for its appeal. Each character type has its own simple special abilities and a different loot number to hit for victory. It is not easy to get a good outcome in combat (there are five or six different varieties of losing, but only one win outcome) and this is made more challenging depending on your class (and the special abilities do little to offset this).

Art wise, there isn’t much to get excited about in the game’s components, though I do like the box art and its weird compositing. The previous editions all had better covers though (one by Otus!) and Classic Dungeon has the best board – this one is a bit hard for me too look at, honestly.

All that said, I loved this stupid game as a kid? I would fiddle with it for hours. I am not sure I ever played it by the rules, but made up my own on the fly and kind of appreciated the punishing wildness of the randomness. As not great as it is, it does feel like a solid primer for D&D. Folks with kids, sound off.