Imbroglio Board Game

I am a bit of a board game geek with a relatively sizable collection. I most prefer collaborative games and fancy a good dungeon crawl, so I set out to make a moderator-less collaborative dungeon crawling game. After a bit of tinkering I put some creative together and had a one-off prototype produced. After a good deal of play testing, it really is a lot of fun to play. Unfortunately finishing it off to get it to market has dragged on forever at this point, but maybe someday! Here is an overview on how the game is played.

In the game you and your friends play in a party of heroes that will be adventuring in a monster laden dungeon. Character creation is intended to be fast and simple but offer a lot of variety and replayability. You create your character by allocating points across several scores (Melee Attack, Ranged Attack, Magical Attack, Defense, Will, Speed, Life). You then select 3 special abilities from a list that you meet the prerequisites for. The abilities contain one or more actions you can take every round, once during each encounter, or once per game. Between your scores and unique combinations of abilities your character (and party) combinations are nearly endless.

Next you pick a quest to play from the quest book and read the introduction of the quest explaining what your objective or reason to adventure in the dungeon is. This game is more of a game engine in a sense and the game you play is really defined by the details of the quest. Once I explain the mechanics of crawling the dungeon next it will be more clear why.

The dungeon is represented by room tiles that you will be laying down to build out the dungeon as you explore it. You start the dungeon map by placing face up the main room of the dungeon and placing your party avatar on that tile. Next you take dungeon room tiles and place them face down beside each corridor leading out of the main room. As a party you select which door to take, flip that room tile and connect up the doors on the table and put your party token on the new room tile placing additional face-down room tiles beside any doors of this new room.

Some room tiles will have symbols on them, there are two kinds of symbols. The first are Timed Events, when you encounter one of these rooms you read the next event in the Timed Events in the Quest. An example of how this mechanic can be used in a quest may be that with the first Event the quest indicates that you hear the sound of water, and the second the ground becomes wet, and by the very last you are up to your neck and drown, so in a sense, you need to accomplish the quest before time is up! This is just one way this mechanic can be used by the quest writer. Here are what these Timed Event room tiles look like:

The other special room tiles are Random Events. When you encounter one of these you read and carry out the description of the corresponding symbol in the Quest log. Perhaps this is a room of treasure, an exit you need to find, a boss you need to defeat, the invincible thing hunting you that you needed to avoid… again, all depends on how the quest writer wants to use the mechanics of the game where these events can occur in any order depending on the doors you choose to open. Here are the Random Event tiles:

If a room tile is flipped without a symbol on it, which are the majority, you roll to see if there is an encounter. If there is, combat ensues, if not, you continue to explore.

Combat is not particularly complicated but unfortunately like most board game instructions it may sound like it is if you have never played it. Here we go:

First you draw monsters from the monster deck up to the strength of your party. This happens in a neat way, every player is worth 100 challenge points, so say that you are playing a three player game, you draw up to 300pts of monsters. You do this by flipping monster cards and totaling the monster challenge score in the top right until you get to or exceed 300. These are the monsters you encounter in this dungeon room!

Next you shuffle these drawn monster cards with a player card for each player and then lay them out in a row. This is the turn order for combat and it will look something like this:

Now take a closer look at a monster card. As you can see there are two hexagon spaces on it. The first is for Life and Armor counters and the second for Token Color.

In this case we will place 4 life counters and 1 armor counter on this card, and we will select a Purple toke for it. We do this for each monster, selecting a different color for each monster.

Next we break out a small battle board to put the monsters and players on. This is where combat actually takes place. We roll to see where each monster starts the encounter, placing their corresponding colored pieces on the spots we roll and putting the player pieces wherever the players choose within the starting red zone.

Now that we are all setup, we are ready for combat! We have our monsters, we have the turn order, we have color tokens that correspond with the pieces on the board and we have life and armor chits on the monsters to track their health. The turn starts with the first player or monster in the turn order (reading left to right) and once everyone has gone you start back at the beginning until all the monsters (or players!) have been vanquished.

A player turn is simple and fast; they can move and then use an action or use an action and then move. The actions they can perform come from the set of 3 abilities they selected at character creation and their nature will depend on what those abilities are… a fireball, a taunt, a swing of a sword, a heal, etc. As a reminder, each ability that was selected at character creation may offer up to 3 actions that the player can use and these actions can vary in power and how often they can be used: can be used each turn, like swinging a sword; once per encounter, like using a cleave attack to hit multiple targets; or once per game, like using a vorpal spinning attack that instantly kills on a hit. As you can see the power of the actions go up as the frequency of their use goes down.

Most actions are fundamentally an attack, and attacking a monster is resolved as follows unless the ability instructs otherwise:

You roll a number of combat dice equal to your ability score associated with the ability (Melee Attack for swinging a sword vs Magic Attack for throwing a fireball).
You roll a number of combat dice equal to the defensive score for the monster you are attacking (Defense for a sword attack vs Will for a magic attack).
If the number of attack symbols on the combat dice rolled by the attacker exceed the number of defense symbols on the combat dice rolled by the defender, then the attack is successful.
The extent of the damage dealt is the difference between these rolls. 5 attacks vs 3 defends equates to 2 successful hits.
If the monster has armor, then remove one armor chit. This armor absorbs all the damage dealt by the attack, If the monster does not have armor, remove a number of life chits equal to the damage dealt, if no chits are left, the monster is killed; flip its card and remove its piece from the battle board.

The combat dice are d6 with 3 sides having Attacker symbols and 2 sides having Defender symbols.

A monster turn is even simpler, they follow this simple set of rules that you play on their behalf and combat works just as above except the monster is the attacker and player the defender and monsters do not have special abilities to consider and slow down play:

Melee Monsters:

If the monster is in melee range of a player they attack that player. If there is more than one player in range, each player in range rolls a threat die (d6) and the highest roll is the target of the monster’s attack.
If the monster is not in melee range of a player, they move towards the closest player (up to the speed) and attack. If there are players at equal distance, again, those players roll a threat die to determine who the monster pursues.
Note that there are abilities (taunts) and effects (slowness) from special player attacks that can alter these rules, but those details are described by the ability.

Magic and Ranged Monsters:

If the monster is in melee range of a player they flee to the full extent of their movement in the direction opposite the players, provided it still affords them line of sight to a player.
If the monster is not in melee range of a player, they attack a player they have line of sight to, again, using threat rolls if there is more than one.

So that’s that! You adventure through the dungeon seeking to complete the quest letting it unfold from the Timed and Random events you encounter, battling rooms of monsters along the way.

There are other rules that are still being tinkered with and tasks to complete: