Kickstarter Tabletop Alert: ‘Rapid Dungeon’—Think Fast!

Get in, fight the monsters, grab the treasure, and get out. Think fast—but don’t miss!

What Is Rapid Dungeon?

Rapid Dungeon is a dexterity set-collection game for 3 to 6 players, ages 8 and up, and takes about 15 minutes to play. It’s currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, with a pledge level of ¥3,500 (about $23USD) for a copy of the game (pay attention to the additional shipping costs since it’s coming from Japan). The game is quick to play and kid-friendly, but because it requires some fast decisions and good aim, it may not be appropriate for those with mobility issues.

(In case you’re wondering why there are so few backers in the reward tiers, there was a glitch this week where they tried to turn on late pledges and all of the existing reward tiers were no longer visible on the page, so they created new duplicates of the reward tiers.)

Rapid Dungeon was designed by Takuya Okabe and Kazutaka Yanagawa and published by GOTTA2, with illustrations by Takuya Okabe and Yugo Katsumata. The Japanese version was released this spring, and the Kickstarter campaign is for an English edition.

New to Kickstarter? Check out our crowdfunding primer.

Rapid Dungeon Components

Note: Rapid Dungeon was released in Japan earlier this year, and I was sent a Japanese copy for review. I believe the components should be pretty much the same as what you see in the photos here, though it’s possible there could be minor changes.

Here’s what comes in the box:

• 6 Foam Pawns
• 6 Health cards
• 66 Exploration cards
• 5 Dungeon cards

The pawns are the most distinctive component in Rapid Dungeon: they’re made of a firm foam that reminds me of flip-flops or those boards you used to learn to swim. Each one is triple layered: the player color in the center, and a black and white side. Each one is about the size of a deck of cards, with a rounded top. You’ll have to apply the character stickers yourself—one side shows the adventurer holding out a sword, and on the other they’re holding a lantern.

There are just 8 different exploration cards in the basic deck, making up 58 of the cards. There are treasures (diamonds, chests, and keys), characters (knights, wizards, and clerics), and monsters (goblins and dragons).

The health cards are a simple card that has a 1/2 on one side and 3/4 on the other, and you turn or flip the cards to indicate your current health, from 1 to 4.

The dungeon cards are double-sized and are reminders of which cards are in play, or whether you’re playing the boss fight, and you combine the “entrance” card with a second card to set up the options. One fun detail is that the artwork lines up when you combine the two cards.

How to Play Rapid Dungeon

You can download a copy of the rulesheets here.

The Goal

The goal of the game is to score the most points by collecting treasures and characters and defeating monsters.

Setup

Choose a dungeon setup by picking the easy or hard side of the entrance card, and optionally pairing it with a second dungeon card. I’ll explain the basic setup first, which uses just the entrance card.

Give each player a pawn and a health card, turned to the appropriate starting health based on the entrance card.

Shuffle the exploration cards and deal a stack of 7 to each player, placed face-down in front of them.

Gameplay

Each round, players simultaneously flip the top card of their stack into the center playing area. Then, everyone simultaneously tosses their pawn onto the card they want to collect.

You may not collect your own card. When collecting treasures and characters (light background), you must use the white side of your pawn, and when fighting monsters (dark background), you must use the black side of your pawn.

Once the dust has settled, check to see where each pawn landed. If you landed on your own card, or landed with the wrong side up, or you completely missed a card, you lose a health and collect nothing. If you’re the only pawn on a card and it’s the correct side, you take the card. If more than one person lands on the same card, the player whose pawn touches more of the card wins and the other player loses a health; in case of a tie, both players lose a health and nobody gets the card!

In the photo above, the blue player will take the key, and the purple player takes the cleric. Red and green both landed on the goblin, but green covers more of the card and wins, and red loses a health. Yellow landed on the knight, but used the wrong side of the pawn, so yellow loses a health. The knight and the chest are discarded because nobody got them.

If you lose your last health, you must discard one of the cards you’ve collected, and then reset to full health.

Game End

The game ends when the stacks of cards have run out. Everyone adds up their points based on the current dungeon card. The basic scoring is:

• Diamonds  = 2 points each
• Chest + Key = 12 points
• Set of all three characters = 6 points
• Monsters are worth points based on the total number collected
• In addition, each character is worth 1 point, and each dragon is worth 2 points (printed on the cards themselves)

The highest score wins!

Advanced cards

Once you’ve learned the rules, you can mix in the advanced cards (and use the corresponding dungeon cards to indicate which cards are in play). There are two copies of each advanced card—just shuffle both copies into the deck. For each type of advanced card you add, give all players one additional card in their stacks.

Here are the four types of advanced cards:

• Unicorns triple the value of your diamonds
• Potions double the value of your monsters
• The Thief lets you steal a card from another player
• On the round the trap is flipped, everyone must use the opposite side of their pawns instead (and the trap cannot be collected)

Boss Fight

You can also play cooperatively, against the Goblin King or the Elder Dragon. Gameplay is the same, but at the end every player must meet the points threshold for the group to win: 30 points each for the Goblin King, or 50 points each for the Elder Dragon.

Why You Should Play Rapid Dungeon

The set-collection part of Rapid Dungeon is pretty straightforward: diamonds, characters, and dragons are all worth some points on their own, but you get better payouts if you can get complete sets of characters or a bunch of monsters (including the zero-point goblins). The best points-to-cards ratio is the treasure chest and key, because it’s 12 points for only 2 cards (in the easy mode)—but because of that, competition can be fierce. If you get a key, other players are going to do their best to deny you a chest. Not only that, but because you don’t deal out the entire deck, there’s no guarantee that every chest you see will also have a key, or vice versa. In one game I played, there were several keys and only one chest!

But, as in most set collection games, the meat of the game is in how you collect those cards, and Rapid Dungeon has a fun, silly twist. Those chunky foam pawns really set the game apart from others, and turn it into a dexterity challenge. Depending on how you throw them, they can bounce or slide, and what looks like a good throw can easily flip into a miss. I personally like the frisbee approach, but some of my other players have gone with more of a lob.

The fact that you have to pay attention to which side of the foam block to use is an additional wrinkle, especially when those trap cards are mixed in! And then there’s the speed. Most of the time, players are racing to toss their pawns as quickly as possible, because if your block is sitting on top of somebody else’s, they win the card. However, rushing can lead to a lot of errors, from using the wrong side of your block to throwing your pawn onto your own card, or just not seeing that there was a better option for you. On the other hand, if you wait too long, you might find that all of the other cards are taken and you’ve missed out.

You can try to play offense, too. It’s extremely hard to do, but I’ve seen a player knock another pawn off a card with theirs, stealing it for themselves. I suppose if you master that technique, then it may pay to wait until everyone is done. We’ve also had a good bit of unintentional interference, when two players throw their pawns at the same time and they collide mid-air, ruining both trajectories.

The cooperative game really changes up the feel—there’s a little more deliberation before the throwing, because you want everyone to get the best score. Getting up to 30 points isn’t impossible, but getting everyone to 30 points is really difficult! There’s definitely some luck involved in the particular mix of cards that were dealt, but you also need everyone to have good aim, and also to make some good guesses about who should take which cards. The scoring opportunities are even higher if you use the advanced dungeon entrance, but then everyone only has 2 health, so accuracy is essential.

We’ve really had a lot of fun with this one, and I particularly enjoy it at higher player counts simply because there’s a bit more chaos with all of the foam pawns in the air at once. The game plays really quickly—15 minutes is really the upper limit—so it’s the sort of game we’ve played several times in a row, and you only need to play a couple times before most people are ready to try some of the advanced cards.

Just like the game itself, you’ll have to think fast about the Kickstarter campaign. It has already funded and has less than a week left to go, so if you want a copy you’ve only got until Thursday morning to decide. For more information or to make a pledge, visit the Rapid Dungeon Kickstarter page!

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Disclosure: GeekDad received a copy of the Japanese edition of this game for review purposes.