Dungeon Delvers TCG

Project & Work

Dungeon Delvers is a TCG that was designed to be playable with just a single booster pack. While the game is still in development the core concept and gameplay has been fleshed out. This concept began exploring the limitations of what a booster pack can contain, what kind of resource players would be able to use to play cards, how to stop repetitive gameplay loops, and what the win condition could be. I wanted a new player to have a low barrier to entry of just buying a single pack and being able to start playing.

Players get 15 card booster packs, each containing 1 Hero card (Pictured at side) and a mix of 6 Action & Item cards. The other 8 cards in the pack are considered Dungeon cards and are composed of Monster and Traps. Each player uses their own booster pack as their hand and their Dungeon deck, creating a Dungeon Level for each player in PvE. The players attempt to co-op through the Dungeon by beating each level and win once all cards in the Dungeons are cleared and there are no more Monsters in play. If a player’s Hero loses all of their Health they recover 5 Health between Dungeon Levels so all players can continue to play.

To help reduce the gameplay loop of playing the strictly best card a player opened I came up with a resource cost of discarding cards from your hand then putting the card into play. By using the player’s hand as the resource it makes planning and designing simpler, you know how much of the resource players roughly have and the dent the cost will impose for them. At the end of their turn they get all of the cards from their discard back into their hand and all the cards in play go to the discard pile, essentially soft locking them from replaying them the following turn and needing to preplan what their next turn could be with the remaining cards. This game can be played as PvE or as PvP where players race to beat the other dungeon first, friendly competition between guild members. Constructed format increases the amount of cards in a dungeon and in the players hand but maintains a lower overall count compared to other games and has a two copy limit.

These were only some of the actual game design challenges. Additionally, I needed to keep in mind ways to reduce costs in other areas - being a TCG the actual card board costs can’t be reduced further unless it scales larger leaving art as the other biggest challenge. This is where I have started leveraging AI generated art. While this the art is technically less clear and abstract it is also free but feels detailed enough. Weather the art style maintains into production or actual funding can be obtained we will see. Below are some examples of the cards from the set as they are with the AI generated art style.

Dungeon Delvers : Adventures Await set is available for purchase here on the GameCrafter website as print on demand.