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Dungeon Roll
Dungeon Roll
2013 | Dice Game, Fantasy, Fighting
One of the best parts of the board gaming experience is finding a fun group of people with whom to play! Sometimes, though, coordinating a game night is easier said than done. We all must occasionally forego the group experience and face the world as the Lonely Only. But fear not! The world of solo-play is a vast and exciting realm! What follows is a chronicle of my journey into the solo-playing world – notes on gameplay, mechanics, rules, difficulty, and overall experience with solo variations of commonly multiplayer games! I hope this will provide some insight as you continue to grow your collection, or explore your already owned games!

Dungeon Roll is a quick and fun dice-rolling game where Heroes delve into a dungeon to fight monsters (potentially including a dragon!), find treasure, and gain experience points based on how deep into the dungeon they go. If you are playing in a group or solo, the rules of the game are the same – the only difference is how you win! In group play, the winner is the player with the most experience points after 3 rounds of play. In solo play, you are working to get as many experience points as possible – competing against previous plays trying to best yourself!

After a few runs of Dungeon Roll, it has quickly become one of my favorite games to play solo for two main reasons. First, I like and appreciate the simplicity of the rules. It is quick and easy to learn, and the solo variation has no extra rules or stipulations. Simply put, I don’t have to worry about forgetting solo rules because there aren’t any! Don’t have any other players? Great! Just play like you normally would! Yeah, I may have to roll my own Dungeon Dice, but I don’t have to worry about controlling any ghost players or remembering whether or not I need to start the game with a solo handicap. The simplicity and uniformity of the rules, regardless of player count, means that I don’t have to spend time re-reading the rulebook to refresh my memory on solo play, and can just get down to playing instead!

The next reason why I love to play Dungeon Roll solo is due to the variability and unpredictability of the game. The base game comes with 8 Hero cards, each with unique abilities, and the expansion packs provide even more Hero choices. Different heroes/abilities lend themselves to different strategies for success – there is not one right way to play. Even if you pick to play as the same Hero every game, though, the dice rolling mechanism makes sure that no two games are ever alike. Dice rolling can be a fickle friend, and oftentimes the success (or failure) of a round depends solely on the luck of the roll. I, unfortunately, am a notoriously bad dice-roller…. BUT that helps make this game more interesting for me because it forces me to really strategize how I am going to use my Hero abilities, treasure tokens, and dice to my benefit. Sometimes it works out well and I come out with a respectable score! But then again, sometimes it’s the exact opposite and I come out wondering whether or not I should even log the play with as feeble a score as I got… Either way, dice rolling is unpredictable and that (along with different Hero abilities and treasure tokens) makes for a unique game every time.

Dungeon Roll is a fun and competitive game for both groups and the solo player. This game is deceptively simple and wildly entertaining, and I highly recommend adding it to your solo arsenal!

https://purplephoenixgames.wordpress.com/2018/12/21/solo-chronicles-dungeon-roll/
  
Blackbeard
Blackbeard
2006 | Adventure, Biography, Drama
6
6.6 (9 Ratings)
TV Show Rating
Good cast (1 more)
Decent for a TV miniseries/movie
Not entirely accurate (2 more)
The characters and boats are far too clean
TV effects (or lack of) might spoil some scenes
Somewhat entertaining
So I was on the search for some more Pirate movies at my local DVD stores, in hopes of finding something with the effects of Pirates of the Caribbean, but a more serious plot like that of the Black Sails series. Something that feels more like how the golden age of piracy would seem, not quite as quirky and humorous as the Disney films, although I cannot fault them for they are some of my favourite movies. It was on my search, that I came across this, and my initial thoughts were that whilst it looked cheap, it could be an entertaining film. As it turns out, I discovered this was a TV miniseries, merged into roughly a 162 minute film.

It has some charm, I can say that much for it. The cast are decent with very few famous names, and the acting itself isn't dreadful. However, there seems to be some lacking in the actual filming and editing of the episodes/feature. It has a decent plot which involves a hunt for treasure, a hunt for justice and slight revenge, which makes the viewing, feel like a pirate experience should be, but there still seems to lack the proper visuals to complete the experience.

If you take a look at Pirates of the Caribbean, one aspect that makes those films so darn good is the visuals. The pirates are dirty, rotting teeth, golden teeth, dirty fingernails, and their ships are battle worn with scars in the woodwork and again, the dirt from barnicles, and land. The ships in this feature on the other hand, are the cleanest ships you'll see in a pirate themed show or movie, and they look as if they were freshly made straight from the ship builder themselves. There doesn't appear to be any barnicles clung onto them, nor are there any battle scars, even after you witness a battle in the beginning of the film. The pirates themselves are also clean, all with white teeth as though they visited a dentist and brushed their teeth with colgate or the next best brand. There's not a single sign of scurvy which was popular among pirates during the golden age, and I didn't really spot any scars from battles apart from the obvious ones where you witness a member of Blackbeards crew have part of his leg removed due to injury (you don't see the gruesome imagery, as it's 12 rated series). Other than that though, there no facial scars, no sign to tell us that Blackbeard has fought enough battles and lived through them to become reknowned as a devil instead of a man. We only see what appears to be a couple of weeks of him as a Captain, and yet he claims to already be known as the scurge of the seas, which is highly unlikely given that we only see him battle one ship and spend the rest of his time hunting treasure, never running across another opposing ship until the finale, which sees Blackbeard battle against a crew of Royal Navy soldiers led by Lieutenant Robert Maynard.

Whilst the plot had me intrigued for the most part, I can't say that this is a film I would 'Highly' recommend, but if you fancy watching a pirate movie, this could be somewhat sufficient until you find something else, despite some of the deaths in battle seeming very staged, as sometimes I would notice a sword being shoved theatrically into someones armpit, only for the victim of the blade to fall lifeless to the floor, some holding onto the blade as though left in their body, others being retrieved from the 'corpse' with no visible blood on the blade.

With very historical accuracy's, mostly about the legend of Captain Kidd, hiding treasure, and the title's that Blackbeard earned, before his life was taken by that of Robert Maynard, the location of his death, and some other less important factors, were dramatized for the series alone and should not be taken as historically accurate.

It's a decent film, but it's just not quite what I was hoping for, and certainly not as great as it could have been.