Cardboard Corner: Review of Karak

Shorter Review: My First Dungeon Crawler (without the horror and gore)

Longer Review: There have been numerous dungeon crawlers published in the board game world throughout the past few decades. From classic fantasy rpg-style games to science fiction alien encounters, exploring the scary unknown with a powered-up hero has been a small but solid niche of gaming. Albi's Karak boils this niche down to its basic elements, and makes something fun for families and children.

Like its adult predecessors, Karak is an action-rpg that sees players choosing one of the six unique heroes to explore the modular corridors of a dungeon, find and destroy monsters, level up, and try to collect the most treasure. On their turn, players have four actions. They can pick a new tile from the pile and lay it so the corridors connect. This often results in drawing from the bag of tokens, tokens which can be various things, from skeleton warriors to monsters, mummies to treasure. Different types of enemies carrying different weapons, spells, and even treasure, defeating them allows the hero to flip over the token and add whatever item the enemy carried to their player board. This can be more powerful weapons which help the heroes’ dice rolls or one-off spells that can be used at specific moments. Some of the skeleton warriors carry keys, keys which are used to unlock the treasure chests players are trying to collect. A powerful dragon lurking in the draw bag, when it is finally defeated, players count their treasures, and the one with the most, wins.

A game playing out over 30-60 minutes (depending on number of players), Karak is family fun that is a little cooperative but mostly competitive. Each hero has hit points, but when the last is used, they simply return to the fountain of health to recover, and continue the game, no perma-death. The rules very simple, even very young children can play. Point in case, Karak taught my son math at age three-and-a-half. He didn’t know he was learning basic addition, but he sure wanted to know whether his dice roll was higher than the skeleton's. (Given two dice are used, this often involved counting on imaginary fingers beyond his ten.)

Unlike the more famous dungeon crawlers, Karak is not packed to the gills with plastic miniatures. And this is far from a bad thing—not to mention it would be impossible to put various monster types inside a draw bag and expect them all to feel the same. The tiles and tokens all made of solid cardboard, and the art, while straight-forward, is suitably family-oriented and fits the mood and feel. This game didn’t have to be a massive production. Player boards are nicely three-dimensional to hold the hero cards, weapons, spells, keys, hit points, and everything packs away nicely in the box.

If you want to introduce your children to the idea of dungeon crawler without rpg complexity, horror, and gore that that often go hand-in-hand with the sub-genre of game, Karak is what you’re looking for. Not a wholly child-oriented game, adults can have just as much fun, and given that dice drive the combat, it can even be a balanced experience if the child has proper goals at proper times (i.e. building up a good set of weapons and spells while collecting treasure, not just shooting for treasure). Given the game board consists of dozens of modular tiles, dungeon exploration is entirely different than the last, which gives the game a strong replay value.