weighing over the heads setting off on the quest to defeat one of the game's seven tyrants but they are kremlin-like in appearance and mischief whilst we're on the subject of deceptive appearance i won't fault anyone for mistaking too many bonds for a dungeon crawler heck i've made that mistake myself but it isn't it certainly wears the dungeon crawler uniform the four characters in the main box easily fall into the archetypes of tank healer melee damage dealer and ranged damage dealer you fight monsters level up get new abilities it's all there but i think tmb leans into a yet undefined genre that might have an equivalent in video games but is more the realm of board games alone when i think of dungeon callers i think of fantasy tropes setting off on a type of adventure where each play session is an encapsulated episode of the overall game you might kill some monsters find some loot or the monsters might kill you here the entire campaign is at the tip of your fingers in one play session but it's less of an adventure and more of a gauntlet to train your characters to be competent enough to defeat whichever boss you've chosen to face at the end from zero to hero in one sitting it might seem a pedantic difference but experientially it sets a very different tone it's not a boss battler either because you'll spend the majority of your game time tackling encounters that lead up to the boss fight you might not even make it to the boss fight falling short before the ultimate crescendo especially if you play at one of the game's harder difficulties in video game terms the closest experience to this genre would be rogue lights a genre of games where trying and dying is part and parcel but even then the comparison falls flat because in rogue lights once you die you start the whole thing over again whilst carrying over some permanent skills in too many bones your choice of tyrant will determine how many days you have to complete the game days meaning encounters not each encounter will result in a fight you'll draw an encounter card and it will give you two options some cards don't have a fight option some do some won't let you do anything else but fight and your choice only determines the special rules superimposed onto the battle if successful you'll get rewards chief amongst them progress points collect enough progress points for a given tyrant and instead of having a regular encounter you can attempt to take them on if you lose even in a tyrant battle it's not game over you won't get any of the rewards but you won't lose either you can even repeat the boss fight your only penalty is time the days move on and once you run out of those that's when you kick the proverbial bucket the battles themselves are more abstract than what you're used to in dungeon crawlers there's no pre-built map with a carefully selected array of monsters there's just a battle mat with NUMBER_TOKEN spaces eight for your gear locks to start on and NUMBER_TOKEN for the monsters as a baseline encounters use what is called a bq a formula to determine how many monsters you'll fight and how strong they will be difficulty wise there are three types of monsters or as
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