Guild of Dungeoneering is an interesting card-based dungeon-crawler, being developed by Gambrinous and published by Versus Evil, that was on display at PAX South. You have a hand of 5 cards of 3 types: enemy, item, or dungeon floor. You’re building out a dungeon as it goes, with floor tiles needing to intersect with each other. This is kind of like the board game Betrayal at House on the Hill in a sense. You don’t control the protagonist, they move automatically, but with some influence as to where they go, by laying down cards to potentially get them to go where you want them to.

Combat is handled in a separate card game, where you start with several cards and can play one at a time, with different effects like doing damage, or dodging and then drawing a card, and so on. Combat in this build only goes for 5 turns, with one of the combatants escaping battle if the limit is hit. As time goes on and the dread stat fills up, a boss enemy will spawn in the dungeon that eventually must be fought.

There’s definitely some work to be put into the pacing of the game – a 20 minute demo had me in one dungeon, and fighting one boss, but the developer is still tweaking the turn limit and the way the game flows. The concept seems promising, and the roguelike aspects to the game should draw some eyes to it. Guild of Dungeoneering is being built in Flash, and will be coming to tablets along with the desktop verisons. The version I demoed was on a PC, but was entirely mouse-based and definitely felt like it was ready for touch as well as mouse play. The desktop version will likely release first when finished, with the tablet version releasing shortly afterward.