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Game details Designers: Brady Sadler and Adam Sadler

Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games

Players: 1-4

Age: 14+

Playing time: 30-60 minutes

Price: $39.95

There’s perhaps no theme in board gaming as well-trod as the noble dungeon crawl. A party of stalwart adventurers suits up and smashes down a dungeon door to explore its catacombs, loot its chests, and kill pretty much anything standing in their way. Playing a dungeon crawl board game is like playing a Dungeons and Dragons session with 90 percent less narrative and 100 percent more face-smashing. The genre’s enduring popularity is in large part due to its ability to provide gamers an RPG-like experience with a much lower barrier to entry.

But dungeon crawlers are table-gobbling beasts, and the 1995 Games Workshop classic Warhammer Quest was no exception. Miniatures, dungeon tiles, terrain, dice, cards, tokens, piles of rulebooks—a good dungeon crawl is all about excess, lavish production values, and as much theme as you can pack into a (gargantuan) box.

Forget trying to find a copy of the original Warhammer Quest these days; the game has been out of print for ages, and used copies go for absurd nostalgia-abusing prices on the secondhand market. (I'd recommend passing on the lackluster digital version .) But even modern dungeon crawlers carry hefty price tags. You can pick up a copy of my standard recommendation, Star Wars: Imperial Assault , for a reasonable $60 on Amazon, but its MSRP of $100 is the standard price you’ll pay for games in this genre.

Enter the humble “adventure card game,” a newish kind of “dungeon crawler lite” that uses cards to simulate the experience of its bigger-boxed brethren. Persistent characters that level up between sessions give RPG nuts the slow-drip progression loop that keeps them hopelessly addicted, and campaign play grounds players’ actions in an ongoing narrative.

Warhammer Quest: The Adventure Card Game (let’s call it WQACG for short) is Fantasy Flight Games’ attempt to distill the essence of a dungeon crawler down to a few decks of cards and a handful of dice and tokens. Does it work? Well... kinda.

Is it fun? Definitely.

Into the grim darkness























WQACG is a cooperative game for one to four players—no dungeon master required. The game’s campaign strings together five quests into a complete story that you’ll play over several gaming sessions. In between quests, you’ll level up your character by gaining new abilities and loot. Four Warhammer versions of classic characters are available—you can be the tanky dwarven Ironbreaker, the cleric-like Warrior Priest, the fireball-slinging Bright Wizard, or the sneaky elven Waywatcher.

Each quest has its own flavor and goals, but the essential gameplay remains the same throughout the campaign: you’ll be exploring a small deck of location cards that represent the rooms and locales you need to fight through to get to the end of the scenario. Each location card has an exploration value; put enough exploration tokens on the card and you can travel to the next one. New locations spawn new monsters.

Instead of a hand of cards, each player has four action cards that rest face up in front of them during play. Everyone has the same four actions, but their flavor and secondary effects vary from character to character. “Attack” lets you take a swing at a monster, “Explore” lets you place exploration tokens on a location card, “Aid” lets you help out another player, and “Rest” lets you recover hit points.

Here’s the rub: when you use an action, you exhaust the card (turn it sideways), and you can’t use it again until you ready it. One of the four cards (it’s different for each character) lets you ready all of your other cards, so planning when to use each action drives most of the game's strategy.

And what would a dungeon crawler be without some good old-fashioned dice chucking? Every action card allows you to roll a certain number of white, symbol-laden custom dice (because numbers are boring). Here’s what they look like:

Warhammers are successes, and the more you get, the more powerful your action is. If you’re attacking, for example, the number of successes you roll is the damage you can do to a monster. If you’re exploring, successes let you put tokens on your current location card. The starburst symbol is a critical success, which banks you a success and lets you roll again—a ridiculously fun mechanic known as "exploding dice."

Shields, of course, let you defend against enemy attacks. And enemies will be attacking you constantly—pretty much any time you try to do anything. Whenever you take an action, you’ll roll a black enemy die for any enemy that’s engaged with you. Just because you’re exploring the room or helping out a friend doesn’t mean the orc in your face is going to take a breather. Enemy attacks can either hit or miss, and they can trigger a special attack from the quest’s boss, who’s always lurking just around the corner.

After everyone takes an action, the monsters get a turn, and they follow the simple AI printed on their cards.

The Clanrat above charges toward a player and inflicts damage. The Gigantic Spider inflicts damage, exhausts a player’s card, and then retreats into the shadows. The creatures all do actions that feel thematically appropriate; they dance around the table, flitting in and out of combat and giving an abstract simulation of the tactical positioning you’d find in a miniatures-on-a-grid game.

A constantly advancing “peril track” keeps you from dilly-dallying; if it ticks up far enough, bosses start showing up and quest-specific story beats will trigger. You'll want to keep moving to stay ahead of the peril track, but every time you travel to a new location, new enemies spawn. The push and pull between clearing out monsters and exploring new locations makes the game tense, exciting, and very difficult.