One of the major aspects of Hex is the PvE dungeons that will offer the players a variety of story-driven challenges. Today we’re going to look at a few of the dungeons revealed so far!

Junkyard Dog

Junkyard Dog was the first dungeon revealed, shown to the world during the daily updates of the Kickstarter campaign. Straight away you can see the amount of effort Cryptozoic must be putting into these things, with that incredibly detailed and colourful map that contains at least 14 different locations (and therefore, presumably, 14 different missions.) That same update also gave us a glimpse at the few Gnoll cards we’ve seen – though interestingly, these cards are used exclusively by the AI; you will never be able to get those cards for yourself (baring some kind of temporary card stealing.) The obvious question is, just how many of these dungeon-specific AI-only cards are there? Even the most hardened veteran is going to have a few surprises if every dungeon features cards they’ve never seen before.

Kraz’s Secret Lair

Kraz’s Secret Lair is a dungeon that was revealed via a mock-interview with Kraz himself. I’m really looking forward to this dungeon, as I imagine it will contain a lot of interesting “trap” cards designed to screw around with would-be heroes – what else would you expect from a supervillain?

The interview itself is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it revealed the existence of yet another new species to the Hex world, a race of top-hat wearing anthropomorphic pigs called the Grunties. Will the Grunties get their own cards? If so, what will they do? Will they ever appear on cards that can be acquired by the player? Questions abound!

Secondly, they also revealed that this dungeon will tie directly into a card that appears in Set 1 and can be used in PvP, Argus, Herald of Doom. Personally I find this very interesting, and can’t help but wonder if any other PvP cards we’ve seen tie directly into their own dungeons – who wouldn’t want a dungeon involving the Mushwocky?!

Wild Heist

This dungeon was revealed in the first post-kickstarter update, Dungeon Delving, and it made a lot of people unhappy because no new cards were spoiled. I enjoyed it though, because I love the idea of dungeons in a card game, and the Wild Heist dungeon in particular revealed a few interesting facts. Primarily, this dungeon is available only to Underworld characters. Faction may have no weight in PvP, but if you make an Ardent character in PvE then no Wild Heist dungeon for you!

It also shows just how crazy the Dwarves are (if the supervillain with the doomsday device wasn’t proof enough) – the story of this dungeon is that you need to steal pure Wild Magic directly from the Genesis Pool, the original of the Elves and all Wild Magic on Entrath, because the Dwarves need a power source efficient enough to fuel their new robot. Nuts, right? I expect to see lots of cool Wild and Elf cards in this dungeon.

Kraken’s Gold

Finally, Kraken’s Gold! This dungeon was also revealed during the Kickstarter campaign, and gave us the most insight into the mechanics of how a dungeon will actually work. Naturally, the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a story-driven dungeon in a card game is a handful of pre-constructed decks each separated by some text that tells the story. This update tells us that this clearly isn’t the case, and things you might not even think of will have an effect on how the story plays out – deciding whether or not to kill the Mayor of the town wouldn’t have occurred to me at all, I simply would have killed him and been on my way!

Each fight can also have an effect on your deck that will last for the duration of the dungeon – if the Kraken grabs too many of your troops, you’re going to be coming up short for the rest of the dungeon because you aren’t getting them back until you’re done. This is a great way of adding a feeling of consistency during the dungeons, and forces you to think a little differently that you might in any other match. It also opens the possibility for a whole host of other dungeon-long effects that could be applied to your deck as a result of your actions or performance. How about plague cards added into your deck, that cause your troops to weaken if you draw it, or a number of single-use artifacts that grant you additional resources when you need them most? The possibilities are potentially endless.

So, there you go. Given how relatively little information we have on the PvE side of things, most of the content currently being produced is very PvP-heavy. Completely understandable, of course, but hopefully I’ve gotten you thinking a little about the possibilities that dungeons present in terms of both very interesting gameplay and story.