There is quite a buzz developing around Super Dungeon Explore, at least on the convention circuit and amongst miniature gamers. Soda Pop Miniatures sell high quality metal miniatures that have a manga/anime style, complete with quirky animal sidekicks, and Super Dungeon Explore (SED) appears to be an ambitious entry into the board game market.

At the moment you can only play SED through a demo that you can download from Soda Pop Miniatures website, although the demo provides you with 5 hero character cards and enough kobold cards to play the ‘bad’ guys. It also provides runes and weapons that you can upgrade your characters with, while the shop on the website sells the requisite models to play the demo.

The demo should give you a good idea of how the game plays and where SED is likely to go in the future with expansions. The game maintains the same Japanese feel graphically, and is based on console games like Zelda, Final Fantasy and others, so perhaps SED can bridge the gap between console gamers and board gamers. Given that consoles are now mainstream and are no longer the sole territory of geeks, the next step is to make Monopoly and Scrabble move aside for the growing mountain of Ameritrash and Eurogames, maybe games like SED can do that.

You will need to provide your own models to play the demo and tokens to keep track of certain game effects. The game will contain special dice, which are increasingly common in games these days, SED includes dice in three colours with different numbers of stars on them, a heart and/or a potion. The demo provides a guide to converting normal six sided dice to their dice format. The demo is only for 2 to 3 players, so the player count listed above is for the full game.

One player is the ‘Dark Consul’ or overlord/sauron/keeper, while the others are the heroes. Your objective in the demo as the heroes is to destroy two spawning points (where the kobolds appear), very reminiscent of the original arcade game Gauntlet, while the Dark Consul has to kill the heroes. I am sure that the full game will have various different scenarios, and hopefully even have story based dungeons to crawl through rather than simply being a combat game.

In true 8-bit style the heroes are cartoonish bigheaded ‘chibi’ style cutesies, the line art on the character cards gives you a good idea of what the miniatures look like, but the final product will no doubt contain full colour art. They have a bunch of statistics like Armour and Dexterity, defined as a number of blue or red dice, a line of hearts to register health damage and a handful of special skills. The special skills are pretty much what make the game in terms strategy and fun.

You have action points in SED, which you spend on moving and fighting and using abilities, creating a nice little chess like element to combat. The turn sequence is split up so that rather than heroes have a turn then the Dark Consul has a turn, you might have two heroes go, then the Dark Consul and then the other heroes. This gives the Dark Consul better opportunities to interfere with the heroes tactics and movement.

When it gets to combat you roll a number of dice indicated on your character card (Attack), add up the stars on the die (hits) while your opponent rolls a number of dice (for Armour) and adds up the stars that negate each hit. Green dice are better than blue are better than red dice, while white dice have a static value, so a white 1 always counts as 1 star. You get the idea.

Going back to the special abilities of the heroes, they really make the heroes stand out from each other. There is a Demonkin Rogue that can teleport, an Elf Ranger that has Pixie Dust and can attack enemies with Sparkles, and a Human Paladin that just kicks butt. How you use these abilities and in what order from one hero to the next can make a big impact on how successful your combats are, and have similarities in play to games like Dungeons and Dragons 4^th Edition and of course Descent.

These abilities have area effects that either hurt enemies or heal friends, knockdown an opponent or remove specific damage effects. The kobolds also have abilities though less of them, including Mob, which gives a kobold more dice if it gangs up on an opponent. So it is in your best interests to play to the strengths of your characters and try to avoid allowing your opponent to do so.

You can open treasure chests and draw a treasure card to upgrade your hero, when you successfully wound an enemy there is a chance that a potion will drop out of him. All this game needs is a spade that you can dig in the ground for health points, giant racing chickens and green slime oozing around the dungeon. It could also do with pillars that you move, trapdoors, puzzles and – well, there are only so many tropes from Japanese role play games that you can squeeze into a board game.

The Super Dungeon Explore demo is a fun game and from what promotional material is available has a really great theme. It looks like Soda Pop Miniatures have a ton of miniatures to release for the game and therefore a whole bunch of different heroes and monsters to bring out, further expanding the game. Even with the amount of text on the character cards it is still easy for players to get to grips with what their heroes can do, making SED easy to set up, teach and play, yet still having plenty of tactical options. It should be endless hours of fun.