Dungeon Match

The game

A dungeon floor is a grid of relics. Trace a connected line through relics of one kind and your lead rides that line to its end — and whatever is standing there takes the hit. Your path is your attack: the same gesture that collects also moves, and also fights. There is no separate attack button, because there is no separate attack.

Which relic you trace decides what the move does. Blades wound. Wards raise a guard on whoever moved. Vials mend. Coins pay. Embers scorch every foe on the floor at once, which is why the board can look lost and not be.

Every floor ends when the hall is clear, or when the hall clears you. Fall and the run is over; there is no continue and no retry on a ranked board.

Worth a closer look

The lead is a choice, not a rule. When more than one of your party stands beside a line, you pick who takes it. Sending the Lancer down a blade chain spends her health instead of the Delver's; sending the Emberwright spends the one who can least afford it. Most runs are lost by never making that choice at all.

Everyone has a relic they are better at. The Delver favours blades, the Lancer wards, the Emberwright embers — a favoured line pays a bigger bonus as they level. It is a quiet reason to send the right one, on a board that already gives you reasons to send the nearest.

Spells belong to the staff, not to the man. The Emberwright joins a Delve on floor eight and the median Delve ends around floor six — an ability tied to him would be absent from most runs of the game. It is tied to the weapon instead: a Delver who finds a staff in a chest casts from floor one, two casts a floor.

Chests are gated on the party, not on a counter. A bow will not appear in a chest before somebody who can draw it is alive to take it — weapons you cannot use are litter, not difficulty. And whoever opens the chest keeps what is in it, which turns the detour from "are the turns worth it" into "who should walk over there".

How it plays

1. Trace a chain of three or more. Drag through adjoining relics of the same kind. Adjoining means up, down, left or right — there are no diagonals, so a line that looks connected across a corner is not one.
2. The line has to pass beside a delver. A chain nobody in your party stands next to is a chain nobody can walk. This is the most common rejected move.
3. Pick who walks it. If more than one of your party is beside the chain, tap the one you want to lead. They travel the whole line and finish on the last tile.
4. The end of the line is the blow. Whatever occupies the tile your lead arrives at takes the damage — and a blade line does damage per cell, so length is power.
5. Spend the right kind. Blades wound, wards guard the one who moved, vials mend, embers hit every foe on the floor, coins pay for what is offered at the stair.
6. Clear the hall to descend. The stair opens when the floor is done, and it is where your gold is spent. In the modes that have one, an exit can be taken early — leaving with what you have is a real option and sometimes the correct one.

The daily

One dungeon a day, the same five floors for every player in the world, dealt from the date. The daily hands you the whole party from the first hall — the Delver, the Lancer and the Emberwright — rather than recruiting them as you descend: recruits arrive on floors four and eight, and a five-floor run would have met almost nobody. It is a puzzle with everything already on the table.

Rescue is the day's second board: a single floor with a barred exit and somebody behind it. Short, and rarely as simple as it looks.

Delve and Escape

The two endless modes start you alone and run until you fall. Delve goes down as far as you can take it. Escape — "keep them moving" — puts an exit on every floor and asks a different question: not how deep, but how long you can keep leaving.

Both rank on their own world boards, kept separate from the daily so a lucky endless run never sits in a daily leaderboard. They are not part of the Gauntlet score.