Dungeons & Dynasties

Dungeons & Dynasties is a guild-management game in a realm without a king. You sign delvers to terms of years and send them into dungeons, where each fixture can cost them their lives. Win enough fixtures to take the Crucible, then hold it until another guild takes it from you.

Dungeon fixtures

Each delve is built for the day. In the Trials, a rival guild enters the same dungeon; if its party reaches the final room, you fight there. You choose your party, orders and equipment, then watch the delve unfold rather than directing attacks yourself. The terrain affects your fighters: flooded ground slows them, while pitch dark hampers archers.

You can choose from nine classes and ten races. Your party grows from four to six members as you climb six divisions. The realm also has a cup alongside its leagues and the Crucible.

Your delvers

Each delver arrives with a belief, a struggle and a personal ambition, though most never achieve it. Sending the right person on the right work over the years helps reveal who they are. Delvers form friendships and grudges underground, then return from their terms asking for what they are worth.

They can gain scars, retire, be sold or die on a delve. The dead receive memorial cards bearing their own sigil and epitaph; Dungeonborn are the ones you bring back. You can also manage training, a youth academy, mentors, vows and families.

A living realm

Seventy-two guilds hold seats in 36 towns across seven lands. Rival halls sign and sell delvers, rise and fall, and take part in wars; the realm remembers who marched. Beasts roam the roads, and the Deep extends below the known world.

Your hall is in a town you can build up and defend. Retired delvers can eventually settle there. A transfer market lets guilds make free transfers, loans, poach delvers and hold fire sales.

The Chronicle

Your guild records its history in the Chronicle, which presents your dynasty season by season as a story of its fallen delvers and the figures who shaped the guild. Everything recorded there happened in your save.

Ways to play

You can begin in the Backwater or start higher up, and choose whether to accept a patron's backing or go it alone. More than a dozen founding terms can be combined, including Ironman and a guild made entirely of beasts. Cozy Mode removes the league, letting you simply run your guild.

• 72 rival guilds, six divisions, a cup and the Crucible
• Training, a youth academy and mentors
• A hometown to build up and defend
• Vows, families, scars and permanent death
• More than a dozen stackable founding terms and Cozy Mode