BoardGameSet from Hungary contacted me to introduce their boardgame components upgrade kits. They produce upgraded game components for many games, and they use 3D printing. I normally don't buy such upgrade kits for my games, because I find the standard, basic game components good enough. For example for Agricola, I prefer the cubes in the first edition which represent the various farm animals. In later versions when you get the animeeples in the shapes of sheep, boars and cattle, it feels a little tedious to me to manage them all. I like the simplicity and practicality of the wooden cubes, even if they are not as pretty. BoardGameSet was willing to send me review copies all the way from Europe, and I was about to politely decline, until I saw... the poops!
I'm referring to the poops at the bottom right. Dungeon Petz is a game about managing a monster pet shop. It is designed by Vlaada Chvatil, and it is a sequel to Dungeon Lords. Poops is a very real and practical aspect of managing pets, and it is well represented in this game. This photo above shows all the upgraded game components that come with the BoardGameSet Dungeon Petz set. From the top left, they are: mutation markers, the start player marker, stress markers, meat-type food, vegetable-type food, gold and of course, poop!
I like the detail on the components.
This is a comparison against the original components. The only one in the upgrade set which I don't like is the start player marker, because it's too ugly. I know monsters are supposed to be ugly, but this one is too much for me.
The components come in a pack like this.
I had not played Dungeon Petz for quite a long time. Asking for a review copy of the upgraded components gave me a reason to bring it to the table again. I asked younger daughter Chen Rui to play with me. It was her first time. She said it was super stressful. Taking care of pets was a lot of work. We have three cats at home, so my wife and I know well the work that comes with owning pets. Our children mostly just know how to play with them. The last time I played Dungeon Petz was before we had cats.
We did a two player game, so we needed to use neutral player pieces. We used the yellow player pieces - those yellow imps blocking some locations on the board. My reluctance about upgraded components is due to whether they are going to be troublesome to handle. Are they going to be harder to pick up or stack together? Will they roll all over the table and annoy the hell out of me? Now that I've tried this Dungeon Petz set, I found that I did not have such difficulties. The components certainly looked prettier and enhanced the play experience.
In Dungeon Petz everyone starts with a free cage which is a little dirty, and this is represented by having one piece of poop in it during game setup. This was my first monster pet in the game we played. By this point it had pooped twice and thus added more "fertilizer" to my pet shop.
The cards represent the needs of the monster pets. They need to eat, they need to poop, they need to vent their anger, they need to release their magical powers, and sometimes they fall sick.
This is the player board. In this photo the upgraded component you can see is the gold. Imps and gold are grouped together to form teams of various sizes. These teams go to the main board to perform actions. In the original game gold is represented by wooden coins. The upgraded gold is gold bars.
Gold bars stacked together look impressive.
Baby monsters on the main board that you can buy.
I sold the monster which I used to keep in the cage on the left. There was a lot of poop left behind and I could only get my staff to do the cleaning now that the cage was vacated.
I divided my imps and gold into 6 team, hoping I might be able to perform 6 actions at the main board. This is a worker placement game. These teams are your workers. Each team has the opportunity to do one thing.
Chen Rui had this monster for a short while only. It got overly stressed and died. The amount of stress a pet can take depends on its size. The larger it is, the more stress it can endure. This one above was still a baby, so two points of stress was enough to get it killed. Stress comes from being sick, going hungry or feeling lonely when nobody is around to play with you.
These are artifacts. That whip on the right was the best performing artifact in our game. I was the one who bought it, and I benefited greatly from it. The power of the whip is it gives you half a point at pet shows. From the second round onwards there will be pet shows every round, and if your pets do well you will earn points. In a 2-player game, 1st place gets 6pts and 2nd place gets 2pts. 4pts is significant, even more so when this is happening round after round. I did not expect my pets to do well. The judging criteria did not match well with their temperaments. However Chen Rui's pets were not all that great either. Many rounds we fared equally poorly. The half point which the whip gave me pushed me into first place. This happened for many rounds, and I scored many more points that I otherwise would have without the whip.
These are minions and they are used for pet show scoring.
After the game ended, we placed all pet buyers in a row, together with the pets they had purchased. It was nice to see our monsters find suitable owners.
This was Chen Rui's favourite monster. She wanted to take a photo of it with the heart-shaped poop arrangement.
If you are interested in boardgame upgrade kits like this, go check out BoardGameSet. There are many other games they have created upgrade kits for. They sell some commonly used game components too. https://www.boardgameset.com/
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