Customer Reviews

The Order of the Stick : The Dungeon of Dorukan

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This game is a lot of fun! And it's funny! (I love the cards that parody D&D spells, and most of Elan's cards are so silly, like "Gratuitous Nudity".) You don't even have to know the comic to enjoy it; one of my friends loves this game, and she's never read the comic. Then again, all my friends who have played this with me have been from my Dungeons and Dragons group, so it's probably to be expected that they'd enjoy a game that's based on a comic that's a parody of D&D. The characters that you get to play are the members of the Order of the Stick: Roy (the intelligent, lawful good, easily annoyed human party leader), Haley (the second in command- she's a loot-obsessed, chaotic good human thief), Elan (the moronic, cheerful, chaotic good human bard/swordsman), Durkon (the good, rather bland, dwarven cleric), Belkar (the probably-evil, bloodthirsty halfling), and Vaarsuvius (the good, gender-ambiguous elven wizard). The point of the game is to move into rooms (room cards get put on the table to create a map, or a kind of "Clue" board) and kill enemies to get their treasure, or "loot" as the game calls it. You can also attack other players for loot, but my group has its own house rules where we ignore that rule; so far no one playing Belkar has wanted to attack the others, and the rest of the characters don't really need to attack any of the other players.

In the game the characters all have their strengths and weaknesses, but balance out pretty well against each other; in theory, Roy and Haley would seem to be the best at the game since they're the ones with the most powerful attacks, but the other characters have just as good a chance at winning the game since beating the final boss (Xykon) isn't what determines the winner- the winner is the person with the most shticks (attack, stealing, and action type cards) and loot cards (these would be the equivalent of gold or money). The trick is to not let the other players pull ahead in how many of these cards they have.

For instance, I've read reviews online where people think Haley is too strong; the trick there would be to follow her around and stay on the same floor as her so she asks for help (since the loot without her face on them don't do her any good other than as bribes) instead of letting her go off on her own floor and kill things by herself, hence getting all the loot and making her start getting more powerful shticks where she won't need much help. Also, I've found that players really need to pay attention when there's a Haley in the game; when I played her, no one realized how often I was coming in and stealing their kills and loot until it was too late, which they could have somewhat prevented by not letting her get so powerful early on (make sure you kill an enemy before she can get there, and help, help, help!).

It also depends on the luck of the draw- what cards you get, how much loot you can snag in the beginning, and how many shticks you can get early on. I've kicked butt as Elan when I lucked out in getting lots of cards early, but last time someone played Elan without making him follow the other characters, so he ended up falling way behind on loot cards and shticks (the point of Elan is to help other and get loot that way, but you can't do that if you're not on the same floor as the other players). Really, you have to strategize and use what works best for the character you're playing, and everyone has an equal chance at winning.

The other problem I've read about in reviews is how long the game runs. It tends to run about 4 hours for my group; we've gotten the game down now so don't have to keep looking up the rules, but when we first started it took longer. But what my group does if the game starts to run long is to make up house rules- for instance, make it be three floors instead of four, or only need six shtick cards at the end instead of eight. The Board Game Police aren't going to come after you if you change the rules up a bit. ;)

This game is an awesome alternative to Dungeons and Dragons when some of the group can't make it (since my group doesn't play D&D if more than one person can't make the game). It also runs about the same time as our D&D game, which is perfect for us.

I've played this a few times now and have had a blast each time! The quick rules worked fine for us the first time, and as questions came up, we read more. It's definitely more involved then your average board game, but if you like strategy games, you're probably going to like this! I'd call it a blend of Talisman and Munchkin.

I love how different the characters are for game play, and that each time you play you'll have a very different experience.

Definitely helps if you like the comic, but I even played with 2 13-year-olds who had never heard of the comic or D&D and they vowed to save their allowance to buy their own copy!

Great game! Highly recommended!

This board game, based of of an awesome webcomic, is the best board game that I have ever played. Although it takes several hours more than it says, and some characters (cough cough roy cough cough) are much better than others. This game has multiple funny items, like the shield of sparrow deflection, and the Muskrat 3000. Overall, this game gets 5 stars.

its the one game that the younger and older kids can play together. New players can pick it up quickly. Lots of fun

The game feels quite straightforward to play after reading the introduction comic, but there are a lot of issues that become unclear as you play the game. The full rulebook + errata does not always make it easy to find the answer to your questions, but so far all the answers have been there.

For the reviewer that couldn't get to the last level of the dungeon, players can keep meeting monsters as long as they end their movement in an empty room, so one can keep getting loot as long as no one is hoarding the loot, and one can keep trading loot back and forth for help. Further the help bonuses stack, so it's possible (and even automatic) to take out very high level enemies.

The poor durability score is due to the plastic holder in the box being already cracked right after unwrapping it. It holds everything in place well, but I don't see how it could have broken in transport.

As a big fan of the comic strip, I enjoy the game a lot, although I see the problems with the rules and gameplay.

The order of the stick is a great family game. You will enjoy hours of fun.Even if your not the "group" game playing type you should give it a try!

My 16 year old and a bunch of his friends think the game is a riot and have played it for 6 or 7 hours at a time. I've played it for an hour or so a couple of times with them and though that's not enough time to make any headway in the game, I can understand why these kids find it so funny. The numerous rules are simple to remember - all you do is go from room to room or different floors to fight monsters, plus the cards have wacky, but clean humor.

Kay Divi

I received this game as a Christmas gift and was really looking forward to playing it. The first thing that made me a bit nervous was the 35-page rulebook. You know how most games can fit all their rules on, like, the back of the box, or in a little fold-up guide? 35 frickin' pages! A small insert to the game says, "Don't worry, just read the quick rules guide (a small comic strip thing) to get started and refer to the rulebook as needed."

After reading through the quick guide my boyfriend and I bumbled through a two-person session that night and, after referring to the rulebook 12d10+10 times decided we needed to really read through the "real" rulebook and give it another go.

We have a few friends from our D&D group who are fans of the comic, so we invited them over to make a six-some and play the max players in the game. Our first mistake was in believing that the estimated game time would be accurate--I believe it was four hours. "Golly," we all sighed, "we had other stuff we wanted to do tonight, but I guess we can devote four hours to this thrilling new game."

Okay...the game is not exactly thrilling. It is pretty much tedious and fairly disappointing. We made the mistake of cashing in our "loot" for "shticks" which are like skills. The shticks are REALLY unbalanced IMHO and very hit-or-miss. I traded in tons of loot and got nine shticks total in the game...three I started out with, and only two others I found worth using. (You can't trade them back in if they suck, though.) Also, word to the not-so-wise--make sure you keep your loot around so that nine hours after the game starts and you finally get through level three, you can help out fighting Xenon or Xenxon or Gencon or whatever his name is. (Sorry, I'm not a devoted reader of the comic.)

Anyway, hyperbole aside, we started our game at 5pm and ended six-and-a-half and three-angry-phone-calls-from-a-wife later. We finally had to call it quits once we realized that there was no way the ONE character who was able to get to the fourth level (because the rest of us had foolishly squandered our loot for useless shticks, leaving us incapable of defeating more monsters which could have given us more loot) was going to be able to defeat the first monster in the same room as...Xedrik?...much less the other four monsters and the BBEG himself.

All in all, it was underwhelming. The cards were amusing, but the game itself could have been less bogged down with rules and intricacies. It's definitely going to be one that doesn't get taken out of the closet often, unless I have an eight-hour-stretch or more I can devote to a board game.