Matthew BaileyFinally having sat on our shelf since before Xmas it’s time to get around to playing “Minecraft Portal Dash” played this afternoon by myself, Jack(7) and Toby(4).
The Minecraft games have always been relatively well received in our house. Both of the boys are fans of the games and the board game adaptions have all been pretty good (especially builders and biomes that game is way better than it has any right to be as a licensed game).
This afternoon we found ourselves with an hour or so to spare so decided to get it out and have a go.
Unlike the previous games “Portal Dash” is a cooperative family-friendly Dungeon Crawler. If you have played Cora Quest movement and combat and the like is all very similar to that.
There is quite a lot rule wise and this definitely is a game the boys totally got but needed me to keep everything together and do some of the background admin.
There is no story but essentially you are all trying to get from the left-hand side of the board to the right-hand side of the board, fight the boss and escape via the portal.
Each player chooses a character and gets a board with their starting gear. You set up the cube of blocks (just like in builders and biomes) and these form the resources you can gather. To get the portal and final boss to appear you have to gather the resources and pay them to the piglings by making columns of matching colours as you collect them.
before your turn, you roll 2 white dice. One tells you a block to discard (this slowly makes you lose resources that act as a soft timer to the game) and the other tells you which monsters attack. The monsters hit pretty hard generally doing about a third of your base health each hit so it’s important to get better gear and fairly quickly.
On your turn, you can use a basic action (repair an item, move 1 or mine 1) or use one of your items (to attack, move more spaces, mine more blocks). When mining a block which colour you take denotes what it does (red healed, grey repairs an item, yellow lets you open a chest, black lets you take a netherite items and brown lets you build a bridge over lava).
Enemy movement and combat are very standard for a simple dungeon crawler. Enemies move to the nearest player and attack with a set amount of damage. On your turn when attacking you roll the correct amount of attack dice related to what weapon you are using and see if you kill the monster.
Once you have opened the portal the big boss appears (which also stops new monsters from spawning) and then it becomes a race to kill him as quickly as possible.
We played on the lowest difficulty and it was not as easy as some games but this was largely a time management thing and not getting caught up killing monsters that will respawn. We realised there is a way to game the mechanic and that is all the monsters are separated into 3 numbers and you only move the monsters that have the number you roll. If you toll a number that isn’t there a new mob spawns. Therefore the best way to deal with this is to simply ensure that you kill all the monsters and only leave 3 alive all with different spawn numbers so you only get one bit of incoming damage each turn and no new monsters ever spawn.
It all works very well and the ever-dwindling resource cube adds a sense of urgency. You do spend a lot of time repairing broken equipment though which is a little annoying and I feel that having 3 actions per turn might have helped this.
Component quality is the same mixed bag that Builders and Biomes were. The chunky wooden cubes are lovely, most of the tiles are far too thin, the heart tokens (new for this game) are lovely and everything else is a bit too thin. If ever there was a game screaming for a deluxe edition with decent miniatures we could all paint with our kids this is it.
Overall it’s aserviceable if fairly basic little dungeon crawler.
The problem is the price. At £40 it’s more expensive than Coraquest which is a better dungeon crawler than this. It’s also more expensive than Builders and Biomes which is a better game than this (although they are very different) and Heroes of the Village is way cheaper at half the price.
So my flow diagram of recommendation….
1. Are your kids super into Minecraft…..
Yes –> go to question 2
No –> Get Coraquest if you want a dungeon crawler
2.Do they want a coop game or a competitive game?
competitive –> Get builders and biomes
Coop –> maybe get this if they really want a game that’s more focused on battling and adventuring than the mining and building bits of the game.
Really and truly I think this game should have used the “Minecraft Dungeons” spin-off license and leaned more into the combat and made it more like a traditional dungeon crawler with smaller room tiles and randomly generated dungeons (like the Minecraft Dungeons game)
What we are left with is a game that straddles in the middle with much better games around it all the while being the most expensive one.
Def one for massive Minecraft fans but far from essential.
