At GenCon 2010, Cutthroat Caverns was the first game that I demoed, and it was over at the Smirk and Dagger booth. The wife and I sat down and enjoyed a 20 minute demo of how the game worked, and I posted about it on my Day 1 on the GenCon floor post. We said we would probably pick it up, but were a little worried about the number of expansions to it. Well, GenCon has come and gone, so what happened? Well, we ended up picking up the core set, one of the expansions, and a choose your own adventure style book for the game, and then not playing it for almost two months.
You see, my group was a bit afraid of a game called "Cutthroat Caverns" having nearly started a fist fight over TPKing (Total Party Kill) in Tomb by AEG Games. I reassured them we would have some fun, and sat down to play. What we discovered was a very entertaining game with a unique mix of working together and edging each other out gameplay that we hadn't experienced before.
The story hook goes that you're a group of adventurers who have stumbled over a great and wondrous item and make a deal that whomever has the most prestige after exiting the dungeon alive will get to keep it. Prestige is gained through different means, but the most common is to get the killing blow on monsters that you encounter from room to room by playing attack cards worth various amounts. There's other cards that allow you to bolster your attacks, heal yourself, or swap cards with other players to add to the strategy. There's another key word there, in that you have to survive until the end. The monsters attack back and you only have 100 health to make it through ~9 encounters. Fifteen prestige is worth nothing to a dead man.
So what you find yourself doing is working as a team to bring down a monster, and then manipulating the last round or two of hands to try to get the killing blow, or even stopping the person with the highest score from getting it. If you mess with your companions too much, you won't be able to take down the monster, but if you don't do anything, you won't win the game. The mechanic works really well, and we even found ourselves in tight spots thinking that it might be better to bow out and let somebody have the killing blow rather than risk taking more damage.
We had a really great time playing this game with six players, and when we had to scale it back to 4, it played just as great. I've always thought it to be a great sign that a game plays just as well no matter how many players are involved. Sometimes, game companies try to get as many as they can into a game ignoring when the game stops being fun, but Smirk and Dagger knew where to draw the line, as sad as it makes me that we couldn't get just one or two more involved.
At GenCon we were a bit concerned with the number of expansions, as the more that get involved, the more complicated a game gets (see Zombies!!! or Killer Bunnies for examples). We only played with the core set for a few games, and then added the 2nd expansion pack (recommended by Smirk and Dagger to us) which included events than ran alongside with the encounters. They added an extra level to it that was still manageable, but provided incentives for doing strange things, like being the last character to take a hit from the monster. Since then, I've ordered the additional expansion packs looking for more like what I got from this one.
So, in the end, do I recommend this game? Well, if you can't tell by all my writing here, then yes, yes, a hundred times yes. Its unique mix of cooperative gameplay and bit of backstabbing without too dire of consequences makes for a fun evening. Pick it up and enjoy a night of dungeon crawling with your friends.
