Nine months after the Uphill Battle to Greatness review, Daniel (@dungeondive) returns with a short status update on Dungeon Crusade — the single thing keeping the game off his table has been fixed.
His original criticism was the relearn: the conversational 70-page Crusader’s Handbook was tolerable on first read, but months later the prospect of re-reading it just to set the game up was enough to keep the box on the shelf. The new Quick Reference Guide — co-written by Roger Pearce and a community member named Ilpo, freely downloadable, soon professionally bound and slipped into reprints and the upgrade kit — solves it. Daniel notes you could very nearly learn the game from the QRG alone, and flags two further additions arriving with the second print run: an Evolved Minions variant (a d20 fray-die-style roll with splash damage to adjacent minions) that significantly speeds combat without trivialising it, and a scalable-difficulty card that lowers target numbers for non-combat encounters and traps at hero levels one and two.
The QRG also finally includes setup photographs for each dungeon — an omission from the original release that even attentive followers had been surprised by. He restates his three persistent wishlist items (a real incentive to trigger traps, interconnected quest narratives across tables one through three, more interesting hero special-ability progression) and announces a giveaway: Roger is sending him a Crusader of the Realm edition for a Dungeon Dive viewer.
How much should the relearn cost factor into how you score a game on review? Daniel calls it a make-or-break for shelf longevity — does that match how your collection actually behaves?