Overview & How to Play

You are an adventuring party, going through a dungeon of 9 monstrosities that you must overcome together! However… while you attack as a team, individually, players are trying to get the final kill on monsters for points. Because this is Cutthroat Caverns.

Whoever at the end of the 9 encounters has the most points, wins the game. Or, if you’re the only one still left in your party, and you manage to crawl out of the dungeon alive, you win.

So Cutthroat is all about attacking monsters, and players will each get an initiative card, which is the order they attack in. Everyone sets an attack card at the same time, then they get flipped in initiative order, dealing damage, so like 50 damage from a 50 Attack card. Then the monster will attack back, with unique attacking patterns, like a Ripper will attack the player with the initiative of 2. Then everyone draws another card, gets new initiatives, and sets more cards to attack!

A couple of crucial things though: the Action and Item cards. The Action cards are blue, which are almost EXCLUSIVELY used to screw over other players: like tripping them when they’re attacking, using them as human shields, etc. The item cards are ways to ready up in between encounters, like consumable health pots to heal yourself.

Oh, and if someone happens to die (oh what a pity!), the game actually immediately gets harder, as the monsters stay just as strong, but the adventuring party is one sword/bow/axe weaker.

Yeah, mostly just land killing blows on monsters, and try to survive!

Pros

First and foremost, ooooh man does Cutthroat have a LOT of replayability. You have 9 encounters that are randomly chosen and shuffled from a deck of 27. The story of each dungeon created by your encounter deck is always going to be different. Plus, the final 3 encounters are very important, because those give the winner extra points, a LOT of them, so those fights are typically more epic.

As for each encounter card, each monster feels entirely different and makes sense to fight against. There’s a Medusa that uses a coin to determine whether or not it stuns players it attacks, or the Wolf Pack, which swarms your party with tons of wolves. Or what about the Gas Bag, which actually punishes players that kill it by dealing almost half of players’ health when killed. This leads to players hoping that they’ll have enough Feint and 0 Attack cards not to damage it.

One of our favorites is Fear, who gains attack, health, and most importantly, prestige, for each round it survives. Adding more on to the story of Fear, it strikes for 10 points at the player who damaged it the MOST in a round, so sometimes players are too scared to use their high powered attacks, until they are 100% sure they can kill it, yet this hesitation leads to the Fear surviving another round and getting stronger. It could eventually grow to epic proportions, being worth 9 points… and hitting for 1/3 of your health.

The attacking mechanics are also done well, where there’s a good variety of attacking cards with humor sprinkled in, to prevent such a simple combat mechanism from being repetitive. There’s satisfying Critical hits of 100 damage, Double Strikes, and even Holy Water that is extra potent against Demons, Fiends, and other ugly things. There’s an infamous Stab and Grab to steal other people’s items, while doing a measly 5 damage. Or there’s ways to stall out and NOT damage the monster which is always cheeky to confuse your teammates… ok let’s be real, they’re your opponents.

These attacking cards mix with the action cards, and item cards to really add good flavor to your dungeon crawl. Continue to screw over each other at opportune times with Critical Miss, or steal kills with a Counter Strike! Or use items like Alchemist’s Fire to damage all the current monsters on command, while also doing a little bit of damage to everyone in the party?

Cons

Indeed, Cutthroat just wants you to be so brutal towards your friends. And you can continue playing as such because the game never really rules anyone out from winning until they’re dead. Points just become abundant later in the game for comebacks. Or, more commonly, people can launch comebacks by indirectly HELPING the monsters to try to kill off everyone else. The game is filled with drama until the end because of these overarching strategies.

And sure, you can technically die off early, but that typically won’t happen. If players start internal party killing too early, the game will become too hard for the remaining survivors, since the monsters are scaled to the people you start the game with, not the current number of players. Now the monsters are still strong, while the adventuring party has less firepower. If everyone fails to make it out of the the dungeon, nobody wins.

Then perhaps it’s the game’s age, but the components and art feel cheesy overall, like it being way too easy to accidentally mess up your health, especially if someone hits the table during a dramatic moment. The art is extremely inconsistent, that had all a vastly different vision of how this world would look like, which is jarring.

The biggest con has to do the low accessibility with how darn confusing the rulebook is. The structure is hard to follow, and some cards like Plan B are so confusing that they require some house rules.

There’s also some concerns on encounter pacing, where the deck of 9 cards can be a little too random at times. Monsters can appear in certain parts of the dungeon that makes no sense thematically OR competitively. Sure, it could be funny to have the last encounter not be a monster, but instead a trap room where no one gets points, but these types of outcomes make it frustrating for players who actually do plan and want to win off of some expectation of a fair fight.

Final Thoughts

Overall, Cutthroat Caverns is a good game that is mostly held back by its below average physical appearance and occasionally confusing interactions not covered by the rules. The opportunity to jump in a dungeon with your friends and constantly question yourself whether or not they’re lying to you (they probably are) just gets flavor from all the different sandbagging cards and monster quirks.