Cutthroat Caverns

The tag-line says it all for this game: "Without teamwork, you will never survive. Without betrayal, you'll never win." You take on the role of a generic dungeon-crawl character (elf, dwarf, etc.) battling to the death with a series of random monsters that have varying special powers. The twist is that only the character who deals the killing blow gets the prestige.

It’s a game of jostling for position and back-stabbing – the monsters’ strength scales with the number of players who started the game, so before you to do away with your opponents you want to use and abuse them as much as possible, bearing in mind that they’re trying to do the same to you. This is definitely not one to play with anyone who doesn’t like a bit of “take that” as there is player elimination, but the overall Cutthroat Caverns is light-hearted. Taunting the monster and redirecting his aggression to an opponent is always fun (well, until you’re on the receiving end!).

The artwork is very nice, but the lack of special character abilities is a bit disappointing (though this will be fixed in the upcoming expansion “Fresh Meat”). There are twenty-five monsters included with the game, which is plenty to get you started, but I recommend picking up some of the expansions to add a bit of variety and stop the game becoming stale.