Trial of Champions

...and we're back to Deathtrap Dungeon. Everyone's favorite Baron Sukumvit has returned with another dungeon and a much larger cash prize. But this time, there's a catch. You're not entering as a willing volunteer. Instead, his evil brother has captured you (along with a large bunch of unlucky fools) and is putting you through an arena challenge to find the best of the bunch. Someone who will beat the new dungeon and humiliate his brother. It was pretty good to see that there is some extra story over just simply signing up for the second challenge, and the ending also presents another twist.

Your first stage is to survive the gladiatorial games and rise to the top of pile, over a mountain of dead bodies. This is quite challenging and death is possible. Furthermore, the dungeon itself also pits you against a lot of enemies with pretty high stats, some which can't be avoided. (That sound was me surreptitiously flipping the dice to a six when rolling my stats.) There are also no provisions in the game, so high personal stats are even more of a must here.

I prefer Deathtrap Dungeon to this one, although it's also pretty good, with an interesting selection of encounters and challenges in the dungeon. You will need to collect certain key items and find the one true path, and this will only be revealed to you as the story goes along. The true path, again, also has you (Spoiler - click to show)running into every other unlucky contestant, who are on average less nice than the ones in the first book. It requires you to find every single one of the key items with zero margin for error. Sukumvit was really tough when designing this one.

It's an entertaining read, but finding the true path can be challenging and will still require you to deal with a gauntlet of high stat enemies. Of course, you could simply pretend that number on your dice was a six, but you didn't hear that from me.