Review: Dungeons and Lasers II

In a slight departure from my regularly scheduled content, today I am reviewing a Kickstarter project that has finally arrived after waiting a few months. Dungeons & Laser II is a highly modular dungeon room creation system made by a Polish company named Archon Studio. This is their second run of dungeon terrain after a successful first campaign. All of the items in this review are "Legacy" items, which means that they are from the first campaign. The rest of the product should be arriving sometime in August of 2021. 

Now, I am in no way affiliated with them, I purchased this product myself, and below is my honest review. Below are my initial thoughts.

Before starting, here are some baseline rules to understand my ratings. I will look at packaging, sprue quality,  and product design. Ranking will range from Very Poor, Poor, Fair, Good, and Very Good. 

Packaging: Good

First off, I apologize for the glare, in my excitement a lot of these photos were taken at night. My Kickstarter package came with a nice set of welcome letters to thank backers for supporting the project. The box was perfectly sized to the contents, and since nothing inside is very fragile, it didn't requires loads of packing material either. 

The box was also very heavy, more so than I expected, which makes me happy about the price of shipping from far off Poland. 

Inside the box were two Fantasy core sets, which would allow me to build a standard stone dungeon, a Hall of Heroes expansion room, which is dwarf themed, a Torture Room expansion room, and the stretch goals, which include Sci Fi and Fantasy accoutrements to dress your dungeons. The actual boxes that these came in were a little thin, but it's really not a big deal. 

The overall score for packaging is Good since I think it did the job without being overly fanciful. 

Sprue Quality: Fair

The plastic itself of the sprues is of high quality, and should last a fair while. The sprue design itself could use some work, especially if you are used to products from Games Workshop. Some of the joints are really close together, making it difficult to get a sprue cutter into the gap, either requiring you to use an X-acto knife or to bend the plastic until it breaks. 

Some of the sprues had a glossy sheen to them, which I'm assuming is a mold release agent. This will require an extra step of clean-up before priming. This might not take too long, but considering the number of sprues in the package could add up. I'm only used to seeing this with resin models so this was a bit of a surprise on plastic. 

Occasionally there are large bits of flash, sometimes even getting thick enough to be difficult to remove. Some parts, like in the picture above, are on the edges of the sprue and break off very easily. This might mean having to dive back into a box to find a part that you're missing. 

Outside of those qualms, the layout of each sprue is generally pretty good, and I'm especially happy that they separated the Sci Fi and Fantasy bits from each other. 

Product Design: Very Good

Once the parts are clipped from the sprue, the flexibility of the system becomes apparent. Even with the expansion pack I could make a small room with a few extra pieces. You can always mix and match between the different sets as well to get the look that you want. The system is very intuitive, and I was able to whip up a room in only a few minutes. Anyone that's every played with Legos will have an easy time of it. Parts clip together and come apart easily. There will be no aching fingers at the end of a build session. 

The rooms also seem to be large enough to fit quite a few models inside, especially if you're playing D&D with 25 mm bases. If you're intention is for wargaming, larger models may not fit inside or they may be taller than the wall edges. The floor tiles also have a subtle grid look to them to help with ease of play. 

The designs are highly detailed and clear enough from a distance. This makes the dungeon easily readable, which is important since you don't play any wargames at an eye level. One issue I had was that there weren't enough edge connector pieces to make a large room, so you may have tabs poking out. This shouldn't be an issue in D&D, but if you plan to use them for wargames like me, it is definitely immersion breaking. 

Added to that last point, the rim created around any room has no details on it, so if you want to make them buildings you will have to find a way to cover that up. Or you could leave it if you want to keep the modularity. 

The room also holds together very well, allowing you to pick up the whole building and move it elsewhere. For D&D this means you can just plop down ready-made rooms instead of building them up in front of your players.

I really like this system, and am looking forward to seeing how far I can push it in my gaming. If you try some out and have new ideas, feel free to drop a comment below to let me know!

-The Space Dinosaur