Dungeons & Gangsters

What is Dungeons & Gangsters?

Dungeons & Gangsters is a turn-based fantasy role-playing game pushed down to street level, where the maths of 2014-era tabletop rules gets reworked into an urban parody. Ancestry becomes Blood, class becomes Work, and the setting trades dungeons for rent trouble: dragons wear silk, wizards work Skid Row, and home is a high-rise nobody would choose twice.

Building a character means choosing one Blood and one Work. The eight Bloods rename familiar fantasy peoples with street handles: Block Native for humans, Hustler for high elves, The Don for mountain dwarves, Bruiser for half-orcs, Sticky Fingers for lightfoot halflings, Hellspawn for tieflings, Scale Set for dragonborn and Tinkerer for rock gnomes. The eight Works run Enforcer, Stickup Kid, Trap Wizard, Street Prophet, Berserker, Rapper, Oath of the Block and Pact of the Plug. Anyone who would rather skip the paperwork can press New hustle, then Walk in, and begin as a ready-made Rogue.

The run spans five cities and is built for one player. It is free, it plays in a browser through an HTML5 build, and it also has Windows, macOS and Linux versions. Scenes are driven by picking options from a list, so the game reads as interactive fiction as much as a dungeon crawl.

How to play

Every check in the game runs on the same engine. Instead of a twenty-sided die you shoot the bones, a pair of ten-sided dice, then add your bonus and compare the total against a difficulty class or an opponent's armor class. Reach the number and the action lands.

Combat is turn-based and rewards timing. When a fighter sets his feet, his next swing doubles its damage, so the answer is to Hustle and leave him swinging at air. Running out of hit points does not end a run on the spot; it puts you into death saves.

Away from combat, Cee-lo is the other dice game in play. Three dice decide it: 4-5-6 is an automatic win, 1-2-3 an automatic loss, and everything else resolves through trips and points, with ties going to the bank. Once your roll is down you can let it ride, doubling the stake before the bank shoots, and a hint shows the chance of winning so the gamble is at least an informed one. Nothing is hidden behind the odds, which makes Cee-lo a real decision rather than a coin flip.

Progress climbs through the five cities in order, with each stop offering its own choices, fights and dice tables. The campaign resolves into one of four outcomes: win, take the deal, take the dice, or live to work the corner.

Controls

Mouse and touch users tap what they want: choices on the page, faces when the game asks you to aim, and the action buttons. Nothing is hidden behind a hover, which keeps the interface readable on a trackpad as well as a finger.

Keyboard players move around with the arrow keys, press 1 to 9 to select a choice, and hit Esc to back out of whatever is open. That number-row shortcut does most of the work in dialogue and menus, so a run can be played without touching the mouse.

Controller support maps the D-pad to movement, A to select, B to back out, Y to the character sheet, X to the journal and Start to the options. The game also offers reduced motion and screen reader support, and it saves itself at every checkpoint, so a browser tab closing mid-session costs less than it might.

Tips for your first run

The fastest way into the game is also the least fussy: New hustle, then Walk in, and you are a Rogue with no build decisions to make. Spend a first run learning how checks resolve before committing to a Blood and Work pairing you care about. The rest comes down to a handful of habits.

Hustle whenever a fighter sets his feet, because that doubled swing is wasted on empty air and the fight gets much cheaper.

Treat Cee-lo as a decision, not a break: the hint shows your chance of winning, and letting it ride doubles the stake before the bank shoots. Remember that zero hit points means death saves, not a finished run, so panic is rarely the right response. Finish a fight once it starts, since saving happens at checkpoints and never in the middle of a battle. Read the odds before every stake, and walk away from a table when the hint looks thin.

• Use New hustle and Walk in for a ready-made Rogue when you want to start immediately.
• Hustle when a fighter sets his feet so his doubled swing hits nothing.
• Check the Cee-lo hint before letting a stake ride and doubling it.
• Expect death saves at zero hit points rather than an instant loss.
• Wrap up battles before closing the tab; saving only happens at checkpoints.

Content and replayability

A run can finish in four different ways: win outright, take the deal, take the dice, or live to work the corner. Rather than a single ending screen, the game keeps a Rap Sheet that records which endings you have reached, the crews you ran with, the classes and races you won as, and your best runs. That record turns the eight Bloods and eight Works into a checklist worth revisiting, and it gives the four endings something to hang on.

The tone is deliberately comedic and deliberately not for young children. The jokes lean on the drug trade and on gangs, there is cartoon violence, and there are dice games played for in-game gold. Nothing sexual appears, but the subject matter is adult-adjacent throughout, so it is worth knowing before handing over a keyboard.

Because the endings, crews, classes and races are all tracked separately, a second run with a different Blood and Work is not just a costume change: it is a new line on the Rap Sheet. The four endings give short runs a reason to exist alongside long ones, and the best-run record gives optimisation-minded players something to beat.

Presentation and performance

The five cities do the heavy lifting visually. The Shire Projects stacks round doors into a high-rise with turf roofs. The Five Boroughs is Manahatta, all castle-skyscrapers, orc rooftops and a dwarven Little Italy. Los Angeles brings palm trees, panther-drawn lowriders, Skid Row wizards and cobalt banners on the lights. Traplanta is humid ziggurat-tenements where Zone 6 is a dungeon with a doorbell. The Penthouse tops it off with marble, gold and a dragon in a silk shirt, buzzer included.

Under the hood, the browser build runs as HTML5 and works offline with no ads, no accounts and nothing tracking the player. Saves are written into the browser at checkpoints, never mid-fight. Reduced motion and screen reader support are both on the list. Type comes from Barlow, Cinzel and Lilita One under the SIL Open Font License. The game includes material from the System Reference Document 5.1 under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, identifies itself as a parody, and is not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by Wizards of the Coast or Hasbro.

Who should play it

This is for players who like tabletop rules but want the setting taken down a few pegs. If the appeal of rolling dice against an armor class survives for you when the dice are street dice and the dragon is wearing silk, the game is aimed squarely at your table. Fans of turn-based combat, interactive fiction and comedy worldbuilding all have something to grab here, and the five cities give the jokes room to change neighbourhood by neighbourhood.

It is also a good fit for anyone who wants a role-playing game that starts in a browser tab. There is no account, no install required for the HTML5 version, and it plays offline, which suits short sessions on a laptop. Controller support and screen reader support widen the door further.

It is not for younger children, given the drug-trade and gang humour, the cartoon violence and the gold-stake dice games. Players who want a straight-faced fantasy campaign should look elsewhere too, since the parody is the point rather than a coat of paint.