Dungeon Crawler Carl Meets Discworld In New Fantasy Game

Published Sep 20, 2026, 11:30 AM EDT

Sharmila is an engineer-turned-gaming hardware journalist and freelance contributor at ScreenRant who has been covering the gaming and tech industry since 2021. While she first built her expertise writing about video games, she has since pivoted towards gaming hardware, with a focus on PC components, peripherals, handhelds, and performance-driven tech. When she’s not testing gear or writing about the latest hardware trends, she can usually be found diving into competitive shooters or keeping up with the evolving esports scene.

If Dungeon Crawler Carl and Discworld somehow got together for a drink at a very questionable fantasy tavern, what would you expect out of it? One is full of absurd dungeon-crawling adventures where survival is mixed with ridiculous comedy, while the other turns traditional fantasy into a playground for jokes, strange characters, and situations you just can’t explain with logic. What if I tell you an upcoming board game brings the best of both book series, but it also lets you drag your friends into the chaos?

Shug, a fantasy tabletop RPG game from brother duo Rufus and Luke Dye-Montefiore, combines dungeon-crawling with the sort of unpredictable, nonsensical fun you’d expect from a party game. The premise, as you might have guessed already, isn’t something you usually come across. Set in a bizarre version of England called Ol' Engoland, the game puts players in the role of peasants attempting to spark a revolution by finding a mysterious creature called Shug and taking it to a legendary pub.

Don’t play this game if you’re the serious, competitive kind who wants to make sense of everything around them. Shug will push you to embrace the ridiculous, with the creators describing it as a mashup of a party game and dungeon crawler. There’s a free-roaming map to explore where you can encounter monsters, collect treasures, and complete challenges along the way.

You can even befriend certain creatures—you don’t have to attack everything that moves. For example, you can vibe with a monster called Selky with a sea shanty. At the same time, you can eliminate your friends (basically your enemies here) with stuff like “Sexy Armour” and killer salsa moves.

There is plenty of strategy underneath the silliness, though. Shug features 155 unique cards and asks players to make decisions as they move around its world. You can rely on clever tactics, but the game also leaves plenty of room for players to cause problems for one another. That combination is where the Dungeon Crawler Carl comparison starts to make sense.

Matt Dinniman’s celebrated series—all set for a genre change in November 2026—throws its characters into a deadly dungeon that is also an intergalactic reality show, constantly mixing genuine danger with bizarre comedy. Shug is obviously a much lighter affair, but it shares that willingness to throw conventional fantasy rules out the window whenever a funnier possibility comes along.

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, on the other hand, is famous for taking familiar fantasy ideas and turning them sideways, filling its stories with strange characters and absurd situations. Shug seems to have inherited some of that same love for making fantasy deliberately silly rather than treating every goblin, monster, and magical object as something that needs to be taken seriously.

Perhaps the most charming thing about Shug, though, is its family legacy. According to its creators, they originally made the game when they were just seven and ten years old, and it has been played by their family and friends for more than 20 years. They have since redrawn the game’s cards and turned that childhood creation into the version they have now brought to a wider audience.

Shug is currently seeking support through Kickstarter and has, unsurprisingly, received an overwhelmingly good response from the community. It has managed to raise almost $2 million from over 20,000 backers so far. The developers were only looking to raise $12,036, so imagine the hype. You can still pledge your part and grab a copy of the game plus collectibles via Kickstarter.

If you like your fantasy adventures with a healthy dose of chaos, questionable decisions, ridiculous monsters, and friends who may be more dangerous than creatures on the map—or you’re simply looking for your next fun board game to play with friends and family—you should definitely keep an eye out for Shug when it becomes available. Dungeon Crawler Carl fans should adore it.

Dungeon Crawler Carl