Dungeon Lords: Happy Anniversary comes with the Dungeon Lords base game, the Festival Season expansion, stickers for food tokens, metal coins, a new "Dungeon Set-up" mini-expansion, and other items.

In Dungeon Lords, players are an evil dungeon lord who is trying to build the best dungeon out there. You hire monsters, make rooms, buy traps and defeat the do-gooders who wish to bring you down. Every turn, players use a hand of cards to choose where to place their worker imps. Actions will vary from mining gold, hiring monsters, buying traps etc. Each action has three spots free - with each spot having different effects (e.g., mining gold lets you mine more gold in each spot). When using the cards, two cards will become locked and will not be available to be used next turn.

The entire game lasts two "game years", and each year is comprised of four seasons (a.k.a. turns). At the beginning of each season, players see the heroes and events to come in the following season, allowing them to prepare. At the end of each season following the first, heroes are allocated to each player according to the players' level of evilness. Heroes can range from mighty heroes to sneaky thieves. Each hero has its own power which the player needs to prepare for. At the end of each year, the heroes will travel into the dungeons to fight.

Scoring in the game is dependent upon what you have built, the monsters you have hired and the heroes you have captured.

The Festival Season expansion brings a fifth season to the year: festival season. More time to build up your dungeon, but also more time for adventurers to gather a larger party. There are new monsters, traps, and rooms to prepare your dungeon for the battle, but also new nasty spells for the adventurers and sneaky bards who encourage them to perform so-called "heroic" deeds – not to mention two paladins for each year, now ready to punish up to two evil players.

Would you like to nudge other players toward evil instead of moving yourself toward good when visiting the city? What about making an investment instead of the usual traditional gold digging? Or what about repairing conquered rooms or tunnels instead of digging new ones? Only eight actions are still available to players, but each season one of those actions is replaced by an alternate set of spaces that offer new and intriguing options. Also, did we mention that it has recently become fashionable for dungeon lords to have their own personal pets?"