Dungeon Crawlers are often trying to abstract a situation that alternates between having both hectic and tense situations : Hectic when the combat starts and limbs go flying, and tense when there’s no combat and you’re slowly creeping around a dungeon hoping to avoid setting off traps etc (unless it’s the kind of DC where you sprint g around dungeons looking for stuff to kill :))
I think the majority of dungeon crawling games, in all forms (whether they’re computer, boradgame, or tabletop RPG) suffer from the same major problem of trying to represent both these situations with the boring, slow slog that is tile-counting, action-point allocation, and tedious amounts of arithmetic (as you add modifiers and subtract armour bonuses etc), or lots of pausing and thinking about what to do. That slow-pace works fine for the exploration part, but does a real barbarian facing a real horde of undead skeletons really have 10 minutes to pause and figure out which of his skills is currently the most optimal to use, and which is best to save for later?!
No! The real barbarian has to figure it out RIGHT NOW and wade into the frey, decimating enemies and pushing them back with his might axes. Which is why Diablo was, and still is, such a breath of fresh air in the dungeon crawling genre, as it was real-time, chaotic, required some seat-of-the-pants character-piloting and manic clicking.
I remember when I first played Diablo 2: I popped those starting mobs with a barbarian and instantly realised that this form of dungeon crawling completely usurps all others, for me, as being “the” best way to simulate it. (TBH I’m just bitter because I once spent 4 hours playing Hackmaster and it basically amounted to travelling across the country side, getting into combat with a single snake, and then flailing amount accidentally chopping each other up whilst trying to kill it. Yawn. My chief complaint at the time was “I could have killed thousands of snakes in Diablo 2 in the same 4 hours! Borrrrrring” )
But Diablo 2 was a computer game. In the boardgame scene I’d champion Catacombs as having the exact same feeling of dungeon combatting as in Diablo 2, and it was such a breath of fresh air when I first played it. I think it’s such a fantastic simulation of a Dungeon Crawl that games like Gloomhaven don’t come close to touching. Sure, it’s turn based, so there is a small amount of pausing to think “what’s the most optimal thing to do now?”, but the actual movement and combat is played out via disc-flicking which really injects the situation with the required amount of seat-of-your-pants chaos and tension, so it removes the boring tedium of counting squares and figuring out where the best chokepoint to position the barbarian is so that the elf can get shots off etc. Instead you just have to come up with a plan, flick and hope it goes well, and, if not, adapt and refine your plan, just like in real combat! (Probably, I’m not a real barbarian)
Also, if you take Catacombs and theme it with Call of Duty or Jagged Alliance or something you end up with SEAL Team Flix, which is another dungeon crawler I’d highly recommend :)
Both are games that I find are much more pleasant ways of spending time in a Dungeon than whatever-quest or some D&D knock-off.