Sondoh has made much better games than True Hero Minigame

When I first started looking into Print and Play games, Robertson Sondoh Jr was a name that came up a lot. They designed a number of light, construction friendly games. 

On a whim, I took a look at True Hero Minigame. And it’s honestly the worst Sondoh game I’ve tried.

Like most of their games, the whole thing is one page. It’s a dungeon crawl where you are managing a hero with two stats, HP and AP. The two have to add up to ten. The dungeon is a preset maze with all the encounters prearranged on a key. Combat consists of subtracting from either HP or AP. The game ends with your death or defeating one of three boss monsters.

It’s a maze with a bit of bookkeeping.

True Hero Minigame is a solveable puzzle but it’s not an interesting puzzle. In fact, I didn’t even print it out. I opened the jpeg and tracked everything on scrap paper. And when I was done, I felt pretty good about not printing it out.

I actively follow Alexander Shen, who makes lots of tiny PnP games and puzzles. The closest thing is compare from Shen is Tiny Maze Things, where you keep track of symbols while doing a maze. Compared to True Hero Minigame, Tiny Maze Things has better mazes, a cleaner system and 200 different mazes.

Not that Tiny Maze Things is brilliant. In fact, I’d say it’s the weakest Shen work I’ll still pull out but only when the brain fog is bad. But it easily beats True Hero Minigame.

The best part of True Hero Minigame is the art. That’s seriously cute.

I don’t want to bash Sobdoh. They with someone with the same last name were making PnP games well before it was cool. And a lot of them capture that old school micro game feel with some definite quirks. But True Hero Minigame just isn’t interesting.