Some tiny PnP dungeons

When I saw Crumbling Dungeon by Alexander Sheen, I thought it looked familiar. A little bit of looking through the old records and I found that it was because I had tried a later iteration of the concept called Dungeon Dailies.

So, I found a demo of Crumbling Dungeon and got out the demo of Dungeon Dailies so I could compare them. While I was at it, I also printed out Solo Tower Hack so I’d be playing three quick little dungeons in a row, just for the beauty of the number three.

Okay, let’s get Solo Tower Hack out of the way. Every five or ten years, I try it out. And I think it gets worse every time. Really, the only choices are which stairs to take. Beyond that, roll a die and do what it tells you to do.

So, both Crumbling Dungeon and Dungeon Dailies are collections of mazes that have things like monsters and treasure chests in them. So they are at least as much puzzles as they are games.

Crumbling is the simpler one. From what I can tell from the demo, the symbols are on the same areas of the grid and a maze is procedurally created around them. The full game consists of 365 of these mazes.

The only random element is combat. Beyond that, Crumbling is just a set of mazes with special scoring conditions. To be honest, the combat isn’t enough to make this a game to me. It’s a puzzle. 

Dailies changes things up with each page having four different mazes. The combat is a hair more complicated, there is a little resource management (you need keys to unlock doors) and you level up. 

Dailies is still almost entirely a puzzle but it feels like it has a hint of a gaming experience in it. Like it’s 95% puzzle and 5% game. I didn’t enjoy my first play but this second time was fun.

Actually looking at what Alexander Shen has done, I find that I’ve tried more of their games and puzzles than I thought. (Still need to try Quests Over Coffee but I do plan on doing that) And a lot of their product are puzzles and games that are explicitly designed to be played during a coffee break. It’s a niche but it’s a niche I regularly visit.

I’m not sure if either Crumbling or Dailies are good puzzles. I do find them relaxing though.

A disappointing trip back to Solo Tower Hack

Some years ago, when my PnP experiences tended to focus on super simple builds, I tried out a very simple dungeon crawl called Solo Tower Hack. All it took was one page, a pencil, a chart and a couple of dice.

Since I've been having fun with Roll and Write games, I decided to revisit it.

What I discovered is a game where you basically roll the dice and do what they tell you to do. The dice determine what's in each room, where the stairs are and how the fights go. Really, the only real virtues the game has is that it is beyond light on ink and, if you were playing it in a cubicle, you'd look like you were working on a spreadsheet as long as you hid the dice.

Other than the novelty of how minimal you can make fighting your way through a generic fantasy tower, Solo Tower Hack doesn't have much to say for itself.

Truth to tell, since then, I have played a much better one-page, dice driven dungeon crawl. Delve the Dice Game is a much better Roll and Write dungeon crawl in almost every way. 

I'm planning on doing a longer revisit of Delve but it's basically controlling an adventuring party via Yahtzee to fight different groups of monsters. You have actual choices and a lot more flavor.

I have played other one-sheet, PnP, Roll and Write solitaire games that have you basically go on an adventure. For such a crazy specific description, there are a number of them out there. Other ones that stuck in my head include the D6 Shooters and Utopia Engine. Delve stands out for by having a variety of adventures and embracing the pseudo D&D theme.

While neither solitaire or dungeon crawls are my thing, solitaire roll-and-write games are nice for me when I'm between groups and don't have a lot of down time. Delve does the trick well enough I'm really thinking about exploring how far it's come since I looked at it long ago.

Solo Tower Hack, on the other hand, is pretty much a time waster. If I had seen it in the early 80s, I'd probably would have spent some time playing it with a pad of graph paper. Frankly, it feels like something from the early 80s, something I'd have found in the back of a gaming magazine. The fact that it's from 2007 is kind of shocking.

With that in mind, I feel like Solo Tower Hack shows how much farther you can go with even free minimalist PnP. I don't just mean visually (the empty graph is clearly a choice) but mechanically. Above all else, it helps me appreciate other games.