Dungeon-crawl

The Dungeon of D is a "print-and-play" (PnP) game, meaning it's not available for sale, but instead you can download PDFs of the components and print them out to make your own copy. In other words, it's an amateur rather than a professional production, but it's worth remembering that "amateur" has its roots in the Latin "amare" (to love); that is, an amateur does what he does for love, not for money. While its rare for any amateur product to reach or exceed professionally-produced products, it can and does happen -- as it has with this game.

Created by Iikka Keranen and Rich Carlson of Digital Eel) (developers of, among others, Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, Plasmaworm and Dr. Blob's Organism -- all computer games), Goblin Slayer is an asymmetric boardgame in which one player controls a dwarf entering a cavern infested with goblins to retrieve an artifact.

Almost 30 years ago, I was bored one evening and decided that what I really wanted was a D&D-like game I could play by myself. So I slapped together a little boardgame called DeathMaze that SPI published a year or two later. Since then, there have been probably hundreds of similar games published -- indeed, even from the inception of digital games, with titles like Wizardry. At present, my favorite game of the genre is FastCrawl, which is a nicely polished version; but "free" is a nice price to pay, and Monster's Den isn't bad either.

DROD is a game that autistic people might enjoy while on methamphetamine. Its a turn-based, dungeon crawling puzzle-game. The way that works is: you can move in one of eight directions, you can wait, and you can turn your sword clockwise and counter-clockwise, and every time you execute one of those verbs, a turn passes. Every turn, other things in the tile-gridded room you're in will move, and every x amount of turns spawn units will create things that move. Thats pretty much DROD, "invented" (because it is so primally iconic a game design) by Eric Hermansen back in the 90s. Since then, it has expounded on that simplicity with so much manic variation that thousands of people have subscribed to Caravel Net and flooded its message boards with help requests, new content ("Holds" as it were) and all kinds of crystallized culture only possible in a hardcore gaming super-niche like the DROD series.

FastCrawl is what the name suggests: a quick-playing dungeon crawler, perfect for a way to kill your lunch hour. One of the parameters you set at game-start, in fact, is whether you want a short, medium, or long game; short ones last about 30 minutes, while long ones last perhaps an hour.

From Niels Bauer, creator of the well-regarded Smugglers 3 comes this hybrid turn-based fantasy and dungeon-crawl game.

Above ground, you raise armies and try to conquer the world--but your leader is a "hero," and has to delve into dungeons to gain loot and reputation in order to succeed above ground.

Caravel Games describes the DROD (Deadly Rooms of Death) series as "dungeon crawls for thinkers," and that's what they are--an oddly compelling combination of puzzle solving and the dungeon experience.

The Best Puzzle Game of All Time

Or so says the Mathematics Association of America, and who are we to disagree?

To call it a puzzle game is inadequate, however; the DROD (Deadly Rooms of Death) games are sui generis, and about the only quick way to describe them is as "Gauntlet meets Sokoban."