There are a few genres of board games that if you throw it down on the table, I’ll play it. Near the top of the list for me are dungeon crawlers. Perhaps it’s from my decades of playing Dungeons and Dragons, or HeroQuest being my first introduction to the genre as a teenager. In either case, I’ve got a soft spot for this type of game. So when Lucky Duck Games sent over a copy of Paper App Dungeons, you better believe I busted it out right away. It’s a solo dungeon crawler that is played with a small notebook and one 6-sided die (or included D-Pencil).
Gameplay Overview:
You start each level at the entrance to a dungeon and you need to make your way to the exit. How do you do this? You roll a six-sided die (or the included pencil that has a number on each side), and pick a direction to move. If you roll an odd number, you can move diagonal the number of spaces rolled. If you roll even? You guessed it, you move orthogonally.
Littered across the dungeon are a variety of symbols, and running over one will either have you gain/lose coins, gain/lose hit points, or maybe teleport you around the dungeon. You start the game with ten hit points and zero money. Once you reach the exit stairs, you check how many hit points and money you gained/lost. Those sums carry over to the next level. If you hit zero Hit points, you die, lose all your money, and start the next level back at ten hit points.
Occasionally, instead of a dungeon level, you’ll reach a shop that will let you spend your gold on upgrades. This gives you a bit more edge on survival, assuming you have the coin to spend.
All told, there are 44 levels of this procedurally generated dungeon. Once you’ve travestied each level, the book is done. If you want to play again, you can buy a new book with another unique dungeon setup.
Game Experience:
On paper, Paper App Dungeon seemed like a neat concept. A quick-playing dungeon crawler that’s inexpensive, highly portable, and requires almost no components. Each level will only take you a minute or so to play, so you can probably finish the whole book in less than an hour. And with the included d6 pencil, this is a great game to play on an airplane or at a bar. Somewhere with minimal table space.
Yet I say on paper because in reality, the game isn’t all that fun. It’s highly random, and the procedurally generated levels are a crap shoot whether they will be fun, a slog, or a breeze. Sometimes you will encounter walls of monsters around the exits with barely a way to get through without taking damage, and other levels will be very monster-light, letting you exit with a breeze. And with only 10 hit points, and monsters that can take a quarter or more of your HPs, then death is almost inevitable. And woe to the adventurer that dies before they hit a shop, as all your coins are lost.
Overall the decision space in the game is pretty light. You roll a die and decide what direction to go. That’s about it. After about 6-7 levels, the game started getting somewhat repetitive for me and lacked any really interesting decisions to make. I felt like I was just going through the motions. And while it’s exciting to hit a shop, if you happen to die close to your visit, you won’t have any coin to spend.
Finally, the rules in the game are on 2 pages at the beginning, but feel a tad incomplete. You’re definitely going to come up with questions, edge cases, or other oddities that just aren’t explained in these two simple pages. The original publisher does have a more comprehensive rulebook I was able to dig up on the web, but a useful QR code would have been welcome in the actual game to help figure things out. I say useful because why the first page of the book does have a QR code noted to use for detailed rules, it just dumps you into the Lucky Duck Games homepage, which is not all that helpful.
Final Thoughts:
While I give it props for its portability and low price point, that’s about the only reason I could see myself reaching for this one again. It was a neat idea, but it was more repetitive than fun. To be honest, I’d probably rather just play a game on my phone than Paper App Dungeon if I was looking to kill some time in a place where I don’t have the space for a normal tabletop game. That’s not to say that the game is bad, but it’s kind of a one-trick pony, and after you’ve played a few levels, you’ve seen most of what this booklet has to offer.
Final Score: 2 Stars – Cute retro style graphics and super portability can’t really save this one from its random and repetitive gameplay.
Hits:
• Very portable
• D6 pencil was a nice touch
Misses:
• Subpar rules inlcuded
• Repetitive and random gameplay
• Procedurally generated dungeon levels don’t always work out well
I backed this on Kickstarter, and I’m not entirely convinced that I like the game more than the pencil.
It’s a neat trick from a technical perspective, since the guy who made it wrote the script that spits out the game layout, but as a game, it’s definitely a one-trick pony, as Tony said.
However, I’m currently in a phase where I’m preferring pen/cil and paper stuff over digital versions, so the tactile nature gives a bit of a bump to my personal rating, which I would put at 3.5 starts of 5.
That’s a good point about the tactile nature, which is why I was really hoping the gameplay was going to be fun.