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2023-11-26
A single player dungeon crawler
Thanks to Lettuce for their “e-zine of solo games” in which they mention Scoundrel, a game by Zach Gage and Kurt Bieg. It is a solo dungeon crawler of sorts that is played with a single deck of normal playing cards.
Me and the wife have adapted the rules slightly and made it a cooperative game. It is quite fun. Each game takes only ten minutes or so and the minimum space requirements — both in materials to carry and playing space — make it an ideal travel game.
The goal is to slay monsters — you know, as you do in a dungeon crawler — and clear all rooms of the dungeon. If you make it out alive you win. There is a point mechanic but to be honest we didn't care.
Jokers are discarded before playing, so are Ace, King, Queen, Jack of hearts and diamonds. The remaining cards are shuffled and form the dungeon pile.
You draw four cards and place them face-up. This is a room in the dungeon.
You start with 20 points of health.
- clubs ♣ and spades ♠ suit are monsters. They deal damage equal to their face value. (A=14, K=13, Q=12, J=11)
- cards of the hearts ♥ suit are healing potions. They heal their face value in points, up to your maximum of 20.
- cards of the diamonds ♦ suit are weapons. They reduce monster damage by their face value, your health pool takes the rest. I guess this makes them more like shields rather than weapons?
The player can heal only once per room, additional healing potions can be discarded but won't have an effect.
Monsters always die after being fought, and are discarded.
Weapons get used up by fighting monsters. Defeated monsters are placed on top of the weapon (with the weapon face value still visible). From then on the weapon can only fight monsters that are weaker (have a lower face value) than the monster before.
The player can chose to fight a monster bare handed, taking their full damage, but preserving the weapon.
Example:
A Eight of Diamonds weapon is equiped. I fight a Queen of Spades monster with it. The queen deals 12 damage, my weapon reduces it by 8, I take 4 damage. From now on the weapon can only be used against Jack-level monsters or lower.
You progress through the dungeon by clearing rooms. For that you need to use at least three of the four cards of a room in order to progress. Rooms can be skipped but not more than one room in a row. Skipped rooms are placed back at the end of the dungeon pile, so you will eventually face the room.
Used cards are discarded. Once one or zero cards of a room remain, you may move to the next room and draw more cards to get back to four.
So far we've come up with three playstyles work for us:
In all playstyles, all rules from above remain in place. Both players equip and heal from the same four-card rooms as before and fight the same monsters.
A player may chose to act as many times as they both agree to. So one player may clear multiple rooms completely and equip weapons if the other player is low on health and there is no healing potion available.
The flexibility of this game style makes winning relatively easy. It might make sense to remove more high-grade weapons and healing potions or add a second deck of cards (with the same cards removed as outlined above) since that adds more monster damage points than weapons/heals.
This is like a relay race. Again both players equip/heal/fight the same four-card rooms but one player is responsible to deal with one room. The other player must tackle the next, and so on.
Honestly this works really well. Cooperation still exists in the form of consciously leaving a heal or weapon of one room for the next player.
Each player gets one action before the next player takes over. One action is using a heal, equiping a new weapon, fighting a monster.
This does require significant amount of planning and talking. This feels like hard-mode.
Scoundrel on boardgamegeek.com
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