Paper Dungeons: a dungeon scrawler game is a Brazilian game developed by Leandro Pires, well known by games like Tsukiji and Rock’n Roll Manager, with a theme of dungeon crawling. Dungeon crawling is a name of traditional medieval fantasy RPG adventures: the characters go down in a dungeon, hack’n slash the monsters and receive the glory.
In this game, playable by 1 to 8 players, you need to command a party of adventurers: walk in a dungeon, collect gems, fight minions, craft magical items, potions and challenge powerful Villains. The objective is accumulate Glory, the name of Victory Points in this game, and write the party’s name in the halls of the great heroes. Regardless of the number of players, you’ll spend approximately 30 minutes, because in every game you have only 8 rounds to create your strategy.
Characteristics
The setup is very quick: pick one dungeon setup card and select the Villain Cards showed in that. Next, you’ll shuffle Mission Cards and select three of them. After that, each participant picks one Player Sheet, a pen and randomly receive two Objective cards and two Power cards. Selects one from each and return the others to the game box. Now, you can start the adventure!
The rounds are played simultaneously: in the beginning of each round all six dice are rolled by one player. After that, each player can choose 3 dice and use the symbol in it to do actions in their Player Sheet. The symbols and the colors can affect which action you can do.
In Paper Dungeons: a dungeon scrawler game, you have 4 different options of actions: level up, craft magic items, prepare potions or moving in the dungeon.
Level up a member of the party is important to fight the minions and the villains in the game, give special abilities to the group (like change the colors of the die or pick up new gems) and provide a few Victory Points in the end of the game.
Craft magic items grants to you plenty of unique abilities like avoiding walls or water courses, bonus damage against the Villains and the capacity to eliminate instantly a pair of minions.
Potions are a important part of the game. Without potions your adventurers lose a lot of healthy points and, because of that, Victory Points in the end of the game. Make sure you prepare some of them occasionally.
Last, but not least, you can move the party across the dungeon. You need to choose the path to collect pieces of magic items, gems and pick up level up bonus. Of course, the dungeon is a dangerous place with minions, traps and Villains. Probably your party will lose some healthy points during the game, but the sacrifice is necessary to ensure the glory.
Rounds, seasons and end game
A game of PaperDungeons: a dungeon scrawler game lasts for eight rounds, divided in three seasons (the first and second have three round and the third, two). At the end of each season (end of third, sixth and eighth rounds), the players fight dangerous villains, competing to deal more damage to them, to obtain more glory point.
Combat Villains is an easy process: you need combine the levels of your heroes and define the combat level of your group. Some magic items, like the Flaming Sword, affects the combat value. Villains have weakness against specific heroes and receive double damage against them (example: the Minotaur is weak against fighters). If you score a high Combat Value you’ll receive many Glory Points.
The game ends after the fight against the third Villain, at the end of season 3 (the eighth round). When this happens, the players add their glory points and determine the winner.
A gift to fantasy fans
I love historical fantasy things, specially when adventurers challenge monsters and conquer treasures, like the tales of Conan, written by Robert E. Howard, and the most famous RPG, Dungeons & Dragons. Because of that, I can say Paper Dungeons is a great example of this genre of fantasy: the game arts are amazing and communicate the greatness and the dangers in this adventures.
But, beyond the theme, I liked the speed and flexibility of the game: it’s very easy to learn the rules, the iconography is clear and works, you have different strategies to achieve the victory, you can do lots of combos and the random elements ensure the replay possibility. Some other good points include a challenging solo mode and a well done campaign mode with 4 preset scenarios with a brief lore.
If you like drawing games and fantasy, Paper Dungeons: a dungeon scrawler game is an amazing acquisition for your collection.
