A few games have tried to capture the feeling of a roguelike video game, and in my opinion, no game does it better than One Deck Dungeon by Chris Cieslik, published by Asmadi Games.
In One Deck Dungeon, one or two heroes take on a dungeon, guarded by numerous traps and monsters. Each challenge requires the heroes to achieve certain dice values in 3 aspects, strength, agility, and magic in order to overcome the challenge unscathed. Players take damage to their health, and/or lose time by discarding cards off the top of the deck. After each encounter, the heroes can choose to either increase their dice pool, learn a new skill, or take the experience to hopefully level up. Higher levels offer more wild dice, as well as potions, and increases the heroes skill and dice pool limits.
Once the deck is out of cards, the floor is over. The deck is reshuffled, and players continue on their dungeon delve. After the 3rd floor, the boss encounter happens, which players attack round after round until either the players take too many hits and perish, or the boss succumbs to the might of the attacking heroes.
One Deck Dungeon includes 5 characters, all with different starting dice pools and abilities, and 5 bosses, each with a different modifier that needs to be dealt with on each of the 3 floors of the dungeon. Multiple expansions exist for One Deck Dungeon, but I’m only going to focus on the base game here.
As you might expect from a roguelike dice chucker, there’s a lot of luck in One Deck Dungeon. From the values you roll, to the order the encounters come out in, there are a lot of aspects outside your control that can make or break your run, but that’s part of the fun in Roguelikes, right? One Deck Dungeon does give players tools to manipulate their fate, such as trading in a blue 4 to get a yellow and red 4 in return, plus a single +1 modifier that can be used on any dice, or that players can always trade in any two dice to get a single wild dice of the lower value.
One Deck Dungeon absorbs me in its dice manipulation puzzle. I love the moment of rolling 8 or 9 dice, letting them settle, then slowly massaging the numbers to overcome the challenge. It can be really annoying if you modify 4 or 5 dice, then realize you made a critical blunder and need to roll back your changes. But that’s more a comment on my own lack of mental power and making changes before really assessing my tableau than a nitpick about the game.
I’ve had at least half a dozen runs that have just been utter failures. From getting to the boss, only to get utterly pantsed, to falling flat and rolling a staggering number of 1’s against a monster and being forced to take 7 damage in a single encounter. While these moments feel unlucky, I don’t think that One Deck Dungeon suffers from being ‘too lucky’. A big part of the game is knowing when to take a hit, and when to take a challenge reward as experience vs the skill vs the dice.
Even with just the base game, One Deck Dungeon feels like it has a great amount of replayability. Each run through a floor, a player will only see 8 – 10 encounters, and each encounter has their own quirks. Add that to the uniqueness of the characters and the bosses, you can play a lot of One Deck Dungeon before you exhaust its variety.
The campaign mode has a variety of difficulties too, with the goal of the campaign to take a single character and best all the bosses in as few plays as possible. The more dungeons you run through, the more skills and benefits you unlock, making your character a veritable powerhouse by the end of the campaign with all kinds of benefits that can be difficult to remember to use. This does mean that the first few games of a campaign will be the most difficult, which is unsatisfying, but once you’re over the hump, it ends up being a pretty fun challenge.
What I really appreciate about One Deck Dungeon is the small footprint. It’s a tiny box dungeon crawl that feels as satisfying as most of the other dice chucking dungeon crawl games that take up way more space. I also very much appreciate that all the characters are female, which is very non-typical for this genre.
One Deck Dungeon has 2 expansions released, with a 3rd one in crowdfunding at the time of this writing. Each expansion is stand-alone, meaning you can play it as its own little thing, or create a hybrid deck by mixing in the original. More variety is only a good thing when it comes to One Deck Dungeon.
If you’re looking for a roguelike board game, One Deck Dungeon can’t be beat. If a fast and compact dice manipulation adventure that is quite challenging to overcome sounds like your cup of tea, I highly suggest you check out One Deck Dungeon. The experience is mildly addicting, especially after you manage to overcome your first boss, then swapping characters will keep you busy for hours on end!
