It is rare to play a any game inside any medium that manages to somehow evoke an epic anything, in this case a dungeon crawl, and scale it down into a short twenty minute experience. Dungeon Pages succeeds in this with a few dice, a pencil, and some Sudoku-like mechanics that has you experiencing the progression of a fully fledged dungeon crawl, with unique character classes, abilties powers, loot, experience, monsters, bosses, traps, items, potions, coins, and more!

The goal is simple. Make a path of digits from your dice rolls connecting the entrance of each dungeon to the exit before dying. Repeat this until the final dungeon where the only additional requirement is also defeat the final boss awaiting you.

The core loop is represented by five core things you do in the game.

• Roll your dice (white dice are “good” dice and black dice are “bad” dice) – fun names!
• Check if wandering monsters attack (doubles on black dice automatically reduce your HP by 1)
• Mark your dice rolls, defeat monsters, collect loot,
• Escape the Dungeon
• Collect your experience and level Up!

While that sounds easy enough, the challenge lies in Dungeon Page’s hook and is it’s main creative core mechanic of the game: Sequential Values. While making it from the entrance of each dungeon to the exit is the goal, the only way to gain experience and grow your character is to do so in a very specific way. Your hero has to connect dice values from your rolls in a path in such a way that the numbers are always connected sequentially, as in, they can either be plus 1, minus 1, or equal to the values adjacent to them. Only then can you gain experience and unlock your special weapons, relics, and abilities.

This sequential dice system seems like it is an obvious rehashed example of something you’ve seen in other roll and writes before but somehow feels new and exciting. It is part dungeon timer, part spatial puzzle, and somehow all of the items, weapons, and relics you get seem to open up this system wide open as your enemies get harder and maps get more intricate. A weapon might give you more range allowing you to space your dice rolls out further or a relic might help you manipulate your dice to get that value you badly need.

The price and pure variability for what you pay for is pretty amazingly…uh… good, but also, kind of evil? For 6 dollars, you get 6 characters and 6 dungeons… and amazingly, every dungeon page you get comes with unique character and dungeon with their own unique powers, weapons, and relics paired along with a unique monsters and bosses. Did I say mention unique? The entertainment doesn’t stop there though as you can just cut these pages in half and boom, mix and match for 36 different options.

Want more variability? Pay for the year-long adventure set (it’s kind of like a season pass) and get a new character and dungeon combination every week (yes, that’s 52 of each!) and well, you can do the math on how many ways to play that adds up to.

At it’s core the game is a roll and write and dice aspect still carries bad luck that can certainly be on against you, especially in the first dungeon or two. My very first game I lost in about 60 seconds after my first three rolls were all 5’s and 6s and the particular dungeon I chose was, in hindsight, a bad choice due to how much damage potential there was.

While I am excited for all of it’s many variations and combos the season pass will offer, I am worried that there may be cases where certain heroes might not be able to succeed in certain dungeons or that after a while everyone will feel the same since as far as I have seen, there haven’t been too many new mechanics added post the core set. Hopefully the creative juices will keep the game from getting stale.

I generally do not mind print and play games, especially if they are roll and write games, but I did feel the need to print and laminate all the characters and dungeons and with the upcoming season pass, this might burn me out. I know some people live by the print once and done motto when it comes to roll and writes but that just isn’t my style as I tend to laminate all my “tear sheet” type games.

Another print and play aspect (that certainly could be a print and play skill issue) is that I really wanted to organize these in a binder, but the positioning of the heroes and dungeons and how they cut made all my laminated pages curl and kind of awkward. I understand why it’s done this way but I almost wish they were either all full pages or exactly half of a page. I am hoping that this specific to the laminating sheets that I had (I used 5mm) but I haven’t had this issue for any other games, even smaller ones where I’ve cut them out after laminating.

The rules are written in some cases a little bit too ambiguous and for such a small footprint game I did find myself having some rules questions. Luckily at the time of writing this their discord is pretty active but i do wish they also checked boardgamegeek a bit too for rules clarifications. They have said they will be updating the rules as they go so hopefully this improves over time.

Not the game’s fault but I am still bitter that I missed the Kickstarter for this. I would have known about it sooner and saved money!

Wakasm's Report Card of Arbitrary Values for Dungeon Pages