Lunch this week is accompanied by the solo game ‘Cavern Shuffle: Maze of the minotaur’ by gravy boat games. It’s an interesting mix of two things that take me back to things that got started in gaming. As a kid one of the first game I learned to play was solitaire, the aim of which is to arrange cards in a specific order or pattern, often by sorting them into suits or sequences. And growing up at a time when Fighting fantasy books were first published has I think ever instilled in me the desire to play dungeon crawler type games. Cavern Shuffle takes these two things and mixes them in to a solo game with a play time that fits neatly into a quick lunch time solo session.
How it plays
Cavern Shuffle is a deck of cards, traditional suits are replaced with adventurers you’d find in a dungeon type game i.e. Barbarian, Cleric Ranger, and Rogue. There are ten of each, and in a very clever conceit, the solitaire mechanism is used to level up. The higher the number, the higher the level. Thus when you play a 2 Rogue on top of a 1 Rogue, the character has levelled up.
A level 8 Ranger
In addition to characters, there are cards that feature other elements of a dungeon crawler such as items (for your adventurers to find and use), obstacle or encounters that need the adventures to be of a certain level to defeat and the game’s eponymous Minotaur which needs to be defeated.
The game is set up and played along solitaire lines with a few tweaks, for example when you level up the minotaur moves to a new column thus blocking you using that column from your use. The same happens when you turn up obstacle or encounters until you can defeat them. The game plays out until you either get stuck or you have levelled up enough to defeat the Minotaur. At this point you rate yourself as either novice, seasoned or legend depending how many items you have managed to recover and not use.
Good for lunch?
For the most part the game fulfils my lunchtime needs – it’s got a reasonably small footprint but it does take up all my available desk space. It’s portable being just a small box of cards, and a game takes around 15 minutes. It’s a familiar card game mechanic makes it accessible and easy to play and I think the tweaks made by adding the adventurer theme definitely make it interesting. Since every set up will put the cards in a different order there is an inbuilt sense of replayability though ultimately I find that like solitaire, once I’ve completed it, I don’t need it for lunch again for a while.
Lunch time solo 