Lunch today involves a spot of dungeon crawling with the solo game that is Traumatarium Deckulus. Designed by Horatiu Radoiu, Deckulus aims to take the spirit of a dungeon crawler and distill it into a deck of cards – so does it make for a satisfying meal?
How it plays
Set up couldn’t be simpler, though you do need at a D6 and something to mark typical adventure things like HP, and items. Take the deck out of the box, choose a hero, and at least one of the boss characters. You can choose both if you want a more difficult game.
Shuffle the deck then add the boss and shuffle again, thus randomising where the boss will be. Now set it face down. Set your hero to one side giving it 20HP and one of each item. That’s it, you’re ready to go. Play simply requires you to turn over the next card from the deck and react to it. There are two types of cards – ones that act as the dungeon providing typical things like traps, chests, and potential supplies. The other are monsters that need other be dealt with.
Fighting is simply – each monster has a damage level which is the number you must roll higher than to do damage, a strength level which is the damage it will inflict on you, and a health level which you have to reduce to zero. Each time you successfully roll, you remove one health though if you have a bomb in your items you can use that to do additional one-off damage.
As long as you’re alive, you keep turning cards until you either die or encounter the boss. Once encountered you fight, defeat the boss you win.
Good for lunch?
You might be thinking that it could soon gets tiresome to turn over the same cards game after game, but if you are then I am afraid you’re wrong. Sure if you’re a full on rpg dungeon crawler fan then you’re probably not going to play this everyday but for a lunchtime gaming fill, it is a real blast. The randomness of the shuffling means you never know when the boss is going to appear, and equally the shuffling creates a different dungeon crawl each time. The artwork on the cards is amazing.
Each card adding to the story and managing to portray exactly what you’re up against. Additionally, the overall black design and the slightly worn aesthetic given to each card evokes, for me, the feeling of wandering through a dark, cobwebby dungeon. In the kickstarter campaign the designer stated he wanted to crate a game that was “super quickly play solo with cards that I would want to collect”. He’s certainly achieved that!
Lunch time solo 