A few months ago, I covered Rook & Ruin, a roll and write dungeon crawler inspired by chess, provided as print & play rather than a physical game.
Just now, another dungeon crawler has appeared on Gamefound, though in preview form at time of writing; more conventional this time, in that no chess is involved, though the interesting aspect of Hidden Realms: The Mummy’s Tomb is that you draw the dungeon yourself.
This is the first game by Spyros Kallos and Myrto Gkizli, Greek gamers and content creators otherwise known as Tabletop For World, who are, as Spyros put it, dipping their toes in the waters of game design.
Playing the Game
The Mummy’s Tomb is intended for 1–99 players, though I imagine that the upper reaches of that could be a tad challenging! Solo and multiplayer gameplay is virtually identical: on each round, 2 dice are rolled and every player uses the same pair of values as they see fit. At the end of 20 rounds, the person with the highest point total is the winner. For an additional challenge (especially welcome for solo games), several taxing challenges are described in the rulebook.
Print out a map for each person, grab a pair of dice, and off you go.
The dice values can be used to lay polyomino dungeon tiles, to defeat monsters, or for a few special actions such as breaking and redrawing existing walls. In more detail:
· The upper right of the map shows a table of dice values and pairs of polyominoes. You choose a ‘tile’ corresponding to one of the rolled dice and draw in the walls, joining an opening to a dungeon entrance on your first move or an opening of an existing part of the dungeon thereafter, making sure not to overlap any already marked part of the dungeon or its edges. The first time you use both tile shapes beside a number, you gain an extra die of a particular value to use in this turn or a subsequent one. As you expand the dungeon, you trap various items printed on the map, monsters and treasure, unlocking the corresponding areas at the bottom of the map.
· If your dungeon path has covered a monster space and you have the relevant die value (as well as some other requirements in several cases—e.g., some monsters have to be tackled in sequence, or others need you to have gained a key or matching gem too), you can defeat the monster, gaining a reward—coins and an exclamation mark (!!) which allows you to start attacking the big monster, the mummy.
· Normally the 4 special actions are available only after you’ve collected the appropriate tool within your dungeon tunnels, and in limited numbers, but you can also use a die to perform those relating to path modification, which can be helpful in closing off ends of tunnels or reaching additional treasures.
The mummy requires several dice rolls to defeat, and you have to have dealt with a lot of the other monsters to enable each of those attacks (to gain sufficient exclamation marks), but those attacks can result in large contributions to your final score, especially if you can get them in early on in the game.
After 20 rounds, you tot up your score based on various combinations of defeated monsters, collected items, mummy attacks and connected map entrances, then subtract penalties for tunnels which haven’t been closed off. Critically, your score doesn’t include money you’ve collected—instead, you should be using your coins pretty much as soon as you get your hands on them: you can pay a single coin to change a die value by ±1, a pair to roll another die (available only to the player who’s using the coins, not every other player like the original dice for the round), or 3 to choose a value. Whichever you do, this gains you an action for the current round (up to a maximum of 4), which can be very beneficial.
Verdict
There’s an awful lot packed into just one page for this little game (or 3 pages for the final game), and play is brain-taxing even on the ‘easy’ first sheet. I especially like how each die value can be employed either to extend your path or to attack a monster, and the way those actions can (indirectly) result in additional dice rolls to gain further actions.
The game works well as a solo puzzler, and the extension to multi-player is neat, with everyone working on the same dice rolls: the range of options for spending dice and acquiring more makes a lot of unique strategies possible. It might have been nice to provide a little asymmetry via player-specific trait cards or a variety of maps at the same difficulty level, but there’s already plenty of variability in play.
What I didn’t like was the mechanism for extending your path by drawing the tunnel walls—I found it all too easy to get confused about whether particular spaces were inside or outside my excavated area in crowded parts of the map, especially when I’d been using some of the special actions to change the layout (where my wall erasing wasn’t as clear as it should have been). Perhaps using a felt-tip pen on a laminated copy would be better, but I resorted to drawing along the middle of my paths instead of the walls, with little arrows indicating openings, though that’s still not perfect.
The Gamefound campaign hasn’t started yet, so the reward structure is unknown. However, based on the evidence to hand at this preview stage, I wonder why this is a crowdfunding campaign rather than heading directly to a Print & Play store—the game seems reasonably complete, and the rulebook is well polished. I mentioned Rook & Ruin earlier, where one of the rewards included a year’s worth of additional maps (one per week), taking the game beyond what could be easily supported on a normal store, but without a gimmick like that, there seems little to tie Hidden Realms: The Mummy’s Tomb to crowdfunding.
Nonetheless, it’s a nice little game, and it’ll be interesting to see how the campaign does pan out when it launches.
About the author:
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
