Daniel (@dungeondive) reviews Light in the Dark from Arona Games (~$20 from their site), a small-box solo crawl where you play a plague doctor healing a region of the pest while fighting monsters and bandits. He’s drawn to the theme and the well-made package — linen-finish cards, good art — and likes a lot of it, while flagging clear second-edition improvements.
The strongest idea is the modular quest system: draw one starter, one middle and one ending quest and line them up as an escalating track that respawns and strengthens enemies at set points. Exploration is a highlight too — laying terrain tiles whose roads don’t always connect, creating dead ends, with markets, villages-to-heal and enemies spawning as you go; he loves how the map looks by session’s end. Combat is a dice roll-off against enemy stats, with kills levelling your stats.
His gripes: the four “characters” are really just difficulty levels, not classes with abilities (an Explorer with low movement reads oddly); the item iconography is poor (he can’t parse the greater war charm without the rulebook); and items/quests want more variety. Even so, at the price and footprint, he recommends it and hopes the company makes more.
Plague doctor is a great hook — does a strong theme and clever tile-laying exploration carry a small-box crawl for you, even when the classes are really just difficulty dials?