The Small Cabinet — the 2020–2022 Small-Box Boom
A long shallow drawer slid open of its own accord on Tuesday morning, narrower than the others and stacked with cards rather than boxes. Inside, eight folders in the hand of Daniel (@dungeondive), a shelf-tour cover sheet, and a small note reading small-box dungeon crawls — the boom years, minus the Glover catalogue. (Jason Glover, The Keeper recalls, has his own drawer.)
The cabinet covers the 2020–2022 stretch when small-box dungeon crawls became their own genre — Kickstarters, Game Crafter print-on-demand releases, and a handful of retail entries all racing to cram a full dungeon-crawl experience into something that could fit in a backpack. Daniel returns repeatedly to one game (Rogue Dungeon, Albert Danish and Chad Minnichia), reviews two of its successors in adjacent years, and bracket-tests four contemporaries against each other in a single sitting. The two later Rogue Dungeon dispatches — a 2023 designer interview and a 2025 expansion review — close out the cabinet as proof that the favourite stuck.
Exhibit Catalogue
- Bag of Dungeon - The Review — Gunpowder Studios’ bag-of-chits paper-doll inventory, one step above TSR’s Dungeon!
- A Look at Rogue Dungeon — yellow rooms become persistent traps that punish backtracking; the favourite of the cabinet.
- The Dungeon of D - A Small Box Dungeon Crawl Done Right — Jack D’s one-deck game where each card does five jobs at once.
- Smaller Things - a look at small games that pack a lot of punch! — the shelf-tour: Dungeoneer through Spire’s End, with a quiet revisit of the Storymaster’s Tales video that got roasted.
- Taking a Look at Mini Rogue, and Expansions — exploding sixes, miss-on-X, and a plea for someone to build a Rogue Legacy-style board game.
- Tiny Epic Dungeons - An Abundance of Icons, Decisions, Challenge — torch timer plus four-goblin cap; the BGG appendix is basically required reading.
- A Look at Deck Box Dungeons — companion-app integration that makes hundred-component games look extravagant.
- Which of These Four Small Box Games is Right for You? — Iron Helm vs Rogue Dungeon vs Mini Rogue vs Unbroken across five axes; Rogue Dungeon takes the X-factor.
- A conversation all about Rogue Dungeon — Daniel sits down with the designers two years after the original review.
- Rogue Dungeon: A Rogue’s Tale - all about the new expansion — the expansion lands four years later; the cabinet’s bookend.
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– The Keeper
Notes that one game in the cabinet has been reviewed three times across five years, and that this is, on the present evidence, the closest a small-box crawl gets to being canonised.