Daniel (@dungeondive) takes a hard left turn into History Maker Golf, a championship golf simulation from Plaay Games — bought within minutes of someone posting the link on the Dungeon Dive Facebook group, and covered here because of what he thinks adventure games could steal from it.
He knows, by his own admission, next to nothing about golf. That’s rather the point. The game abstracts away the walking, the club selection, the caddy conversation — everything that isn’t a highlight — and leaves you the tee shot, the recovery from the rough, and the putt. A hole takes two or three dice rolls and under a minute. A full round of highlights runs twenty or thirty. It is, he says, less a game than an activity: simulating watching golf rather than playing it.
The wider argument is the real content. Playing Rogue Dungeon, Iron Helm and Dungeon of D has convinced him that moving a pawn tile to tile is mostly dead time — facing and distance rarely matter, and everything interesting lives on cards and lookup tables anyway. He wants designers to cut the minutiae and keep only the memorable moments. Component quality is poor; the design lesson isn’t.
Daniel argues most dungeon crawls would be better if they abstracted away the map and kept only the highlights — is moving your pawn tile to tile genuinely dead time, or is that journey part of what makes the payoff land?