Daniel (@dungeondive) confronts the elephant in the room with admirable candour: this print-on-demand roguelike dungeon crawl from designer Peter Jank costs approximately $130 shipped. Before you reach for your smelling salts, he offers a rather elegant economics lesson on why.
The short version: economy of scale. At one end of the spectrum, Riot Games prints tens of thousands of Mechs vs Minions for their captive audience of millions. At the other end, Game Crafter prints exactly one copy when you order—hence your wallet’s lamentations. Poor Peter Jank apparently makes about 30 cents per sale, which makes this less a commercial venture and more an act of stubborn creative devotion.
What does one receive for such princely sums? Over a thousand cards comprising a board game distillation of the roguelike PC dungeon crawl experience. Ten floors of increasingly deadly pixel-art peril stand between your chosen hero and the eponymous Lost Pixel. Twelve distinct heroes offer varied stat distributions across strength, dexterity, and intelligence—each determining which dice you’ll be hurling at monsters and which elemental attacks might actually penetrate their defences.
The equipment system provides a proper paper doll arrangement: headgear, armour, boots, two accessories, and one weapon. Weapons dictate which stat fuels your attacks, while elemental damage types create interesting tactical wrinkles—monsters defend differently against fire, ice, and poison than against straightforward physical damage.
Daniel places the complexity somewhere between Bag of Dungeon and Dungeon Quest—accessible enough to learn in minutes, yet possessed of sufficient depth for extended engagement. The time pressure of ten turns per floor creates tension without oppression, while random events, treasure, and monster decks ensure no two descents feel identical.
For those who prize replayability above all else—the sort who ask “how many times can I play this before exhausting its possibilities?”—this may qualify as something approaching a holy grail. Daniel’s clearly smitten enough to have ordered two expansions, pushing his total investment into Kingdom Death Monster territory. Madness? Perhaps. But clearly the pleasurable sort.
What’s the most you’ve ever spent on a game you’d never heard of a week prior, and did it reward your recklessness?