Daniel (@dungeondive) looks at Roll-With-It: The Fortress of Terror, John Bailey’s solo roll-and-write maze game from Humble Bard Games, sold through The Game Crafter — he backed the print-and-play and requested the boxed set for review. He rates it among the best-documented Game Crafter games he has seen, and is surprised a larger publisher hasn’t picked it up.
Each round you roll four white movement d6s, a d4 luck die that adjusts one of them, a doom die and, later, red combat and blue orb dice. You must spend three movement dice per turn, moving in straight lines and never retracing your steps — the warlord Bram has cursed the ground to crumble behind you — and if a wall stops you completing your moves, you lose. The Fortress module runs four chapters: a garden maze where relics and ice orbs are destroyed one number at a time by the doom die, Bram’s crypt of locks and lore stones, a tower of monsters and keys, and Bram himself, whose 40 fortitude is whittled by every monster killed and lore stone collected en route.
Relics break the rules — zigzag movement, rerolls, walking crumbled paths — and are the luck mitigation; optional story cards add flavour; companions make it easier. He plays a turn on camera, makes an allocation that would have lost the game, and takes it back. The box also holds module two, Temple of Despair, an overland ruin hunt; modules three to six are coming.
Fortress of Terror crumbles the floor behind you and one bad die allocation ends the run. Do you want that unforgiving a puzzle in a solo game, or luck you can always mitigate?