The closing verdict on Daniel (@dungeondive)'s favourite game of all time. The faults are presentational — ugly art, amateurish graphic design — and Daniel argues he can overlook all of it because of what the game gets right.
Five reasons it sits at number one:
- Pure fun — the most pure-fun dungeon crawl Daniel has played; a power-fantasy that never sacrifices tension or danger.
- Exploration — the illusion that anything can happen at any time, but with random elements bound so tightly to the pulp theme that nothing reads as arbitrary. Ninjas and lizard people while being visited by the Terminator is on-genre, not off-tone.
- Bottomless-box-from-turn-one — nothing is locked behind campaign progression. The super-weapon you’d normally earn at hour ten can come out of the search deck on turn one.
- Designer enthusiasm — feels like the team were kids in a candy store, building a big-budget indie game with real respect for the pulp-adventure genre.
- Personal fit — the game runs on the same fuel as the authors Daniel reads: A. Merritt, H. Rider Haggard, Lynn Carter, Robert E. Howard. Pulp without the racism, structurally.
Hope for the reprint: keep the messy core, leave the scenarios alone, hire a modern pulp illustrator and a better graphic designer. Don’t repeat the Lost Station mistake of changing too much.
Daniel structures his all-time number-one around five specific things, not one. What’s the board-game equivalent of an A. Merritt novel for you?