Daniel (@dungeondive) opens with a confession: speedrunning is his spectator sport, and the Games Done Quick marathons are his Super Bowl. That frames Super Hazard Quest, a small-box card game from Puppet Arcade that emulates an 8- and 16-bit side-scroller and, in his reading, plays like a glitched speedrun on the table. Players pick a hero (a thinly veiled Samus, a stealth ninja, a “Polish carpenter” and friends), each with one unlimited action, then build a randomly generated level of stage cards, moving checkpoint to checkpoint by playing cards for lift, dig, climb, unlock, stomp, attack, defend and hide. Hazard chits can be slapped over a space to change what it demands, which is where the glitch flavour lives. Beat a mini-boss for a crystal, then reach the matching Scrambler boss first. Empty your whole hand in one run and you “super leap” to another checkpoint. The cheap solo expansion adds a robot-wizard AI that hunts checkpoints, powers up from cards shuffled into the item deck, and helpfully explores the map for you. Daniel likes the flavour text and pixel art but finds the stage art repetitive. His verdict: fine solo, but really a beer-and-pretzels take-that game for friends with cartridge nostalgia, and he wishes it leaned harder into speedrun terminology. It also kicks off a pixel-art small-box comparison with Unreliable Wizard and Fire of Eidolon.
Would a tabletop game that borrowed real speedrun jargon (skips, sequence breaks, any%) appeal to you, or is that too niche a theme to build on?