Daniel (@dungeondive) digs into TOMB, John Zinser’s competitive party-building dungeon crawler from AEG, and the homebrew solo variant he’s been hammering into shape. His verdict on the box as printed is blunt: a terrible rulebook and near-nonexistent solo rules wrapped around one of the most lavishly illustrated games he owns — stacks of encounter, treasure, trap, curse and character cards, each with unique credited art. The competitive game (build a party, raid static tomb boards, backstab rivals for the highest XP) he rates merely okay and overlong, but he’s convinced a great game is “bubbling just underneath the surface.”
Most of the runtime is Daniel walking through his solo fix: drawing a party of four from a bag of twenty expendable heroes, equipping them by class (fighters draw items, clerics prayers, rogues tactics, wizards spells), and clearing every crypt without burning through all twenty. To give the otherwise-pointless movement some teeth he adds two roaming monster markers that chase the party, plus a d6-triggered Crypt Master card to ramp difficulty. He readily admits it isn’t finished — many PvP-flavoured abilities still need on-the-fly reinterpretation — and openly invites viewers to develop the variant further. A candid look at salvaging a flawed-but-gorgeous game for the solo table.
TOMB is the game Daniel says he’d most like to “fix” because so much good is already in the box. What’s a game in your collection that you keep house-ruling because you can feel a great design buried inside it?
I haven’t gotten a chance to participate with the group for quite some time, but I drive for many hours a week and I listen to Daniel’s videos and daydream about board game design.
This one has come up along with Dungeon Crusade for the past month.
I have both Tomb and Cryptmaster and I agree with Daniel’s appraisal. There is something bubbling beneath the surface. Furthermore I’ve found folks have created spreadsheets with labors of love for all of the attributes of all of the cards of Cryptmaster at least.
A few things on my mind.
- Daniel’s idea of the roaming monster having different effects depending on the Tomb card you draw (trap/treasure/monster)… I love the idea but I couldn’t wrap my head around his rules for pickpocketing the treasure, or thematically how you can avoid a trap by moving away from something that follows you. BUT…
I couldn’t help but think about Dungeon Crusade’s Raid dice/Roaming Monsters. Could there be something where Monsters attack the Inn? Killing potential hires?
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One of the recent comments on the Tomb BGG thread talks about just having a random encounter roll where you draw from the tomb deck on a 1d6 roll of 1. I’ve been fooling around with: If I draw a treasure card, I draw another card until I draw a Trap or Monster. The monster is carrying the treasure, or the trap is protecting the treasure, so random encounters can end up being quite good.
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The populating a “crypt” with several cards reminded me of the Axianquest Infinite Dungeons system and I thought to myself “what about having a randomly generated dungeon like that as well?” In short, Infinite dungeons populates the rooms with traps, monsters, “furniture”, treasure, and “clues” as a component for clues. Add to a Tomb map the rules for wall/door placement and you have basically every card type (minus the furniture and clues) of infinite dungeon.
I would love to sit down with anyone and work on something like this.
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