Daniel (@dungeondive) backed this one on Kickstarter for love of the source material, and the result is one of the more enthusiastic reviews on the channel in some time. Iconic Studios’ Tomb Raider: The Crypt of Chronos is a solo-focused dungeon crawl with a 15-level campaign mode and — Daniel’s favourite — a random “island” mode where Lara explores an overland hex map of jungles, mountains, tombs, and deserts in search of a map and key to the titular crypt while Natla’s mercenaries hunt her down.
Mechanically the game runs on a D6 dice pool assigned to six actions on Lara’s board: move, search, melee, hide, dodge, research. Crafted weapons, outfits, and abilities persist between chapters. The event deck doubles as a timer — burn through it and Natla places a tracking marker; collect enough markers and the deck flips to its invaded side, where everything gets worse. A hidden/unhidden stealth state, sliding terrain, noise tokens, and an achievement-and-artifact legacy layer round it out. Daniel openly pleads with Iconic to license the system out for Conan, Leiber, or generic fantasy. He’d happily design one himself.
Does this dice-pool engine deserve other-IP treatments, or is the Tomb Raider flavour load-bearing for what makes it sing?