Daniel (@dungeondive) looks at two DriveThruCards games he ordered five minutes into a Geek Gamers video: Tower of the Ice Lich and The Castle of Sanguine Blight. Both are simpler even than Escape the Dark Castle (flip a room, resolve it, flip an event, move on) and both, he says, do one thing exactly right: mood through flavour text.
In the Tower, four heroes with strength, dexterity and intelligence plus health, sanity and luck climb five floors of three rooms each. Every test is 2d6 plus a modifier against a target of nine; luck buys re-rolls, and health or sanity at zero ends it. His Kati Amun Ra pried an item from under fallen rubble, withstood a prismatic trap, declined to drink from a fountain of blood, and found a one-eyed hanged man that did nothing but set the scene. At the top, the Lich’s six powers are shuffled and drawn one at a time. Three expansions add a lore deck of whispering bones, purely thematic rooms, new characters and traps. Daniel reckons the cards double as a random dungeon generator for solo RPG play.
Sanguine Blight is a half-step more complex: Gothic horror, characters with backstories and special abilities, an exorcist priest in the cast, a vampire at the end. He prefers the Lich for its dungeon theme. Recommended if you are at peace with very simple; avoid if you need depth.
These games are almost all flavour text and a target number of nine. Is atmosphere alone enough to carry a solo game?