Boredom. That is what I got from Castle of the Dead. It's a nice concept but this was, literally, driving me to rather sleep than complete playing.

I had great fun playing this with my kids. I love that it's one sheet of paper folded in half. I just printed out two copies so each kid had a set of rules, and their character sheet on the cover. (That's the lowest ink version). We used dwarven forge tiles to build out the castle, that worked out quite well. Mechanically the game is quite tough, and a bit of a slog, but the rules are so simple it's easy to hack. For my kids game I let them go back to town and buy stuff, however that reset the castle. Other tweaks I'm considering: Dex and Wits seem quite weak, I may put in Dex based melee, and maybe Wits based ranged and melee weapons. The spell book solves the Wits issue, but to keep it contained to the basic game adding a couple wits weapons seems doable.

Finding the boss is quite difficult, even after encountering the other monsters you have to find the right room (1/3) and then roll the boss (1/6). That's a 1/18 chance. I will probably make it so that once the boss can spawn, he does automatically.

The fights seem to take a bit too long, but that may be due to my kids and their particular characters. I'm considering having a pool of health for a group of monsters rather than individual health, which would allow overkilling with good damage rolls.

I'm going to look through more chapbooks to see the variations in the rules before making any changes yet.

Oh, also the game works perfectly fine with two players.

Like many people, I've taken to cruising DTRPG for whatever new little thing to keep me occupied during the lockdown. I ran across one of the Micro Chapbook RPGs and decided to give it a shot. Glad I did. This is a fun little series, with more stuff coming out regularly at the time of this writing.

Each of these games follows the same very basic foundation, with only Weapons, Rooms, and Monsters being different from one to another. The core system is roll 1d6 and attempt to score under the attribute you are testing. Combat works similarly, with a free ranged attack opportunity each round before melee. In melee, you roll for each monster in the encounter, dealing damage if you succeed your check, and taking damage if you fail. The dungeon is over when you encounter and defeat the Boss. Rooms are randomly determined from a simple chart, with an additional d6 roll to determine the size.

My only hang up is that it costs 100 gold to add +1 to an attribute. This is the only 'level up' mechanism, and after 3 dungeons my character barely has 50 gold. Fortunately, each of the games has a 3rd page, not required to play, that gives hints for running it as a group rpg with a referee, and other suggestions for hacking it.

Overall, I would really recommend this if you like a light RNG dungeon crawler.

I randomly found this game while looking for solo dungeon gaming during this covid-19 thing. Man am I happy I found it! I even made a playthrough video of it here : https://youtu.be/CKx_RS3ZMAw Such a tight well thought out system.

Thanks!