Dungeons can contain all sorts of nasty surprises, from dragons, to mimics, to deadly traps - and sometimes, they're just loaded up with puzzles. Puzzle Dungeon is a solo dungeon crawler board game with gorgeous pixel art and a very strong 7.8 rating on Board Game Geek, and for the whole of October you can get it for 25% off its already affordable base price.
In Puzzle Dungeon, the player (yes just the one, this is a solo board game after all) chooses a hero and then delves into an ever escalating dungeon full of monsters in pursuit of glory and trophies. The game was both designed and illustrated by a solo developer, Brian Garber, with a distinctive pixel art style that has serious SNES RPG vibes.
The game is currently on sale on Garber's ETSY page. The base set can be purchased for $15 (£14.14), while the deluxe edition costs $48.75 (£45.96).
This is a slow paced experience. The core of the game is a puzzle of hand manipulation. Your hero starts with an 'arsenal' of six cards and a hand of six more, facing four columns of monsters. You can fight the topmost monster in a column to capture it and add it to your trophies, revealing the next monster in the stack - a bit like RPG-flavored Solitaire.
To defeat a monster you must discard weapon symbols from your arsenal or hand that match its defenses, or exhaust monster cards that you've already captured and use their weapons instead. Special abilities, good and bad, will fire off when you defeat certain monsters - or when the final copy of a monster species in the dungeon flips over to reveal its more powerful Monster King side
With a teeny tiny deck to draw from, you need to be very careful picking your battles to ensure you make the most of every turn or risk running out of resources. Each hero has a specific list of trophies that they need to claim, as well as a unique power, and there are absolutely loads of heroes to choose from. If that wasn't enough variety, the heroes all have an alternate 'hard mode' for once you've mastered the core game!
While dungeons may be dark and scary places, the Wargamer Discord server is like an inn, where you can stop on by to destress and recover some hit points. We'd love to see you there!
If you want to test your mettle against some other games, why not explore our list of the best strategy board games? And if you're interested in Puzzle Dungeon, chances are you're also interested in Dungeons and Dragons, so why not have a gander at our DnD release schedule?