Shrunken Shrine

Released on Steam early access on February 28th, 2018 by Handelabra Games, I was on the fence about One Deck Dungeon for some time before coming to the conclusion that it doesn’t actually meet my criteria for the full-entry treatment here. It’s close, though, and is fully worth checking out if what I’m about to describe sounds like something you may enjoy.

You choose a character class and enter a dungeon with several paths, which in turn feature several rooms. Most actions you take cause a turn timer to tick down, and you want to explore as much of the current dungeon floor as possible before the timer runs out and you’re forced down to the next floor. Survive as many encounters and traps as you can, accumulate XP, items and skills along the way, and move on until the run ends. 

Combat and traps are a little hard to explain without some hands-on experience, but here goes. You roll several six-sided dice of various types, corresponding to different attributes of your character: strength, dexterity, magic. The class you chose at the start will affect how many of each type of dice you have. Let’s say you chose a mage and you’ve run into a skeleton. You can easily bypass its block because you’re likely to have rolled many magic-type dice, but you’re less likely to be able to stop it wasting your time or hitting you because you have fewer dexterity and strength-type dice at your disposal. Ultimately, it becomes a game of resource management and deciding when it’s best to use potions, special abilities, or even just taking damage – if you can survive even one round against most enemies and traps, you automatically win and can just move on. 

Why isn’t it getting the esteemed accolade of being the twelfth ‘real’ chronological entry in this project, then? Simply put, despite the name, there isn’t enough deck-building, guv. I don’t mean in the strict sense that the game must feature literal cards to be a roguelike deck-builder – it actually refers to most of its on-screen elements as ‘cards’. I’m talking about the player having a rotatable, semi-random loadout of skills that comprise the core of engagement with the game. Even Solitairica compelled you to use its solitaire interface as a medium to constantly trigger complementary deck-like special abilities in order to offset your opponent’s abilities or damage them directly. In ODD, you can pick up a limited number of skills that affect your rolls, number of dice, health, and such, but these are more akin to potions in Slay the Spire, or triggerable D&D class features that are on cooldowns. They are very much a secondary method of negotiating challenges or mitigating risk – your primary tools are always the dice rolls and how you choose to parcel them out against the challenge’s numbers.

If you’ve played this game, you may disagree with my call here, and I’d love to hear why. My choice to omit it is not a judgement of its quality. ODD is great fun and has a ton on offer. Not only are there six character classes, there are a further TEN available as DLC if its infectious, Dicey Dungeonsesque gameplay loop gets its hooks into you. Most unique is the ability to take two characters of different classes into the dungeon at the same time and try to compensate for the need to split your rewards with the benefits brought by having more diverse dice types at your disposal. There’s no shortage of clever stuff going on here.

…After all that, I realised that it is actually based on a physical game of the same name that was released in 2016… which disqualifies it from consideration here entirely, as I’m only considering games that were originally conceived as video games. The name suddenly makes a lot more sense, though!