My Little Dungeon

So on Friday, The Game Crafter announced a game design contest. The theme is map building. Basically, it has to have a map, and the map has to be modular. Even if the map is only pre-built scenarios, like in Descent, it counts. The game could be about map building, or it could just be a short process at the beginning of the game.

So I went with My Little Dungeon, an ironically cute title. The game is 2-4 players. You play as little octboxes (10mm), and you have three friendly cube (8mm) spirits that follow you around. Your main form of attack is to play cards that let your cubes momentarily transform to have some ability, like to shoot, teleport, charge an enemy, explode, etc. You fight little black cubes (8mm), go through a random dungeon made of 8x8 rooms (mostly 6x6 playable area), and fight the final boss to get the MacGuffin and get out.

The main characters are kinda cutesey, but the enemies are much more.... morbid. Each room of the dungeon has a random set of monsters in it. Each round has three phases: Travel, player combat, monster combat. In the travel phase, if you're in a room with no monsters in it, you can move to any adjacent room. If you reveal a new room, that room has monsters in it. On the player combat phase, you can move yourself and each your cubits, and each of you gets one attack. You can move three spaces, but your cubits can normally only move one. Both you and your cubits normally only have an attack strength of one, but can play cards to increase the power of your cubits (not yourself). In the monster combat phase, the first player controls the monsters.

At the beginning of your turn, you draw cards up to your hand limit. Your hand limit is two, plus one for every cubit still alive (max of five). Attacks are done by the the attacker and the defender both drawing cards from the combat deck equal to their strength. The cards have different numbers on them. You add the numbers up, and that's your attack/defense power. The one with the higher power wins, with the attacker winning ties. All the creatures and cubits die in one hit, but players are invincible (you slow them down by attacking their cubits).

The final boss is either going to be a minotaurish creature that tries to knock your cubits into the lava surrounding the outside of the room, or a bridge you have to run across while a tentacled beast is trying to grab you/your cubits. In the basic game, whoever beats the boss wins. In the 'advanced' rules, once the MacGuffin is obtained, whoever has the MacGuffin always has the first player token, all remaining monsters instantly die, and you can't explore empty rooms. If you can manage to hit another player (not their cubit), you can steal the MacGuffin from them. The player to get to the starting point with the MacGuffin wins.