Solitaire: Delve

As the Overseer of the Hold you have been given four tasks. The first is to dig and explore the spaces underground, the second is to develop those spaces into something which will benefit the Hold, the third is protect the Hold against incursions and attacks from the monsters and things that will discovered during its exploration and exploitation, and fourth, locate the Void Crystal for the Under King of the Dwarves. This is the simple set-up for DELVE: A Solo Map Drawing Game in which the reader and player takes control and directs the fate of a Dwarven Hold. Beginning at the bottom of the newly dug stairs, squads of tunnellers will dig outwards across each level and down to dig out ever increasingly lower and lower levels. In the process, the Overseer will discover natural formations like underground forests and crystal caverns, remnants of former inhabitants below such as a wishing well or ancient library, adventurers like a Saboteur or Druid, along with inventions and magic good, bad, or wyrd. Ultimately, excavation teams may unearth legendary finds and ancient monstrosities, but throughout the Overseer must work to develop and protect their Hold. The Overseer can build rooms, from the barracks and cannon outpost to the temple and the treasury—and more, construct traps and barricades, and hire troops, including soldiers and gunners, clerics and mages, golems and alchemists, who will turn help protect the hold from intruders and things discovered deep in the bowels of the earth…

Published following a successful Kickstarter campaign by Blackwell Games, DELVE: A Solo Map Drawing Game requires pencil and paper, and a deck of ordinary playing cards to play, whilst a set of polyhedral dice may be useful, but not required. Ideally, the paper should have a grid on it, but there is nothing to stop the Overseer drawing the details of their Hold freehand. In addition, the Overseer should have access to some tokens to represent both their defending forces and any attacking or invading foes, may want to have a notebook to hand in order to record the development of the Hold in addition to its mapping, as well as the events which come its way. Each turn, as the Overseer the player will draw a card from the playing deck, and draw it on their map; resolve any combat; exchange Resources for Trade Goods or vice versa; build new features like rooms, traps, and barricades; and recruit new Units. Only one room can be built per turn.

The suit of the card drawn determines what the excavation teams have discovered. Clubs are Remnants, Diamonds are Trade Goods, Hearts are Resources, and Spades are Natural Formations. The depth or level of the discovery will determine the amount of Resources or Trade Goods found, whilst the number on Clubs or Spades card indicates the result on the Remnants or Natural Formations tables. In the case of the Hearts or Diamonds result, the Overseer can draw an empty cave on their map to represent the discovery, whilst with a Clubs or Spades card, they draw the result from the relevant table. When building a Room, the Overseer pays the listed cost and either adds it to an empty space or builds it into an already discovered cavern. Each Room provides a particular benefit. For example, the Barracks enables the Overseer to recruit and house ten Soldiers or ten Gunners, the Forge enables him to construct traps, the Mason to build barricades, a Library to hold Mages and study Good Magic, and even a Prison to hold prisoners from the Hold above! Some rooms buff or provide a bonus for others. For example, a Hospital revives nearby Troops to full Strength after combat, a Kitchen increases the Strength of Troops by half again, and a Shrine can serve as a trap for rampaging hordes if a Shrine of Defence or a Shrine of Fortune to enhance the discovery of Diamonds and thus Trade Goods.

Troops simply cost Diamonds and thus Trade Goods to hire and require facilities to house them. Combat is a matter of attrition, comparing the Strength values of the combatants and deducting the lower Strength value from the higher Strength value. A Unit whose Strength is reduced to zero is removed from the Hold, but a Hospital on the same level where the Unit died can revive it. The rules also allow for ranged combat, Clerics casting a divine shield around other units, and so on. When enemy units spawns, or when one of the Overseer’s units turns hostile it moves at speed of one space a turn towards the Entrance until stopped.

DELVE: A Solo Map Drawing Game is lost if an enemy Unit makes it to the first level of the Hold and exits via the Entrance. This marks the failure of the Hold and the Overseer. However, the Overseer can essentially win if their digging teams find the Void Crystal. Whether or not this happens, it is down to a turn of the cards, and it only occurs after the Overseer has reached Level Five. At this point, the two Jokers which up until now have been removed from the deck of playing cards, are added back in. From this point onwards, the Overseer can unearth ‘Legendary Finds’—great boons, great magics, great banes, great beasts, and more. If the Black Joker is drawn it indicates that the Overseer has encountered an Ancient Monstrosity that is unique and requires a few more cards to be drawn to define what should be something that the Dwarfs whisper about for centuries to come. Like other enemy Units this will move towards the Entrance, and having Strength of a hundred and more, will smash through Unit after Unit of the Overseer’s troops. When the Ancient Monstrosity gets to the Entrance, it may be too large to get through it and so it instead begins a Takeover of the Hold…

If the Red Joker is drawn, something good has been found. This can be anything from a gem to armour, an instrument to a shield, and possesses a pair of powers or features, randomly determined by drawing two cards. It might simply be valuable, in which case a collector will offer to purchase it from the Overseer, or it could offer guidance, enabling the Overseer to draw two cards per turn and pick the better of the two-unless they are Jokers, in which case, they must be played. If the two cards drawn to determine the Legendary Find’s powers or features are both face cards of any suit, then the Overseer has discovered the location of the Void Crystal and fulfilled the task set by the Under-King, and thus won.

The play of DELVE: A Solo Map Drawing Game is intentionally procedural. The Overseer will draw a card, add its feature to the map, move any enemy Units and conduct combat, and then collect and spend Resources and Trade Goods to build and develop the Hold, connecting rooms and caverns with corridors and levels with stairs, with both stairs and corridors being free to build. They can add notes to the map, but at the same time, record other details in a journal. Initially, this process is relatively quick because there are fewer Resources and Trade Goods to be found, so the Overseer has fewer options in terms of what rooms, traps, and other features they can afford as well as Units they can recruit. Dig deeper, and then deeper still, and the Resources and Trade Goods are increasingly plentiful when found, but the monsters and dangers are more powerful and challenging to stop. Having more Resources and Trade Goods means being able to build better defences, recruit more troops, and so give the Overseer more choice. With that increased choice comes more complexity though. The random nature of the game means that at times the Overseer will have no choice such as when an enemy Unit is rampaging through the Hold, forcing him to recruit more troops to protect the Entrance to the Hold, construct traps and barricades to slow the enemy Unit’s movement, and so on.

As the play of DELVE: A Solo Map Drawing Game proceeds, three things develop out of it. First is the map of the Hold, drawn in cross section, with each level spreading out across the page and then with each subsequent level, the Hold down the page. The limits of the Hold are marked by the page edge, but the Overseer could easily develop onto another page if they wanted to, and they could even draw the Hold as a traditional overview plan with each page representing a level. Second, when combined with the notes kept in the journal, a story can begun to be told of the Hold’s development and history, the Overseer free to name rooms, Units, adventurers hired, Legendary Finds discovered, and more. Ultimately, this story will either end in success or failure. Success if the Void Crystal is found or failure if an enemy Unit manages to fight its way up from the depths of the hold and the Entrance. Third, the combination of the map and the notes in the journal with story told means that the player has created a dungeon with a history and legends which could be explored by a party of adventurers in Dungeons & Dragons. If the Hold was successfully built, it might be the case that the adventurers need to sneak in and steal or confront a particular Legendary Find, but if it fell to an Ancient Monstrosity or other monsters, the Hold may have long fallen to ruin, an ill remembered legacy of the Overseer’s failure…

Beyond discovering the location of the Void Crystal, DELVE: A Solo Map Drawing Game provides a second objective which involves digging even deeper—as far down as the thirtieth level, plus options for increasing the difficulty of the game. These include adding themed levels with particular powers, such as level where any liquid found is magma, and Bloodrunes which change aspects of the game, such the Rune of Nightmares which switches play to begin on the Nightmare layer of the thirtieth level and the Overseer have to work upwards rather than down!

Physically, DELVE: A Solo Map Drawing Game is a cleanly presented, digest-sized book. The writing is clear and simple such that the reader can become an Overseer and start digging and drawing very quickly.

DELVE: A Solo Map Drawing Game is the pen and paper equivalent of the computer game, Dungeon Keeper—indeed it was one of the inspirations for the game, but played at a very sedate pace and with the player handling all of the procedural and resource management elements. It can be played in one sitting or put aside and returned to at a later date, but it does take time to play and the more time the Overseer invests the more rewarding the story which should develop. And as good as successfully finding the Void Crystal feels, playing DELVE: A Solo Map Drawing Game and not finding it and having the Hold fail can be as narratively interesting and satisfying—if not more so.