Friday Fantasy: 365 Adventures: The Dungeon – 2025

A calendar is useful, if boring. Start of the month, check for appointments and things you are planning to do. Cross off the days as they pass, and when you get to the end of the month, flip over the page and start on the next. Either that or you are ripping off one page, day-by-day, month-by-month, all the way to the end of the year when you will start all over again with a fabulous new calendar. Of course, a calendar can be themed or display pictures from your favourite series of books or television series, or whatever you like, as there is probably calendar for it. What though if you wanted to go an adventure, fight monsters, find treasures, be a hero? Well, you would think that you were out of luck, except that is for the 365 Adventures: The Dungeon – 2025. This is a calendar on which you can face challenge nearly every day, whether it is battling goblins, facing mushroom men, avoiding a trap, and fighting a boss like a two-headed giant or a minotaur! As you play from one month to the next, there will be rewards, but also greater challenges, and as you cross one defeated monsters or overcome challenge after another, you can keep track of your score on the 365 Adventures app, compare your score with others, and at the end of the year find out what your overall score is for the year.

Published by the amusingly named Sorry We Are French, the 365 Adventures: The Dungeon – 2025 is a desk calendar that you can play once a day for two minutes for the whole of the year. Alongside the fliptop calendar itself, the 365 Adventures: The Dungeon – 2025 comes with a rules leaflet, five six-sided dice—four red, one blue, and Marlow. Marlow is the hero of the story, a brave and mighty warrior, ready on January 1st, to enter the dungeon labyrinth of monster-infested rooms and trap-laden corridors, fight monsters big and small, face down bosses of increasing toughness, and put what treasures he can find to use to defeat yet more monsters! Marlow is represented by a flat metal enamelled figure, armed with sword and shield, and always moving to the right, deeper into the wing represented by the current week, and down to the next level, each one represented by a whole month. There is a challenge every day and a boss monster to defeat on Sundays! Marlow does not have to defeat every monster to keep moving forward, but the more he defeats, the greater his score at the end of the year.

Each day player gets to roll the dice to defeat one monster or the boss monster at the end of the week/wing. The have a value of between one and six, whilst the boss monsters have values ranging from sixteen to thirty, the values for the boss monsters varying across the week. The values for both monsters and boss monsters rise over the course of the year. Each day, the player rolls the dice up to three times, the aim being to roll slightly different whether facing a monster or a boss monster. To defeat a monster, a player has to roll three of the same value as a monster. Thus, for monster rated as a four, he must roll three dice with the number four on them. To defeat a boss monster, the total number on all of the dice must equal or be greater than the value of the boss monster. The player does not have to select the monster he wants Marlow to attack prior to rolling, which means that he can match the dice results to any monster for the week. If a player fails the roll for any monster, nothing happens, but if defeats a monster or the boss monster, he crosses that monster’s shield out, and will add it to his total for the month. A player does not have to defeat everything in a week/wing and Marlow is going to go onwards anyway, just as the days are going to pass. However, the fact that a player can attempt to defeat any monster and/or the boss monster at any time in a week feels like Marlow is moving back and forth through a wing rather than constantly moving forward.

So far, so good. At the end the month, the player gets to flip the month over and move Marlow down into a new level of the dungeon. What this reveals is a nice piece of colour text as well as a new element to the game play of 365 Adventures: The Dungeon – 2025 added for the new month/dungeon level and going forward. For example, February adds a new rule. This is for traps which can only be overcome by rolling numbers that do not match the value of the trap. For March, Marlow discovers a magic sword, which once a month, allows the player to flip the blue die to its opposite face, and there is a magic sword box at the top of the month to remind the player that he has used it. Later months and levels add elite monsters, invisible monsters, monsters that provide a bonus score and reduce a boss monster’s value, and so on, all the way to December, where everything gets much tougher!

365 Adventures: The Dungeon – 2025 is a day-by-day monster beat ’em. Like any commitment for a year, a player is going to start out strong, playing it and rolling dice day-by-day, but whether he can stick it out for a year is a matter of his willpower. Likely he will lapse occasionally and race to catch up. Beyond tracking the passing of the days, the 365 Adventures: The Dungeon – 2025 is not much use as a calendar as the boxes for each day is occupied by a monster or trap, but it is not designed as such, being more game than calendar. The game play is not particularly detailed or deep, and so not particularly challenging either.

Physically, the 365 Adventures: The Dungeon – 2025 is nicely presented, full of colour and detail that make you wish some of the creatures were available as card standees for your proper roleplaying game. There is a touch of humour to the art as well, like the cap-wearing pink teddy bear with dynamites trapped to its belly and the generally cranky monsters. Both the basic rules and the monthly additions are clearly written and easy to understand. The only problem is Marlow. Marlow is meant to adhere to the calendar with its magnet, but this does not work, making tracking Marlow’s position day-by-day difficult.

365 Adventures: The Dungeon – 2025 is a silly product, what you would call a ‘stocking filler’. However silly it is, it is well executed and actually quite clever in its design. For the player prepared to stick it out, it offers a little respite from the world everyday with a little dice rolling and some monster bashing.

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Sorry We Are French has expanded the range for 2026. There is another fantasy adventure for Marlow, now joined by Mira, with 365 Adventures: The Dungeon – 2026, but 365 Adventures – Cthulhu 1926 expands into a new genre as private detective John Miller discovers mysteries and age-old secrets on the streets of Arkham.