Solitaire: UMBRA

An alien force has invaded one galaxy after another. Assaulted one world, followed by another. Reduced colonies to glass and moons to floating collections of rubble. Civilisation is at the invader’s mercy, and as hard as it fights and as desperately as it fields one more newly developed weapon, it cannot withstand the onslaught. How long before survivors huddling on isolated worlds with oxygen and food supplies dwindling are all that is left? Soon, but perhaps there is one last hope, the fabled Reaper’s Gambit. Myth and legend say that it can be found on a world beyond the borders of civilisation, buried deep underground. Now that world has been located and an expedition been sent to excavate a possible site for the device. So far, the Bridge, a Landing Pad, and Ship’s Power has been established on the world along with a force of Marines. It is time to begin digging, exploring, researching, and defending.

This is the set-up for UMBRA: A Solo Game of Final Frontiers from the publisher of RISE: A Game of Spreading Evil and DELVE: A Solo Map Drawing Game. All three are map-drawing games for one player and each involves the drawing and building, populating and defending, and exploring and exploiting of great underground networks. Both RISE and DELVE are fantasy games, themed around building and exploring dungeons and telling the story involved in this. UMBRA is a Science Fiction solo roleplaying and journaling game inspired by the Science Fiction and Science Fiction horror of Alien, the Halo and Dead Space video games, The Thing, and Starship Troopers. In the game, the player takes the role of the Commander of an expeditionary base. From one turn to the next, as Commander, they will manage, expand, and defend the colony as well as sending out excavation and exploration teams which continue to dig out and dig down deep below the planet’s surface in order to locate the Reaper’s Gambit. Managing primarily means ensuring that the base has sufficient power and food to survive. Expanding the colony means constructing new facilities—barracks, crew quarters, charging stations, fabrication bays, genetic labs, power plants, hydroponics, cloning bays, alien beacons, research laboratories, and much, much more.

To defend the base, the Commander can recruit Marines and Hackers, build Support Droids and Robots, clone Mutants, and hire Alien Mercenaries. Once they have built a Fabrication Bay, they can begin installing automated machine guns, laser grids, psychic mind crushers, and more, whilst installing barriers—both defensive and offensive, and even secret passages, the latter to get around invading enemies. Together, they may need to defend the base against alien hive drones, war drones, and many more threats.

Exploring means finding resources, funding, natural formations, remnants, and other things. Natural formations include chambers full of eggs containing parasites; eruptions of lava; and strange anomalies. A remnant could be a monolith strange markings which might scan an adjacent area or turn some Marines hostile; a buried alien probe which a hacker could hack; or a dormant war machine already to go to battle…

The designer’s previous games in this family have all been about exploring and building underground—DELVE: A Solo Map Drawing Game about exploring and building down and RISE: A Game of Spreading Evil about exploring and building up. UMBRA: A Solo Game of Final Frontiers is also about exploring and building down, but it adds a new dimension—the outside. Or rather the surface. A colony breach at the surface can cause decompression and loss of units not protected behind airlocks; armed aliens might stage an invasion; an alien ship might conduct a strafing run or an asteroid might crash into the base; and once a Motor Pool has been constructed, Expeditions on the surface can be launched and discoveries made, such as finding a strand alien mercenary, a previously undiscovered civilisation, and even a lost relic.

To play UMBRA, the player will need squared paper, a deck of ordinary cards, some tokens to represent units, a notepad in which to record the expedition’s progress, and pen and pencils. They will also need dice—a four-sided die at least. The game starts with the player drawing the Bridge, Landing Pad, and Ship’s Power on the grided paper at the top. Then on each turn, they choose an unexplored location on the map—which is a cross section of the base and its underground facilities—and draw a card to determine what is found. Hearts are Resources, Diamonds are Funding for hiring troops, Spades are natural formations, and Clubs are remnants. Both natural formations and remnants require the player to draw another card and refer to the respective tables. 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 troop unit whose Strength is reduced to zero is removed from the Hold, but a Medbay on the same level where the unit died can revive it. The rules also allow for ranged combat. The player can trade and exchange Resources for Funding or vice versa, and finally they can build new features in the base—facilities, security features, and much, much more, and hire new troop units.

Once the Commander has excavated to the Level Five and beyond, the deck of playing cards’ Jokers are added back into the deck. When drawn Black Jokers represent Alien Terrors, bigger challenges that the Commander will need to overcome, and Red Jokers are Alien Artefacts which will help them in the long term. When the Red Joker is drawn, two further cards are drawn to determine its traits, and if they are face cards, then the Commander has located the Reaper’s Gambit. In which case, it is shipped off to support the Galactic War, the base and its facilities are given full colony status, and so the player has achieved victory in their play through of UMBRA! If however, enemy units reach the base’s Bridge, defeats the troops there, the base has been overrun or captured, and the Commander’s efforts to find the Reaper’s Gambit thwarted. The Galactic War will continue until the civilisation is destroyed—and so the player has been defeated in their play through of UMBRA.

If a player is victorious, they need not stop playing. There is something dark and dangerous in the abyssal depths of the planet, a truly monstrous threat—perhaps one greater in the long run to that being faced in the Galactic War. UMBRA contains options also for theming the planet’s levels, for terraforming the planet and making it even more difficult to explore, and a list of challenges that the player can overcome and so gain a little glory. Rounding out UMBRA is a selection of prompts and a quick reference page for ease of play.

Physically, UMBRA: A Solo Game of Final Frontiers is a cleanly presented, digest-sized book. The writing is clear and simple such that the reader can become a Commander and start exploring and drawing with very little preparation.

UMBRA: A Solo Game of Final Frontiers is closest in design to DELVE: A Solo Map Drawing Game. Both are sedate in their play with strong procedural and resource management elements, and these elements along with the map—or rather floor plans of the base in the case of UMBRA—are what the player builds and tells their story around. UMBRA 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 Commander invests the more rewarding the story which should develop. And as good as successfully finding the Reaper’s Gambit feels, playing UMBRA: A Solo Game of Final Frontiers and not finding it and having the base fail can be as narratively interesting and satisfying—if not more so. The story of discovering that tale though, might be for another roleplaying game and an entirely different session.

Solitaire: Rise

In ages past the greatest of all dungeons fell. Its great portals were penetrated by mighty heroes and level by level, its halls and corridors walked down, and its rooms and chambers, chapels and necropolises, lairs and dens, and reliquaries and treasuries entered, their denizens put to the sword and the spell, their coins, gems, and magics plundered. A millennium has passed since then and the doings of those great warriors and wizards have passed into legend and dungeons are things of the past, so perhaps it is time for a new network of tunnels and rooms, constructed and populated at the hands of a new Dungeon Keeper? Or at least the old Dungeon Keeper of old, woken after a thousand year slumber to build a dungeon anew?

This is the set-up for RISE: A Game of Spreading Evil. Published by Blackwell Games, it is a counterpart and opposite to DELVE: A Solo Map Drawing Game. Both are map-drawing games for one player and both involve the drawing and building, populating and defending, and exploring and exploiting of great underground networks. The difference is that in DELVE, the player takes the role of the Overseer of a Dwarven hold, digging down into the depths of the earth, whereas in RISE, the player takes of the role of the Keeper, tasked with building up to the surface—though is nothing to stop an enterprising Keeper from building down! In the course of this mighty construction, a Keeper will explore nearby caverns and tunnels, develop them into rooms such as chambers and hovels in which recruited troops can have their lair, forges which enable traps to be built elsewhere in the dungeon, a mason to allow the construction of secret passages and barricades, prisons in which to incarcerate captured adventurers, taverns and theatres to keep the dungeon’s denizens happy, and altars on which to sacrifice them in return for really good magic! Lastly, a Keeper might discover a portal to another realm and send forth explorers to learn its secrets and plunder its treasures.

RISE: A Game of Spreading Evil is a solo map-drawing game with tactical elements and some journaling aspects which can be played at leisure by the would be Keeper. Fairly easy to play, it can be started, put down, and picked up again because a Keeper’s dungeon never amounts to more than sheets of paper and perhaps a notebook. It requires a good pencil, a rubber, several sheets of gridded or graph paper, a notepad, some tokens, and a standard deck of playing cards. Each turn, beginning from the Dungeon Heart, as the Keeper the player will draw a card from the playing deck, and draw what it indicates 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. In addition, the Keeper must keep track of the dungeon’s Happiness, keeping it high enough to avoid its denizens from mutinying and turning on the Keeper!

The suit of the card drawn determines what the Keeper’s 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 Keeper can draw an empty cave on the map to represent the discovery, whilst with a Clubs or Spades card, the Keeper refers to the result from the relevant table and then draws that on the map. 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 Hovel serves as a basic lair and can house some ten units’ worth of troops, whereas a Puzzle Room is intentionally designed to slow any combatant—whether having descended from the surface or mutinied from amongst the Keeper’s own troops—down from one turn to the next. Others like the Theatre or the Casino enhance a dungeon’s Happiness, and some provide buffs, such as the Kitchen, which increases the fighting Strength of nearby troops with a ready supply of good unwholesome food, and Treasury, which increases the maximum amount of Trade Goods the Keeper can store.

If a Keeper builds an Altar, then sacrifices can be made to gain Good Magic. This might be to summon a spell which brings a room to life and turns it into a unit of its own or helpful whispers flit about the dungeon and cause any imprisoned Adventurers to switch sides and enlist in the service of the Keeper!* Another potential Good Magic is a portal. Once a portal has been discovered, the Keeper must construct a Portal Siege Camp if the aim is to launch raids through the portal and into other Realms. Successful raids will return further Resources and Trade Goods, as well as captured Units and even stolen items and artefacts. The latter is best stored in their dungeon’s Thieves’ Gallery.

* This quicker than the other option, which is sending the Adventurers to the Torture Chamber—should the Dungeon have one—and from there to the Hiring Office, and probably involves less paperwork. It is also probably less fun for one of the parties involved.

Combat occurs when a Keeper discovers the presence of the enemy, represented by a Remnant being drawn at the start of turn, such as an Adventuring party or a powerful champion who tests the Keeper’s forces. It can also occur when a Keeper’s own units become unhappy and mutiny, turning on their former master—or mistress, fighting their way to the Dungeon Heart. If the enemy or mutinied units cannot do this, then they will dig in and begin taking over a section of the dungeon. This will present a further challenge to the Keeper in addition to expanding the Dungeon from the depths to the surface. 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 Dungeon. The rules allow for Ranged combat, such as from Archers and Warlocks, whilst Cultists can cast a protective shield and Trappers can reset or disarm traps.

In addition to launching raids into other Realms via Portals, RISE gives tables for Adventurers to be encountered, Information to be found, Legendary artefacts to be discovered—once the Joker cards have been added back to the deck with the Keeper’s expansion reaching the fifth level, gratuitously great Heroes who take it upon themselves to delve deeper and deeper into the depths of the Keeper’s Dungeon, and options such as World Layers. The latter are themed levels of the Dungeon, like a Primordial Layer populated by gigantic reptiles, lava flows, and ancient megaliths. These add flavour and serve as a feature in the Keeper’s Dungeon. Lastly, RISE comes with a set of challenges which can be attempted over the course of multiple playthroughs of the game.

What is not quite clear is what the end objective of playing RISE: A Game of Spreading Evil actually is. The aim is to explore and develop up from the depths, ultimately to reach the surface, and perhaps from there, become a true threat to the world beyond. Yet there is barely the need for such an objective, or even a sense of having won in playing RISE. This is a game whose point is twofold. There is, of course, the play, the intentionally procedural construction of the Dungeon and its development, but there is also the story of the Dungeon to be told in that constructive play. As with DELVE: A Solo Map Drawing Game, what develops out of the play of RISE: A Game of Spreading Evil is a map of the Dungeon, level by level in cross section; when combined with the notes kept in the journal, a story that tells of the Dungeon’s development, history, and notable features; and ultimately, a Dungeon complete with notes and map that the Keeper can take, and as Dungeon Master, could be run as a dungeon for a group of players. Perhaps for Dungeons & Dragons, perhaps for another roleplaying game.

Physically, RISE: A Game of Spreading Evil is a cleanly presented, digest-sized book. The writing is clear and simple such that the reader can become a Keeper and start digging and drawing with very little preparation.

One of the given inspirations for RISE’s sister game, DELVE: A Solo Map Drawing Game is the computer game, Dungeon Keeper, and the same can be said for RISE—if not more so. It is played at a much more sedate pace than the computer game, with the player as the Keeper handling all of the procedural and resource management elements. Of the two, DELVE: A Solo Map Drawing Game is the more polished and deeper affair, RISE: A Game of Spreading Evil being a little rougher around the edges and not being quite as well explained as it could be. Nevertheless, RISE shares much in common with DELVE. 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 Keeper invests in the play, the more rewarding the story which should develop and the more interesting the Dungeon created—and ultimately, RISE: A Game of Spreading Evil is about the story of Dungeon.

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.