Thursday, April 21, 2011

Escape from the Labyrinth

I recently purchased The Labyrinth, a solo dungeon-crawling game and BilliamBabble's Inked Adventures Basic Set. After reading through the rules of the game, it became obvious that I could use the Inked Adventures tiles with it. So after some fiddling with The Gimp, downscaling to 80% to fit my 15mm fantasy minis, I got this:
This is the modular room turned into a 8x8 board, along with modular pieces for the walls, starting points, loot and exits. I like the result as it reminds me of both old-school dungeons and games like Gauntlet. As it will become clear from the following report, the similarities do not stop on the layout.
I created a layout based on the ones from the book and placed my trio of adventurers -- Fighter, Healer and Marksman -- at the starting locations. As they started moving, the (yet unknown) monsters started entering the board.
Soon the monsters -- a horde of undead -- entered combat and the Fighter slowly carved a path among them, with the support of the Marksman and the Healer.
The adventurers found that the first passageway led deeper into the dungeon, so they must find another route of escape. They managed to break through the wall of monsters, bringing them hope of getting away.
The Marksman found an enchanted dagger on the chest on the corner (gaining a bonus to close combat) and the adventurers moved towards the exit as new monsters arrived. Surrounded, they had to press on to be able to escape.
Unfortunately, the Healer got badly hurt and ran away in panic, becoming surrounded by monsters and away from the exit. Meanwhile, skeletons and zombies overwhelmed the Marksman despite his newly gained magic weapon.
Eventually the Healer was also defeated by the never-ending swarm of monsters. The Fighter kept hacking at the creatures until he managed to reach the exit, leaving them behind.
A standard game of The Labyrinth involves several boards linked to each other, but I thought that the poor Fighter deserved a break after wading through so many monsters.

Closing remarks
The Labyrinth is a fun game that works well solo. It reminds me of Gauntlet due to the dungeon layout and the large horde of enemies out to get you. The rules seem to favor the adventurers until you find your party surrounded by monsters. Although the rules do not state it clearly, I assumed that a 1 is always a success and a 10 is always a failure, otherwise you may get some impossible rolls.

Even though I got the Inked Adventures set for another reason (creating a dungeon that I intend to use at a local convention) it was a great match for this game. I'll probably add some tokens to use instead of coins for the unknown monsters, along with counters to mark where the adventurers fell and to track their wounds.

2 comments:

Chris said...

Hi,

I purchased the labyrinth awhile ago, and have thought about how to construct a real tabletop version. Your solution is great!
Where did the minis come from? Are they your own designs, or are they from another source?

Best regards,

Chris

Ricardo Nakamura said...

Hi Chris

Thanks for the comment! The minis are from OneMonk (http://onemonk.com/)

Besides the paid models, you can find lots of good stuff on the Forum Hoards also on that site.