Delve. Die. Repeat
MINI ROGUE
Designer: Paolo Di Stefano & Gabriel Gendron | Publisher: Nuts! Publishing
Roguelikes have had their meaning diluted. While in vogue for video games in the last decade, the term has simply come to mean a kind of permadeath – or as many of us would recognise from early games consoles, arcade mode.
Mini Rogue is more purely a conversion of games like Nethack – randomised dungeons, brutal and unfair spikes of difficulty, and most importantly, genuinely surprising moments. The thing players enjoy about these experiences is not that they die on 80% of their dungeon runs. It’s that for each room they explore, depending on its context, there might be a twist coming up.