Delve: A Solo Map Drawing Game

With Anne out of town for two weeks, I scoured YouTube for some new solo games to try.  Well, they may have been around for a while, but they were new to me.  I was sold on Delve: A Solo Map Drawing Game after watching Kruggsmash play for a while.

The overall idea of drawing cards and looking up the results in tables was fine, but to me it was very odd how it focused on the quality of your drawings.  Sure, I used to have time to do detailed illustration work, but lately I can do stick people and doodles if anything, and since I accidentally only printed half of the blank grid page and then ran out of paper, I had to split those empty boxes in half and there was no room left to draw anyway.  I suppose I could spend more time and spice it up some before scanning it and posting it here.  In this case, red cards were resources and black cards were natural features or creatures. Simple enough, so I ran with it for an hour or so.

On its Kickstarter page, Delve claimed to be inspired by Dwarf Fortress, which was ominous, since classic Dwarf Fortress lets you get hours or days into building a settlement only to relentlessly wipe out everyone.

After a few boxes, I had a forest chamber and dug down to a sleeping wyrm which would wake up if I tried to mine its gems and with a strength of 100 would wipe out my whole colony.  Going the other direction, I got an obsidian tube, which is a pit leading all the way to the bottom of the page.  I built a storehouse and kennel, rescued some small creature which could then live in my kennel, bought two dwarf fighters who got killed a few turns later, and kept going.  I dug down next to the obsidian pit and built a bridge across -- it wasn't listed as a thing but I threw a few resources at it and said okay -- but when I dug into the wall I hit a magma pool, so I have a lovely magma-fall filling the pit all the way to the bottom.  At least it didn't destroy any of my rooms with important stuff in them, and it's a free source of lighting.

I rolled "Garzin's Garish Gaze" which instructed me to color the room with bright colors.  Except that I was just filling in boxes with words connected by penciled-in doors.  Kruggsmash and the author of Delve had some fine dwarf-drawing skills.  I am not one of those people.  But I continued, hit a lake and a river, paid to drain my rooms, and kept going.  I cleared a crypt and built a library next to it.  I added an Inn and rolled a Barbarian with 20 STR.  I built a cannon (STR 30) and have two other guys (STR 5), and I am about to clear out the golem forge that comes with 40 STR of monsters to beat, and the goal is that after clearing that chamber I can build golems of my own.  I had a cleric at one point, but he was eaten.

There is plenty of variety and flavor here.  I got hints of mysteries and stories as I went, which is always good.  Still, there is a sense of foreboding since half the cards in the deck add dangers.  And with a 50% chance of bad things, we must inevitably draw some Thing we can't handle.  If the Thing makes its way up to the entrance, you lose the game.  I guess that's fair.  An authentic hint of Dwarf Fortress doom (I also watched Krugsmash play DF for about an hour).  I will try to find time to continue this little trail of cards...


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