Delve deeper into the world of Aughmoore in this dungeon crawl campaign.
What Is Tiny Epic Dungeons Adventures?
Tiny Epic Dungeons Adventures is a cooperative dungeon-crawling game for 1 to 4 players, ages 14 and up, and takes about 60–90 minutes to play each chapter. It’s currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, with a pledge level of $35 for a copy of the game. Other pledge tiers are available, like a $20 print-and-play, or the $49 deluxe bundle that includes an expansion. Although it is compatible with Tiny Epic Dungeons, it is a standalone game and does not require the original — but if you’re interested in the original, you can also get that through this Kickstarter campaign as well.
Tiny Epic Dungeons Adventures was designed by Scott Almes and published by Gamelyn Games, with illustrations by Ian Rosenthaler and Nikoletta Vaszi.
New to Kickstarter? Check out our crowdfunding primer.
Tiny Epic Dungeons Adventures components. (Prototype shown) Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Tiny Epic Dungeons Adventures Components
Note: My review is based on a prototype copy, so it is subject to change and may not reflect final component quality. The prototype only included materials for chapter 1 (of 8). Also, the meeples are 3D printed plastic, but the finished game will most likely include screen-printed wooden meeples. The components list below may also be incomplete, as there are items that may be added as stretch goals. Finally, because there are things that are revealed over the course of the campaign, I’ll leave out a lot of those details to avoid spoilers.
Here’s what will be included in the game:
— Adventure Booklet
— Dungeon Booklet
— 8 Secret Envelopes
— 25 Room cards
— 5 Minion cards
— 20 Loot cards
— 10 Spell cards
— 9 Special Room cards
— 8 Mob cards
— 4 Explorers Pack cards
— Entrance card
— Exit card
— 2 Blockage cards
— 6 Boss cards
— 5 Torch Track cards
— 4 Hero mats
— 4 Hero miniatures
— Chest of Continuation
— 22 Dungeon tokens
— 24 Tracker tokens
— 8 Mob meeples
— 5 Minion meeples
— 12 Fire tokens
— Boss meeple
— Spawn token
— 4 Brute meeples
— 3 Hero dice
— Enemy die
As always, it’s a whole lot of stuff packed into a small box, though this particular Tiny Epic game has a slightly less tiny box than its predecessors: it has the same small footprint but is about twice as thick, and the expansion box will be the standard Tiny Epic size rather than the half-thickness box that previous expansions have been. If you enjoy this one, you’ll probably need to make some more room on your shelves in the future: it’s marked as Adventure #1, and Gamelyn Games plans to have more adventures to come.
The dungeon booklet is a spiral-bound book of maps, one spread for each chapter, and is used together with the room cards to build out the maps. The adventure booklet contains the stories — a lot more narrative than before, with section breaks where you pause until certain conditions have been met.
The four base game miniatures. (Prototype shown) Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Tiny Epic Dungeons Adventures has plastic miniatures — as with the original TED, these are a slightly smaller scale than your typical miniatures game, but still have a good amount of detail on them. The campaign page lists these four heroes and has four more to be revealed, so the game will most likely have 8 total by the time this is wrapped up.
Hero mats. (Prototype shown) Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Here’s a look at your four heroes: Tugsy Wararm is a dwarf blastmaster — he’s got a blunderbuss ranged attack that can damage all the enemies in a room, but is particularly effective if he has a bomb to add to his attack. Ava the Brave is a human explorer; her specialty is quick movement, the ability to reveal dungeon rooms without stepping into them, and she can also dig for explorer tokens anywhere. Prince Orn is a human archmage — his Divine Word spell can be used either as an area attack or an area heal. Commander Leena is an elf blinkblade who can teleport to another hero, and does more damage with her Synergized Attack when she’s with somebody else.
A few of the new minions, which are like mini-bosses. (Prototype shown) Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Most of the components are similar to other Tiny Epic titles: a few large cards (hero mats, the Torch card) and a lot of square cards, little tiny wooden meeples for tracking health and energy, and some cardboard tokens for things like the items you can find in the dungeons and the passages you mark when you unlock a door or blow a hole in the wall.
How to Play Tiny Epic Dungeons Adventures
The game uses a lot of the same basic rules as Tiny Epic Dungeons, so I won’t repeat all of the rules in detail but will just give more of a general overview. For a more detailed look, refer to my write-up of the original base game. You can download the rulebook for Tiny Epic Dungeons here; the rulebook for Adventures has not been released publicly because you learn some of those mechanics as you play through the campaign. I’ll have some minor spoilers for chapter 1, though will keep them to a minimum and will avoid story spoilers.
The Goal
Each chapter has its own specific goals that the party will need to complete to progress through the adventure.
The specific setup instructions for a chapter are inside the envelope. (Prototype shown) Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Setup
Each chapter envelope has its own setup instructions. A lot of the basic setup will be the same as before, making a supply of loot cards and other tokens, giving each player a hero card with full health and energy, and setting up the torch mat as the countdown tracker for the game.
The chapter envelope shows how to build the map: which pages to use in the dungeon book, how to build the map deck using a mixture of room cards and encounter cards, and then where to place the room cards in relation to the dungeon book. This first chapter also included a card for the mobs in this dungeon, and a larger mat to store both the mob tokens and the card itself.
2-player setup for Chapter 1. (Prototype shown) Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
The one other thing that is new to Adventures is the explorer’s pack, a square card that each hero gets. It stores up to 2 items, and has instructions for how the search action works (as well as a player aid on the back explaining the use of different weapons).
The first section of the chapter tells you about setup, and gives you your first objective. (Prototype shown) Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Gameplay
The adventure book includes a story that you’ll read together, and then indicates your next goal. For instance, in the first chapter, the first goal is to kill the mob in the courtyard near you, and get a hero to the space marked “A” on the map. Once you do that, then you read a little more story, and you get more information about what to do next. You’re also told in the chapter envelope that you’re trying to reach the sarcophagus in the bottom portion of the map, so you know you’ll need to work your way through the dungeon cards somehow to get there. The blockage card — the rubble-filled card to the right of the dungeon book — is just an obstacle that takes up that space in the map but cannot be traveled through by any means.
Spell cards require passing an intellect check — failure could have negative consequences! (Prototype shown) Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
On your turn, you may move (each character’s movement speed is printed on their hero mat), do one heroic action (blue icons), and any number of free actions (orange icons). Your hero mat has some of your available heroic and free actions on it, but many dungeon rooms, map spaces, and loot cards also have actions. Attacking, casting spells, disarming traps, and resting (to recover health and energy) are all heroic actions. Free actions include things like spending energy to modify attack dice, exploring to look for items, and some character-specific abilities.
The explorer’s backpack card and the four items you can find. (Prototype shown) Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Exploring for items is a new action in Adventures and can give you one of four items:
— Keys can be spent to unlock doors or treasure
— Bombs can be used to attack enemies or to blow a hole in a wall
— Nightlamps move the torch token back on the torch map when you rest, giving you more time
— Fairy in a Bottle lets you perform an action after you recover from being knocked out (usually all you can do is rest and move but not do any actions)
It’s a trap! Pass the skill check or suffer the consequences. (Prototype shown) Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
As with Tiny Epic Dungeons, you reveal rooms as you walk into them, potentially taking damage from enemies hiding in them or triggering traps that you must avoid. Skill checks are done using your three skills — strength, agility, and intellect — for which you’ll roll 1 to 3 dice, usually only choosing the results of one die, and then comparing them to the required value. There are more mobs in Adventures — that means you can spawn more of them before you lose the game, but it means, uh, more mobs.
At the end of your turn, you move the torch token down one space — some spaces may spawn more mobs, and some spaces will cause all of the enemies on the board to take their actions, which can involve moving around and attacking heroes.
Game End
The chapter ends if you complete all of the required steps, in which case you win — some components will go into the Chest of Continuation for the next chapter.
You lose if you need to spawn a 9th mob, or if the torch reaches the end of the torch track before you complete the chapter. Finally, if you start your turn unconscious and there are enemies in your room but no other heroes, you lose. I imagine there might be other specific loss conditions in later chapters, but that’s the gist of it!
Tugsy and Ava have made their way to the sarcophagus — now what? (Prototype shown) Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Why You Should Play Tiny Epic Dungeons Adventures
I really enjoyed Tiny Epic Dungeons back when I first wrote it up for the Kickstarter campaign — this was in early 2021, when I was still not hosting game nights yet so I had mostly played with my kids, and then a little bit with my homebrew Tabletop Simulator module so I could play with a few of my friends online. It’s a mix of the familiar and the new: run around in a dungeon, fight monsters, collect treasure, but the boss fight requires luring the boss out of its room through ritual spaces before you can kill it off. And it was pretty tough! I was having a hard time figuring out the balance between speed and safety: if you speed your way through, you take a lot of damage from monsters and traps (and you might lose because you’ve spawned too many goblins), but if you don’t go fast enough, your torch runs out.
If you reveal an enemy when you walk into a room, you’ll take a hit immediately. (Prototype shown) Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Tiny Epic Dungeons is a dungeon crawl but doesn’t have a specific story: it’s just another day, another dungeon. Tiny Epic Dungeons Adventures is a way to tell a more cohesive story — this chapter sends you off to a small village who has sent you a message of distress, and it’s clear from the ending that there are more sinister forces brewing. I’m curious to see where the story goes from here, and how much there will be new rules or tasks in future chapters. The first chapter doesn’t include a boss fight, so it does feel like a nice introductory session (and I was able to win!), but given that there are 6 boss mats on the component list, I’m guessing that it won’t be long before the bosses make an appearance and things get a whole lot more challenging.
The story in the adventure book was okay, but could use a good editor before the finished printing. The plot was fun, but some of the writing itself was a bit clunky — not quite the right word here, some strange grammar there. This is only a prototype, so I hope they put as much time into polishing up the writing as they do with the rest of their games.
Some types of loot give bonuses if you collect pieces from the same set — Dragon loot gives you a speed boost. (Prototype shown) Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
There’s a lot of content that I haven’t seen yet: aside from the other 7 chapters, the deluxe edition also includes a side quest, and then the expansion has three more chapters that will bridge the story between this adventure and the planned second adventure. Of course, if you’re a fan of Tiny Epic Dungeons already, this also serves as more to mix-and-match with the base game, since you can bring any of the heroes, monsters, and loot from Adventures into your dungeon-of-the-day sessions, too.
For more information or to make a pledge, visit the Tiny Epic Dungeons Adventures Kickstarter page!
Click here to see all our tabletop game reviews.
To subscribe to GeekDad’s tabletop gaming coverage, please copy this link and add it to your RSS reader.
Disclosure: GeekDad received a prototype of this game for review purposes.
