Mage Knight Dungeons Solo

Setting Up the Dungeon

I’ve got my tiles, dungeon builder kit, rule book, doors, and tokens. I’m going to lay this out according to the solo rules. For setup: 10 tokens, 10 pieces of other terrain, six treasure chests, 9 to 12 tiles (at least two need to be corridors), and monster tokens. The rules recommend five yellow and five blue, but I’m doing four blue, four yellow, and two red because we’re getting crazy.

One important note: the three unused treasure chests and tokens can be popped up later while you’re playing, so keep those set aside.

Understanding the Solo Rules

I misunderstood the rules initially and had to read them again. You only put one monster token in the rooms with treasure chests, then there are four tokens remaining. Every time a hero moves into a token, you roll a dice and a token or terrain feature might pop in. That’s part of the living solo element.

The exit won’t appear yet—once we get a treasure chest disarmed, then the exit will appear somewhere on the board.

First Moves and Activations

To start, we move everybody into the dungeon. We get three activations, one for each hero. If somebody dies, we lose that activation.

My first guy has stealth, so he won’t trigger a token when he walks into a space. Part of the solo rules is that I don’t control the monster tokens—we roll a d6 and that’s how many activations the monsters get.

Rolled a five. So five activations for the monsters. This is going to be interesting.

Combat Mechanics

The strategy here involves understanding each character’s abilities. One guy has venom, so he can do pretty high automatic damage. If I kill certain monsters, I get a level up too.

There’s no pushing damage in Mage Knight Dungeons like there is in normal Mage Knight, which is pretty awesome—you actually get to do something. These monsters can’t push themselves to get damage.

If I leave the big monster alone and kill the smaller threats first, I think we’re going to be okay. This guy shoots first—10 into a 17, I need a seven. Just barely a seven! He takes three clicks of damage and he’s dead.

The Close Calls

The skeleton fight got intense. Rolled for damage—this could really hurt someone pretty bad. Not if I roll a one though! Pretty unlucky for the skeleton, lucky for me.

When disarming treasure chests with stealth, I get plus two to my disarm trap roll, and with sneak attack I also get plus two. So I’m at 12, need a four to disarm. The trap is disarmed!

But wait—it’s actually a trap chest. The effects happen immediately: a 12 attack of four damage to the hero. Anything but ones… that hits for four damage. Brutal.

The Teleporter Discovery

When I rolled a six for terrain features, there’s a teleporter! Much cooler than a puddle of water. I can use this strategically to move characters across the board quickly.

Rolled the dice to see where the teleporter sends you—eight tiles over. When he teleports there, that’s a new tile, so we have to see what’s in that room. A four is just an artifact piece, nothing crazy. No monsters. Got pretty lucky.

Fighting the Draconum

This is where things got scary. The possessed Draconum has 47 points. He’s in your face. 10 to 16 attack incoming—I need a four. That hits. This guy does five damage, so I take four after toughness. Back down to level one.

My counterattack needs an eight. That’s an eight! Does two points of damage. But on his actual turn, we need anything but ones. Hits for three. He demoralizes me.

We’re done. We have ended in failure.

Reflections on the Game

That was pretty fun! I doubt anybody is still watching this long, but it was fun for me to play through and actually roll some dice and play some Mage Knight again for a while. I kind of loved it. I could have run out with the treasure, but it’s very fun just rolling dice and being goofy.

Very simple game, but it can be pretty deep, especially if you’re playing one-on-one. I tried to make it a little bit harder for myself and pretty much nuked my team by dropping in that guy who was eight points over the limit.

Game Design Inspiration

I wanted to play this as an exercise in game development myself. I really like Mage Knight, specifically Mage Knight Dungeons. I like the mechanics of it. If I were to make a game, I’d probably piggyback pretty hard on this style.

I want to play games with my kids too. I like how as you take damage, your stats get worse. I like how there’s just four simple stats with colored abilities—I think that’s really cool. This was more for me to start thinking about making my own game in this style.

Thanks for watching if you’re still here. It was a lot of fun!