Play a tabletop RPG digitally with Paper Dungeons

Translating board games into digital versions can be tricky at times, with the challenge to make it more interactive and exciting than in the physical world. Creating a game from scratch, with a tabletop RPG format and no existing user base to spur it along may be even more difficult. Paper Dungeons is a dungeon crawler with customizable features and a boardgame sensibility and is now out for Andoid devices.

Paper Dungeons was released as an Early Access game in Steam last year, and now the fantasy board-game is making its way to mobile devices. It has four single player modes available: Boardgame, Campaign, Rogue, and Puzzle modes. Boardgame mode is a long adventure set, wherein everytime you play a new dungeon, it resets to level 1 (although you do keep the inventory you’ve gathered along the way in previous games). You get to roll a dice, and based on this as well as your statistics, it will determine where the monsters and items will be placed on your board.

Campaign mode is a full-fledged game with up to 10 dungeons linked together, and you don’t need to reset for every new one. Rogue mode lets your character level up as you play the game, but when you die, you get to have your name on the Halls of Fame. You also get to have more powerful sets of Dice that you can use everytime you play this mode. Puzzle mode is pretty self-explanatory, and when you play these tricky levels, you know exactly there the monsters are, and you have to strategize your moves to beat them and win.

One of the greatest appeals of this game is probably the fact that it is highly customizable and you get to share your own games, created through the map editor and the campaign editor. You can choose characters from among five classes (warrior/archer/priest/mage/thief) and have them go through 125 levels in Adventure mode and 31 levels in puzzle mode. You can get Paper Dungeons as a free lite version or as a full game for just $2.85, with not IAPs needed.