A Sharpened Critique of Paper App Dungeon
- Solitary Quest Blog
- Oct 7
- 7 min read
Updated: Oct 13
Paper App Dungeon is a charming pencil-and-paper roguelike solitaire game that hits some nostalgia but stumbles on gameplay depth and rules clarity. Clever concept, clear execution on theme, but its mechanics feel less than deliberate.
Back before gaming accessories were a billion-dollar industry in and of themselves, improvised tools for tabletop games were more common. Bottle caps made excellent stand-ins for scale models, a passable grid map could be drawn on the back of a pizza box, and a simple #2 pencil could be easily modified into a six-sided die with number values etched into each edge. Of course, this sort of budget-friendly, DIY style endures at many tables today, even if it’s overshadowed by the nascent market of flashy tabletop trinkets.
So when we saw a six-sided golf pencil engraved with die values featured as a main component in Lucky Duck Games’ Paper App Dungeon, it triggered a sense of familiarity with some of my coworkers. One appreciated the nostalgic intention of the pencil—an homage to a classical age of adventure gaming that characterizes Paper App Dungeon as a whole. Another set out to prove he could craft a better one and immediately took a pocket blade to a Ticonderoga. Lucky Duck Games aren’t the only ones to produce rollable pencils recently, but the Paper App Dungeon P6s were a huge hit on Free RPG Day a year ago.
A Pad, a Pencil, and Peril
Paper App Dungeon is cleverly abbreviated to PAD, and it is just that: a pad of paper, spiral bound with a cardstock cover. Contained within is a sequence of 45 gridded dungeon maps featuring traps, enemies, and treasure. In this roguelike solitaire dungeon scrawler, you must navigate your adventurer across each bite-sized dungeon floor to reach the ladder that leads to the next level. But, of course, don’t die. Classic, simple, straightforward.
Rolling the P6 determines movement on the grid: move orthogonally on an even die roll and diagonally on an odd die roll. A few key rules—some of which can only be found by following a QR code on the first page—limit the player’s movement options: turn when you bump into a wall, don’t double back unless you need to, and choose a path if you can where you won’t bump into a wall.
The dungeon floors are littered with coins, treasure chests, web traps, portals, enemies of varying power, and more. These symbols occupy squares on the grid, and if you pass over them they have some effect. The symbology is sensible: passing through an enemy reduces HP, passing through a heart adds HP; passing over a coin gives you a coin; a portal moves you to the other portal location; spider web means stop. As you progress, you (might) accumulate enough gold to purchase a special item from the dungeon shop, which appears every half-dozen floors or so. If you ever hit ≤ 0 HP after balancing your HP gained and lost for the level, your character dies. But death isn’t the end—you just lose all your coins, tally a death toll, and keep delving.
The intentional simplicity of the game—both in components and gameplay depth—keeps it fast-paced with no real downtime and no fiddling with extraneous pieces. After a while, I found the biggest inconvenience was repeatedly rolling the pencil D6. It was just one extra step: rolling the pencil, picking it up to write with, rolling again, etc. I just grabbed a spare D6 for rolling in one hand and a pencil to scribble in the other. At the end of each dungeon floor, there’s just a little bit of math to check if you survived and how much coinage you’re carrying to the next level. This also makes Paper App Dungeon very easy to learn and start playing.
Rules: Digital and Otherwise
The rules pages in the pad offer a playable overview of the game, but they also point to a QR code for “detailed rules,” which I figured would be just more verbose explanations. So I jumped right in with what I had in front of me. I worked through the first few dungeons before deciding to consult the “detailed rules” to make sure I was using the portal symbols correctly. I was surprised to find not just textier information, but an entirely new rule not mentioned anywhere else in or on the box.
A slight disappointment: a pocket-sized game like this—designed to be portable and easy to pick up—should have everything you need to play right out of the box. Burying critical rules in a digital-only link is inconvenient, especially since one passage in the detailed rules, as BGG user lttatter observes, “completely change(s) the way you play.” Namely, the digital rules introduce a new restriction:
“If there are direction(s) available that allow you to take your full move without hitting a wall, you must pick one of those.”
Playing with just the printed rules, the player can choose freely among available directions, even if that means bumping into a wall. With this digital-only caveat, however, the player must always take a path of least resistance. In other words, if a direction lets you move your full roll without hitting a wall, you have to take it.
This rule significantly impacts how much freedom a player has to move each turn. Typically the higher the roll, the more likely the player is to be forced into limited or undesirable moves; the longer you have to go, the more likely you are to come face-to-face with a wall. So lower rolls ended up being preferable, but can make the route across the dungeon clunky and unreliable.
I found myself with all four directions available maybe 20% of the time; two to three options about half the time; and only one valid option about 20% of the time. The remaining 10%—when all paths were invalid, and thus all became valid—was when I had the most actual choice.
Navigating tight spaces in the dungeon feels especially laggy, and sometimes leads to repetitive movement loops. Because movement into walls is invalid if another direction is available, players are naturally pushed away from walls each turn, making it difficult to enter or exit a room with a single square opening. Other times, I ended up caught in a hallway, stuck going back and forth because those two ways are usually the only valid option. Precision movement is tough with a fully randomized way of determining movement like rolling a die, this is where the game’s flat, predictable movement formula seems to work against it.
Logic and Luck
This lack of intentionality can also lead to some nonsensical moves. Thematically, it makes for amusing fiction—“I enter the next level and immediately run into an enemy that lethally drains my HP”—but strategically, it can be unsatisfying to so often make moves that feel counterintuitive.
For example, I rolled a 4 to kick off Dungeon 37, meaning my only valid move was to rush headfirst into the closest enemy (see below).
In the same dungeon, just a few turns later, I rolled a 6 in a narrow passageway, so my only valid movement is to go plow into an enemy that hits me for 8 HP because it was the only movement option where I wouldn’t bounce off a wall or double back. A few hearts were nearby, and some tactical wall bouncing could have allowed me to escape (see below).
In those moments, the balance between luck and strategy feels heavily tilted toward luck; and that's fine! It's a dice-based game, and maybe that tilt is intentional—let the dice rule. Fight enemies even if you’ll lose. Walk straight into spider traps instead of treasure.
But if you’re hoping for a tighter tactical game with more player agency over the outcome, where you can plan your ricochets like billiard shots, Paper App Dungeon won’t scratch that itch.
Playing without the digital addendum gives the player more control and a sense of intention. Still, the dungeon crawl remains tough, if not downright deadly. I completed all 45 levels and died 17 times. I think that’s pretty good?
Elsewhere in the game, the shops that appear every few levels add a welcome break and a few boons, but I wish they appeared more frequently—or that dying didn’t zero out all your coins. Maybe it just felt this way, but the toughest levels appear right before the shops, so I usually arrived haggard and penniless. With the next shop 5–7 levels away, their impact feels so limited when you miss out on getting perks. A simple way to “bank” coins occasionally would make these upgrade opportunities feel more meaningful.
Post-Game Thoughts
After the 45th dungeon is complete, you can still get some use out of the pencil, but the pad itself is done. Replayability isn’t really intended here though. This one-and-done dungeon scrawler rides its simplicity and just enough challenge to keep the player hooked through until the end, even as the gameplay itself doesn’t always seem sensical or streamlined.
It’s really hard not to compare Paper App Dungeon to Pencil Book Quest, which just funded on Kickstarter last week. PBQ is another booklet game featuring grid dungeons (80 of them), where the player can fight monsters, collect loot, and … just stop me if you’ve heard this before. PBQ seems a little more intentionally tactical and adds some complexity, like lines of sight for monsters. Both sold at the same price point, I’m interested to see whether the newer is just reinventing the wheel, or if it will play like the new-and-improved imitation.
I’ve seen Paper App Dungeon on more small retailer shelves than I can count. Featuring a cover sketch of a bad-ass knight brandishing a sharp pencil and selling for around $15, it’s an easy impulse buy. But don’t be duped: there are many similar bite-sized dungeon crawlers that do it better. The print and plays Pencils & Powers and Morning Coffee Dungeon: Just a Dungeon are just as straightforward, and maybe just a bit more mechanically satisfying.
Designer: Tom Brinton
Artist: Mateusz Michalski
Publisher: Lucky Duck Games
Player Count: Solitaire
Play Time: 5-10 minutes / level
👍 fast & simple; bit of nostalgia; pencil d6; sensible symbology
👎 digital rules required to play; limited player agency
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