AAR: DELVing into my backlog

Here’s DELVE, which describes itself as a solo map drawing game. Clearly I have a theme of map drawing games, but the others have been co-op games and this one is not! It’s almost a turn-based city-builder.

I got this during lockdown, and it arrived in early 2021. “Neat,” I thought, and read through it. And then I never really got round to playing it, to my shame.

I was really keen to draw some maps and draw cards. But I wasn’t really interested in having Resources and Trade Goods, and modelling the different units in my army, and the liquids and gasses moving through the dungeon, and the monsters. And I talked myself out of it, basically.

But a few weeks back, a friend and I had a free couple of hours, and tried it on Owlbear Rodeo. He’d played before, and we muddled through together as a “single player”.

Story

The dwarves started delving, and built a store room first of all to save the cost of the rooms they would build later on this most shallow of levels. Tunnelling to the east, they found a drake that was barely stopped by the initial contingent of soldiers that was their defence. A kennel was built for it¹, so it could taught to defend the dungeon… and then the next cave was full of magma which flooded right back through the kennel.

No more drake.

Tunnelling west was more bountiful and a barracks built as a matter of urgency. Soldiers were hired, just in time to find a hive of giant ants, which were no match for the doughty infantry. This exhausted the top level and so reluctantly they tunnelled down, straight into the first of two volcanic shafts; deep fissures into the earth.

“In for a penny,” the expedition thought, and dropped several levels to find better treasure, as the coffers were dry. An abandoned inn was found, deep in the twisty caverns. The Dwarf & Jester reopened with a cheer, and a spy came in from the cold. The barracks near the surface expanded with dorms, and a temple was erected in the hive. Clerics can shield the soldiers somewhat, in theory.

Then did the doom fall on the dwarves. A Circus of Chaos was found by the inn. No evil clowns yet crept forth, but it was only a matter of time. Heedlessly, they tunnelled away from it, straight into the lair of a lich-lord. His army swarmed forth.

The soldiers carefully picked their battleground on the top level before the Entrance. Shielded by a cleric, with ranged fire from bowdwarves to the west, they arrayed behind a field of traps.

And the lich army wiped them all out. 🧟 🧟

🪦 🪦 🪦

Lessons

This took just under two hours to set up and run. It’d be quicker without tech fun. Owlbear Rodeo was used for drawing and tokens. For a laugh I used my webcam pointing at an actual deck of cards, as the deck needs to be reshuffled after each draw, and the jokers go in if you delve deep enough.

Owlbear Rodeo has changed. It feels like it’s going for hosting assets on their servers and then charging for storage/bandwidth, rather than it all being self-hosted. The old version scaled poorly with players, to be fair. It’s not actually changed much in what it provides, so the drawing still doesn’t quite support co-operative scribbling. But I’m not sure what the killer feature is now. I haven’t found anything better than Roll20 for drawing, although I’ve not used Foundry this year.

I liked Delve - now I know the rules, it feels less complex. There’s two currencies for reasons I don’t quite understand yet, and combat isn’t a complete trial. Irritatingly though I didn’t bring my paper copy to this house, and it’s mainly look-up tables. I might read it on a tablet perhaps. Then draw on paper, and move some erasable tokens around on top.

There’s still a lot of things you can get wrong though. Nearly every value you read from the rules is modified by depth in some way. We spent a while thinking we were going to defeat the lich until we remembered it had an additional 20 STR from its starting location and that totally swamped us. There’s few examples in the book, and the rules feel very spread out.

There’s also RISE (the Dungeon Keeper version of evil coming back up again) and UMBRA, which is a version in space. Umbra is more complicated, your colony requires power and food. Depending on the atmosphere (or lack of it), your costs can be high for these.