Skulldug! is a pulp adventure board game designed by myself and Jon Gill, with art from Ghia Mercado and box cover art and logo from Alix Branwyn. It began life at Global Game Jam 2013, mixing the jam’s theme (the sound of a heartbeat, which we interpretted as “tension”) and our infatuation with the emergent gameplay in roguelikes.
After two years of iteration, we self-published on Kickstarter in 2015. The project was successfully funded at 220% of our goal and 2000 copies were printed and shipped to players around the world!
Gameplay Overview
Players explore a randomly generated cave together, racing to be the first to return to the entrance alive with three Treasures in hand. Each turn, a player may spend up to three Action Points to do various actions like moving or picking up items.
When a player moves into an undiscovered area, they’ll add a new passage tile to the map, marked with how many randomly drawn Hazards they must encounter and/or Fortunes they may acquire. If a player loses all of their health, they drop their held items into the passage they died in and respawn at the cave entrance on their next turn.
Design Highlights
Lessons in Procedural Generation: The first version of Skulldug! had cave passages, items, and monsters all shuffled into the same deck, and exploring was done by drawing cards until you drew a passage and putting everything prior into it. The deck you drew from was based on how many treasures you were holding, with more treasures resulting in more risk. This was fantastic for creating dread in the end game but ultimately made exploring too high variance and hunting for specific items too easy, so we separated items and monsters into their own decks.
Cursed Treasure is Great: Having the items required for victory also hinder players adds a natural rubber banding to the game outcome, it feels thematic for pulp adventure, and makes for some great decision moments: if this is the first piece of Treasure I’ve discovered, do I endure its curse and swap a useful item for it, or leave it covered in traps and hope no one else tries to claim it?
Emergent vs. Directed Gameplay: While many cards are built for maximum combo potential, some cards specifically refer to each other, like the Guttering Torch and the Shambling Corpse. These specific combos are rare and not intended to happen every game, which allows them to be a little more powerful and thus even more exciting when it happens!