# Dungeonrunner *Created:* 2026-11-02, *Modified:* 2026-11-02 ![[Dungeonrunner (cover).jpg]] Fifteen to thirty minutes, one player, and a dungeon that fits in a tuckbox. **Dungeonrunner** is James Eisert's solitaire card game of fantasy dungeon delving — a deck of cards standing in for the ruin your hero is walking through, drawn one card at a time until they reach the quest and come out again, or don't. It is openly nostalgic about its sources: a game inspired by classic pen-and-paper fantasy RPGs, with a hero card carrying a class and a stat line, and monsters, traps and curses to get through on the way. What it is not is a solo RPG — there is no referee, no interpretation, and no way to talk your way past a card. You resolve it or you take the damage. ## Setting There is no world map and no canon. Each **Hack Pack** is a place — a castle, a crypt, a lair, a swamp, a tower, mountains, caverns, a road — or, in the case of the *Deck of Deadly Things*, simply a collection of hazards. The fiction is whatever the deck's title and art imply, and the hero is a classed adventurer: fighter, thief, wizard, paladin, whatever the pack's hero card offers. The line reaches thirty decks, coded by series — **B** for basic, then Z, D, A and M — and each is stand-alone. You do not need any other deck to play one. ## Mechanics ### The deck is the dungeon Play is a loop of one card at a time. Each card is a monster, a trap, an event or an item; you resolve it by combat or by decision, then draw the next. Reaching the **quest card** for the scenario completes the adventure. Each 54-card deck carries **ten separate adventures** of varying difficulty, so one pack is ten dungeons rather than one. ### The hero card A hero is a name, a class, and three numbers in shapes on the card: **TWAC** (to wound armor class — how easily the hero hurts a monster), **Armor Class** (how easily they are hurt), and **Hit Points**. Hero cards also carry the six attributes — Might, Vigor, Agility, Dexterity, Wit and Intellect — which is where the pen-and-paper ancestry shows most plainly. ### Setup and the Bottom Deck You lay the hero card in front of you, pick a quest from the pack's quest list, take the card that quest names as the quest card, shuffle the rest back into the main deck, then deal a handful of cards to form the **Bottom Deck** beside the table. The rest of the deck is the dungeon between you and the quest. ### Mixing The rules explicitly invite you to play world creator: cards carry a deck identifier in the bottom corner so you can sort them home again after intermixing heroes and encounters into adventures of your own. ## Editions - **Dungeonrunner Rules v3.01** — 126 pages, the current build and the one to read. - **Dungeonrunner Rules v3.0** — 126 pages, superseded by 3.01 and kept as the archived step. - **Dungeonrunner Rules** (early build) — 55 pages, the original short rulebook from before the game expanded; the decks above were written to work with either. ## Hack Packs Held here: the rulebook and nine Hack Packs. Each is a 54-card deck — 108 pages as a PDF, because every card takes a page for its face and another for its back. - **Castle of Emperor Zinn** (B1, 2017) — the beginner's pack and where the line started: Emperor Zinn's castle, its traps, and the minotaur in the maze. *In the library.* - **Crypts of Rojosh** (E1) — the crypt adventure. *In the library.* - **Lair of Lawnadynn** (B3) — the Demon Queen's lair, and the pack that names her. *In the library.* - **Muckelf Swamp** (B2) — the swamp, and the Amazon Warrior's home pack. *In the library.* - **Tower of Saxon** (E2) — the tower, opening on the Arcane Wizard. *In the library.* - **Mountains of Zokar** (E3) — the mountain adventure. *In the library.* - **Caverns of Grot** (M1) — the caverns, and the Alpha Grendelder. *In the library.* - **Roads of Tonar** (M2) — the roads between places. *In the library.* - **Deck of Deadly Things** (M3) — not a place but a hazard deck: things that want the hero dead. *In the library.* ## References - [Powercell Games — itch.io](https://powercell-games.itch.io/) - [James Eisert — Powercell Games](https://jameseisert.com/powercell-games/) - [Dungeonrunner B1: Castle of Emperor Zinn — DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/299184/dungeonrunner-b1-castle-of-emperor-zinn) - [Dungeonrunner: Crypts of Rojosh — BoardGameGeek](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/357652/dungeonrunner-crypts-of-rojosh)