I’m a skeptic when it comes to roll-and-writes. For every one that hits, there are three or four others I’d rather never touch again. No, I won’t be giving examples. Whether that’s because I can’t remember any off the top of my head, I can neither confirm nor deny.

Paper Dungeons by Leandro Pires exemplifies the phenomenon. Per Space-Biff! policy, I’ve played it three times. In between each play, it managed to slip from my memory like fog through fingers.

My nine-year-old likes to draw the boss monsters onto her sheet.

Let’s see how much I can remember.

Paper Dungeons is, as you can probably gather from its subtitle, “A Dungeon Scrawler Game,” an even blend of roll-and-write and dungeon crawl. Uh oh. That’s two genres that often suffer from an abundance of repetition. These days, the dungeon crawls that appeal to me most are those that take a different tack from the usual metering of movement spaces and action points. The avant-garde approaches of Vast: The Crystal Caverns and Vast: The Mysterious Manor swapped the tedium for some devious inter-factional dynamics, as did, to a lesser degree, the squicky horror and competitive brutality of Cryptic Explorers. Other than that, I’m scraping my brainpan and coming up empty.

Paper Dungeons plays it straighter than any of those titles. When it comes to the actual dungeon delving, it’s fairly wide-open, letting players sketch routes onto a grid without worrying too hard about obstacles. There are walls and waterways, both rare, and both surmountable with the right artifacts. There are also spike traps, which injure your band of heroes when they enter the room, but likely don’t pose much of a threat if you’ve glanced in the direction of a potion sometime in the past month.

Indeed, the game is so permissive that there are plenty of choices, but none of them are difficult or interesting. The “roll” portion of this roll-and-write results in a handful of dice that can be spent on leveling up your characters to make them deadlier to the dungeon’s many foes, unlocking artifacts, brewing potions, or moving around. There are only a few minor restrictions on how these dice can be used, and only selectively. Leveling up a character requires a matching die. The same goes for piecing together certain artifacts.

But as for potions, or, more tellingly, navigation, any old die will do. The effect is not dissimilar to that of Star Fighters, another title published by Alley Cat Games, which also seemed to misapprehend the value of limited choices. When you spend a die on dungeon crawling, you get to move two spaces. Along the way, you’ll slay monsters, have your boots punctured by spike traps, and scoop up loot. Depending on the map setup and your personal goals, the route forward is fairly obvious.

Leveling up characters is a cinch.

There’s joy to be found in uncovering a map, and that’s exactly where dungeon crawlers flourish. It’s bad enough that Paper Dungeons doesn’t touch on that. Far worse, however, is that there are never ever, ever ever, ever any surprises. Nothing feels dangerous. Spike traps aren’t traps so much as patches of brambles that you know will scratch at you. Monsters are pre-ordained hurdles that require certain hero levels to beat, but failing that they’ll inflict a wound or two and that’s it. Players are also encouraged to gear and level up to face three boss monsters, which offer lots of points but also a stern beating, but they’re uninspiring and samey.

The entire thing is samey. Each of my three plays, despite being introduced by its own fluff and given its own dungeon arrangement and set of boss monsters, felt identical. One of the biggest problems with many roll-and-writes, that they descend into fiddly arithmetic problems about squeezing one-and-a-half points out of every action instead of merely one, was enthusiastically recreated. Slaying monsters is worth points, but you’re going to slay monsters anyway. Beating bosses is worth points, but that’s sort of your main goal to begin with. Artifacts and well-leveled characters, those too.

Gems constitute the more interesting scoring category. That’s because collecting a gem in one player’s dungeon will erase it from everyone else’s. This forces a race of priorities between players, not to mention it gets everyone to look up from their own paper once in a blue moon. This is the game’s sole snag, but it isn’t enough to catch one’s attention on. Perhaps if our dungeons had been further entangled, with defeated monsters in one realm empowering the monsters in every other, or a preemptively defeated boss making its peers tougher… but now I’m pining for the game this could have been instead of the one we got.

When a roll doesn’t go your way.

What we got is yet another roll-and-write. Maybe it’s a victim of its time. Paper Dungeons is two or three years old at this point. That’s half a generation in board game years. Which marks it as too old for the genre’s realization that it needs to invigorate itself, to stretch beyond bean-counting arithmetic games, to expand its boundaries.

In a way, Paper Dungeons is an artifact itself. Just as certain deck-builders are emblematic of that genre’s craze, shoehorning deck-building into every possible setting but without much thought or insight into what makes deck-building interesting or worthy of inclusion, Paper Dungeons embodies the roll-and-write genre as we found it in 2020, when designers realized some dice and a pad of paper were all the rage. With nothing else to distinguish itself, it’s a sorry sight.

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A complimentary copy was provided.