Remember Dungeon Keeper? I was only a kid when I played it off of a PC Gamer demo disc, just a little older than my daughter is now. At that age, playing as the baddie was transgressive, a dark secret I never could have shared with my parents. Looking back, they probably would have laughed. Or asked whether it was satanic. It’s hard to know which phase we were in at the time.

Jordy Adan’s Stonespine Architects is set in the same shared universe as Roll Player, Dawn of Ulos, and his own Cartographers. It’s about building a dungeon, carved in stone and filled with deadly traps and monsters. Like the other titles in the Roll Player line — and very much unlike Dungeon Keeper to an eleven-year-old — it’s a safe and colorful place, inoffensive, and certainly absent any form-fitting black leather. As drafting and tile-laying games go, it’s pretty good.

My dungeon is a work in progress.

So you’ve been commissioned to build a dungeon. There’s something amusing about the workaday approach Stonespine Architects offers. You’re a minotaur, you see, and minotaurs are natural contractors when it comes to excavating dangerous corridors. The first card you draw is a literal blueprint, a set of bonuses you can fulfill for quite a few points when the game concludes, showing where your employer hopes certain rooms or traps will be located. Monsters, traps, and treasure chests alike either come with the rooms or are purchased at market and sprinkled throughout the chambers like seasonal ornaments. Is this what it means to design a labyrinth? You’re closer to an interior decorator trying to spruce up a cookie-cutter suburban home than a dark lord.

It’s an oddly banal framework, one that might have been incisive or interesting with a little more oomph. Has dungeon-keeping become too corporate these days? Did the sinister necromancers of yore request bespoke dungeons rather than the prefabbed slabs these new-money sorcerers prefer? Does your minotaur wish somebody would hire them to arrange corsages rather than lay these unholy cornerstones? We’ll never know.

Instead, Adan hurries into the business of drafting and arranging cards. As these things go, the hubbub quickly establishes itself as competent. There are heaps of considerations right from the get-go, and more trickle into your possession with each passing round. From a hand of five cards, you draft and place a room, keeping it within that round’s row. At any given moment, you’re trying to fulfill the proper arrangement of stone hallways versus cave chambers, the right composition of monsters and traps to fulfill bonus cards, strike a positive balance of point-adjusting stars, and most importantly, earn a whole bunch of gold.

Gold isn’t important in its own right. Sure, having a lot of gold can nab you an early slot in initiative order, although this isn’t especially important until the last round, when one’s initiative earns points and perhaps functions as a tiebreaker. Before then, initiative and gold are spent in the market. This is a clever addition, functioning almost like a patch in the event of a poor draw. If you need a certain type of monster — kobolds, say — but only draw different monsters — green goops, perhaps — then the market might provide what you need. Might. It isn’t a sure thing. But it’s one more opportunity to nab the stuff you need, swapping gold (and therefore a strong position in initiative order) for extra features.

The marketplace of (torture) ideas.

This in turn requires careful arrangement of your dungeon rooms. Gold is earned by your current row of rooms plus any treasure chests you’ve previously scattered about the place. Unsurprisingly, there are the usual tradeoffs between nabbing the most profitable chambers and those that offer the best monsters and corridors. Especially corridors, since you want as many rooms to connect to your dungeon’s entrance and exit for a heap of extra points at the end. Establishing a single cohesive route through your dungeon isn’t the only way to earn a huge amount of points, but… well, I would advise it.

The choices are meaty, if never quite agonizing. I mentioned that there are quite a few ways to improve your score. As you might expect, the game quickly becomes one of assessing priorities: when to emphasize one objective over another, where to sacrifice a request from your dungeon lord because you need the gold, whether to swap your position in initiative for an extra goblin. That sort of thing. And the processes at play are pleasurable and immediately rewarding. Even though your dungeons never become places one would want to visit, even as a plundering adventurer, Stonespine Architects produces the requisite limbic satisfaction of putting everything in its proper place.

But while it knows which levers to pull, the pulleys those levers set into motion don’t lift much weight. In one sense, Stonespine Architects sticks as much to formula as its dungeons adhere to template. The results are similarly flat. It’s neither as organic as Cartographers nor as sharp as Dawn of Ulos. Nothing about these arrangements feels expressive, let alone creative.

Because when you get right down to it, these formless blobs might accrue a certain score, but they don’t stick in the head. I have a guideline for tableau-builders. If I’m going to spend time poring over the arrangement of this space, it ought to be a place I might want to visit. Not literally, of course; I wouldn’t want to spend ten minutes on a ship from Galaxy Trucker. But within the game’s fiction, the spaces we arrange ought to be memorable and striking. Galaxy Trucker’s spaceships cobbled together from spare parts. Santa Monica’s beachfront, both beautiful and littered. Vast: The Crystal Caverns’ tangle of corridors and interests. Ecos: First Continent’s interdependent ecosystems. I can project a mental image of the spaces these games have produced. Within one minute of packing away Stonespine Architects, it’s gone.

Halfway there!

That isn’t the only criterion upon which a game should be judged, obviously. But these days one can practically trip over a functional tile-laying game. There are clever ideas to be found in Stonespine Architects. Had they been connected to more exciting dungeons, spaces that felt threatening or amusing or anything more than like cells of a spreadsheet, it would be a place worth visiting.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi.)

A complimentary copy was provided.