Scary Cave ✨👪
Your friend Suzie is missing, she's in the scary cave! Adults can't see the scary cave, but you can! Armed with a trusty flash light and some spare batteries, you delve into the scary cave behind the school.
Title: Scary Cave
Creator: Casper Dudarec (the friendly ghost)
Publication date: 2025
Price: $2.50
System/Genre: Solo dungeon crawl, Young Adult
Hand-drawn games are becoming a rarity in ttrpg circles these days, giving Scary Cave a quaint, retro, feel as you open up the pages to peek inside. It's aimed at a younger audience, or someone looking for a simple, family-friendly experience.
Scary cave is a single-player map drawing and dungeon delving game with a rogue-like feel to it. It's designed to be a physical booklet and prospective players would want to print this out in order to play. The game directs you to use a coin as a player pieces and to move it around the pages as you play, keeping track of your journey.
Players use the coin to draw a map of the scary cave, which is always changing, with themes such as rats, mushrooms, insects and dragons, it really dives into that young adult aesthetic, of magical places and stories that an adult would never believe.
The booklet contains random tables that allow players to build out their own dungeons, with scary encounters, traps and monsters. Each encounter is resolved by rolling a d6 and the encounters get steadily harder as the game progresses.
Scary Cave isn't going to win any awards for innovative play, but it's a well-made zine that nails the vibe it was going for and could be a great introduction to ttrpgs for a nervous kid, or for a parent wanting to share the joys of pen-and-paper with their kids.