Picture a blank sheet of graph paper. You roll two dice, pencil in a room, then roll again to find out what's inside it: a pack of goblins, a trapped chest, a corridor bending off into nothing. That's the hobby. One small rulebook does the job a game master would do, and the dungeon only exists once your pencil puts it there. People play this at kitchen tables, on trains, in the half hour before bed, and it's older than you'd guess, because Gary Gygax published rules for exploring a dungeon alone in the first issue of The Strategic Review in spring 1975, and his advice was to start in the middle of the page and let the dice build outward.
What nobody warns you about is how fast it starts. There's no evening to schedule, nobody to teach the rules to, no table to clear. You open the book, make four characters, and before the night's out a dwarf you've grown oddly fond of gets flattened by an ogre. Honestly, that's a good first session.
Our line on this one: start with one book and stay with it. Once you know the rules, a single dungeon takes about 45 minutes to an hour and a quarter, and the core rulebook is built to carry a party from first level all the way to fifth. That takes a lot of dungeons, which means a lot of evenings out of one paperback. The usual beginner mistake runs the other way: a stack of expansions bought on day one, and then no idea which to open first or where one book’s rules stop and the next one’s start. Play the core book until your party is close to fifth level and the dungeons begin to feel familiar. By then you know what you want more of, and that is the moment to add the next book.
So: buy the book, grab two dice, stop there. The pencil, the eraser and the squared paper you may already own. Everything further down this page is a decision you can make after your first party dies.
We kept the picks deliberately cheap, so that if solo dungeons turn out not to be your thing you've lost roughly the price of a paperback and a packet of dice.
Where This Little Kit Can Take You
A few real moments and results from this hobby — made with tools no fancier than the ones below.
An evening written in diceThe sheet still shows which rooms were cleared and which ones went badly.
Tally marks and a steel nibEvery stroke in the grid is one roll that already happened.
A whole dungeon, dealt out as cardsForest of the Spider Queen: bosses, loot and rooms you play straight from the deck.
The book that runs the dungeonFour adventurers, one rulebook, no game master.
The Stump of Elemental EvilOne short dungeon on a handful of cards.
None of it asks anything of you except an hour and a flat surface. If you'd rather invent the story as you go than roll it off a table, playing solo with a yes-and-no oracle gets you somewhere similar by a completely different road. What follows is the short version of what a first dungeon actually takes.
What's Actually on the Table
The whole kit fits in a tote bag. A rulebook, two six-sided dice, something with squares on it, and a pencil you can erase with. People arriving from board games keep expecting a board, or cards, or a bag of little tokens, and there's none of that: the publisher is blunt that no miniatures are needed, and the map is whatever you draw. If you're still working out which corner of the solo roleplaying hobby you want to land in, this is the cheapest door into it. The one thing I'd not skimp on is the pencil, which sounds ridiculous until the fourth time you erase a corridor.
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01Pick 01 of 10
Solo Dungeon-Crawling Rulebook
This is the rulebook that stands in for a game master. It holds the character classes, the combat rules and the random tables that decide what waits behind each door, so one player can generate and play a whole dungeon in a sitting. Pick a print edition over a PDF if you plan to play away from a screen, because you'll be turning pages constantly.
Why we picked this exact one: Andrea Sfiligoi's Four Against Darkness, from Ganesha Games, is the book this corner of the hobby points newcomers at, and it still carries a 4.6-star average years after release. The paperback is printed to order, so it can take longer to arrive than a stocked book. Its one real weakness is layout: the combat rules sit in two separate chapters, and you'll flip between them a lot in your first session.
Every roll in this kind of game uses ordinary six-sided dice, the same ones that come in a board game box. Two is the working number, though a couple of spares save you hunting under the sofa halfway through a dungeon. Sixteen-millimetre dice read at a glance, which the tiny ones bundled with cheap games do not.
Why we picked this exact one: The Bicycle 5 Dice Set gives you five plain 16mm d6 in white and black for pocket change. These are playing-card-company dice, not collector dice: square edges, printed pips, nothing clever. If you want something prettier a year from now, this is the least painful thing to outgrow.
A squared notebook is the board. You draw corridors and rooms square by square as the dice turn them up, and the finished page is the only record the adventure leaves behind. Four squares to the inch is the usual size, roomy enough to pencil a monster count inside a room without squinting.
Why we picked this exact one: The Top Flight Sewn Marble Composition Book is ruled at four squares to the inch, which gives a single page far more room than the 20-by-28 square map the rules ask for. It's sewn rather than glued, so it doesn't shed pages when you flatten it to draw. Plain and cheap, and the marble cover is easy to spot in a bag.
Dungeon maps get redrawn. You'll misjudge where a corridor lands, or draw a room on the wrong side of a door, and a pencil with a real eraser is what saves the page. A 0.7mm lead splits the difference: fine enough for small squares, thick enough that it doesn't snap when you're hurrying.
Why we picked this exact one: The Pentel Twist-Erase Click has a long eraser that twists up out of the barrel, so it keeps working well past the point where a cap eraser has flattened. It sits at a 4.8-star average. The pack holds more pencils than one person needs, but it also brings spare erasers and lead refills, which are the parts you actually run through.
Buy those four and you can play tonight. One warning from everyone who has done it: your first party will probably die, and the game is fine with that, because the boss waiting at the end of a beginner dungeon can roll up far nastier than a level-one dwarf deserves. Treat the first four as the tutorial and save the good names for the second lot.
Once You've Mapped a Few
Somewhere around the third dungeon the novelty of looking things up wears off, and that's the moment these start to make sense. The smell of a fresh deck of cards helps more than it should. So does a dice tower, if rolling into a tray starts to feel tame, and a small printer, once you notice how much of this hobby arrives as free PDFs. I'd skip miniatures entirely, by the way, since nothing in this game needs them and they quietly turn a pencil hobby into a painting hobby. People who like the drawing side of it often drift toward solo games you play by writing, where the page is the point rather than the record.
05Pick 05 of 10
Card-Based Dungeon Deck
Instead of rolling on tables and turning pages, you deal cards: each one is a room with its monsters, treasure and instructions printed on the face. A deck is a single themed dungeon with its own quest and its own creatures, so it plays through once and then goes back in the box. It needs the core rulebook, because the cards replace the lookup rather than the rules.
Why we picked this exact one: Undead And Buried is one of the Four Against Dungeon Decks that Pocket Lands co-produces with the game's own publisher, so it's an official product rather than a fan hack. Seventeen tarot-size cards cover a graveyard dungeon with its own boss and its own magic items. The cards are printed to order, which means a wait and a shipping charge you wouldn't pay on a marketplace.
A thin printed adventure with a fixed premise, written for the lowest character levels. Where the core book rolls a dungeon out of nothing, a module like this hands you a reason to be down there and a goal past finding the boss. It sits on top of the core rules rather than replacing any of them.
Why we picked this exact one: Caves of the Kobold Slave-Masters, the Ganesha Games adventure for this system, is the book long-time players name first when somebody asks what to buy second, and it's written for level one and two characters, so it fits a party that survived one dungeon. It holds a 4.7-star average. At twenty-four pages it's slight, which is exactly why it doesn't swamp someone still learning the core rules.
A shallow tray with a soft lining that catches dice instead of letting them skate off the edge. The folding kind flattens for storage and snaps back into walls with magnets. It also kills most of the clatter, which matters if you play late while somebody else is asleep.
Why we picked this exact one: The Buweeo magnetic folding dice tray opens to about 13 by 10.5 inches and folds down to roughly paperback size, which suits a game you might carry to a cafe. Its 4.4-star average sits below the rigid octagonal trays, mostly on complaints about magnet strength. If you never play away from your own desk, a solid tray is the steadier pick.
You drop the dice in at the top, they tumble down past a few baffles and land in the tray at the bottom. It folds flat with magnets, so it packs into the same bag as the book and the notebook.
Why we picked this exact one: The Luck Lab Folding Dice Tower holds together with magnets instead of fiddly tabs, sets up in seconds and folds flat again for storage. The felt lining keeps the clatter down for late-evening play, and it takes ordinary 16mm dice like the ones in the essentials. Hundreds of buyers rate it well on Amazon.
A small black-and-white laser printer for the paper side of the hobby: party rosters, map sheets, the quick-reference tables and the free print-and-play dungeons you find online.
Why we picked this exact one: The Brother HL-L2405W is a compact wireless mono laser. Toner does not dry out between occasional uses the way inkjet cartridges can, and black and white is all a party sheet or a rules table needs. It prints straight from a phone or laptop over Wi-Fi, so the PDF you just downloaded is on the table a minute later.
A printer with no ink or toner at all: it prints with heat onto special thermal paper, so it stays small, quiet and cheap to keep around for the odd character sheet.
Why we picked this exact one: The Phomemo M08F prints full US-letter pages over Bluetooth or USB and is small enough to live in a drawer next to the dice. It needs Phomemo folded letter-size thermal paper, which comes in 200-sheet packs. Thousands of buyers rate it well, and short-lived printouts like character sheets are exactly what it is good at.
None of this makes the game better, exactly. It makes it faster and better-looking, which after your fifth hand-drawn corridor turns out to matter more than you expected. Buy one thing, play with it, and see whether you still want the next one. If you've already got a squared-notebook habit from keeping a bullet journal, you're half equipped before you start.
The Questions That Come Up Around Room Six
Why do I keep losing my place in the rulebook?
Because the book isn't laid out the way you read it. Players regularly find the combat material split across two chapters that don't sit next to each other, so the first time a fight starts you're flipping back and forth while trying to hold a monster count in your head. The consequence is that a forty-minute dungeon turns into ninety and feels like homework. Print the quick-reference sheets and pocket mods the game provides before your first session (either printer further up does it) and keep one beside the map; longtime players treat that as step one, not an optional extra.
Do I actually need all those supplement books?
No, and buying a stack of them early is the most common way people spoil the game for themselves. The core book alone takes a party from first to fifth level. If you want a story with a fixed plot along the way, a short adventure for first- and second-level characters, like Caves of the Kobold Slave-Masters, adds about three sessions. The natural next big book is Four Against the Abyss, which picks up where the core book stops, at fifth level. Past the first handful of books it gets genuinely hard to remember which rule lives where, and you end up searching three volumes mid-fight. Add each book only once the one before it is nearly played out.
My rooms keep coming up empty. Am I rolling wrong?
You're rolling fine. The odds favour empty rooms and small vermin over bosses and treasure, which is deliberate pacing and not a broken table. Newcomers read a run of nothing as the game failing and quit three rooms before the interesting part. Search the quiet rooms anyway, because secret doors and hidden treasure only appear when you spend the action looking for them.
How big should the map be, and where do I start drawing?
Bigger than you think. The rules ask for a map area of 20 squares by 28, and the free sheet the publisher gives away is smaller than that, which is why people run off the edge of the paper partway through. Start your first room near the middle of the page rather than in a corner, so the dungeon has room to sprawl in any direction. That's the same advice the very first published solo dungeon rules gave in 1975, and it has not improved since.
Should I just get D100 Dungeon instead?
It's the usual alternative, and the honest difference is scope rather than quality. D100 Dungeon has grown to eight books, and the system asks more of you before the first roll. Beginners who bounce off solo play almost always bounce off setup time, not off the genre, so the smaller rulebook is the safer first purchase. If you finish three dungeons and find yourself wanting more bookkeeping, the bigger system will still be there.
People Worth Following Into This Hobby
Real practitioners we found while researching this setup — people who do the work, show their process, and publish on sites they run themselves. No sponsorships, no affiliations; we just think they're worth your time.
Plays solo dungeon crawlers room by room and writes up exactly where the rules contradict themselves.
Her playthrough of this game names the rules ambiguities a beginner will hit in their first fight, including the explosive-six and fleeing-monster wording the FAQ above warns about.
Writes historical and fantasy fiction and plays solo wargames and dungeon crawlers, making his own play aids when the published ones fall short.
He noticed that the free map sheet is smaller than the 20-by-28 squares the rules ask for and drew a correct one to download, which solves the paper problem in the FAQ above before a reader hits it.
Writes random-table books for tabletop games and collects free character sheets and play aids for players who'd rather not design their own.
A beginner who has drawn one dungeon usually wants a cleaner way to track four characters, and this page gathers the free sheets that do it without buying anything else.
Plays solo tabletop games and writes the dice results up as prose, and designs his own solo-first games and maps.
His run through this game shows what the bare dungeon tables look like once a player starts narrating them, which is the next step for anyone who finished a first map and wanted more story out of it.
Love what you see here? Save individual picks with on any item, or copy everything to a list of your own in one click — great for coming back to later, or dropping as a not-so-subtle hint.
