The Minotaur’s Labyrinth is a classic legend that forms the root of many a dungeon-crawl. After all, what was the labyrinth but a mega-dungeon with a horrifying array of creatures and obstacles for our hero to overcome? Unfortunately, our experience of running labyrinths, mazes, and even just generally complex-dungeons in RPGs has been mediocre, at best. Too much time spent mapping, describing distances, checking and re-checking maps, fixing miscommunications….all of which take away from the actual gameplay. Furthermore, it removes the feeling of being lost in a labyrinth, exchanging it for just general tedium and confusion. That’s not a good game. A long while back we came across some excellent and innovative card-based ways to run a maze. These methods used custom card decks. This approach is great. However, what if we could just use a regular deck of playing cards instead?

In a recent Shadowdark game, the adventurers had to explore a minotaur’s labyrinth, searching for a special magic item. Other locales existed in the maze, including other treasures. The goal was to find their intended item, and then return to a designated exit card. Starting with the card-based approaches we’d found, we adapted them to our specific maze. We started with a pre-built adventure, Mad Maze of the Moon Kingdom from Kobold Press. We added a few traps and then started assigning the rooms and encounters to specific cards in a deck of playing cards. Here’s what we came up with:

Jacks we set aside as “Dead Ends” that could be added ad-hoc if necessary, through means we will describe later. The same with 4’s and 5’s as ad-hoc “Right Path” cards. “Discard” means send the card, once resolved, to the Discard pile and shuffle back into the game later, whereas “Remove” means remove entirely from the deck. The 6’s and 7’s were paired up so that when the first one was drawn, there was a hint or sign of the particular monster. When the second one of the same number was drawn, the monster was encountered. We were using a crawling clock (inspired by the Dungeon Master Diaries podcast, patterned after The Underclock) to trigger random encounters. The players rolled on the crawling clock after every time they revealed a card. However, if the card was marked as a “Right Path” card, they only rolled after every 3rd card. The general idea is that as they explore the maze, they will encounter and Remove “obstacle” cards, and through other means, add more Right Path cards into the deck. Over time, they will encounter fewer obstacles, make fewer rolls on the clock, and be more likely to find specific cards (like the Queen or King room, or the entrance/exit cards). As in the examples we found, the players could roll skill checks on their turn for a chance to manipulate the deck in their favor. A unique feature of the maze was the teleportation daises Aces and 2’s. To simulate the “wipe the map” experience of being teleported somewhere else in a labyrinth, using a dais would cause the deck to reshuffle. This was important when the players had peeked ahead, or altered the deck in certain ways. As in the examples we found, the players could roll skill checks on their turn for a chance to manipulate the deck in their favor. Sometimes this meant a shuffle was advantageous, other times, disadvantageous. This lent the players some agency in how they explored the maze, just as they might have when doing a conventional map-based exploration.

Some other rules were – resting in the maze would increase the size of the clock die (d6->d8->d10->d12->d20). Resting required there to be a Dead End card available in the tableau, the party would have to find one through exploration, or they could choose to add one to the deck. We created a short list of possible generic events that could also alter the maze deck.

We also curated an “Encounters” and “Events” table….generally split between combat-likely encounters and more general events. We arbitrarily assigned a 25% chance to “Events” and a 75% chance to “Encounters”.

And so that was pretty much it – now we had a system to simulate a labyrinth without needing to handle all the tedious mapping.

So How Did It Go?

We did a quick simulated playthrough of a deck as we finalized the card assignments, but given the amount of randomness involved, the ability to use skill checks to alter the deck state, and all the other unpredictable factors – we were not sure if this would work! But it sure felt like it would. We explained the concept to the players and with their buy-in, gave it a shot.

And honestly? It was a total success, in spite of some incredibly bad luck for the players. They were almost completely unable to succeed at the Skill Checks, even with the DC set to 13. The upside was that it made those successes feel very significant and substantial. There was some great party discussion around when to use a dais or not, a great sense of urgency around torches and the Crawling Clock, and a real feeling of danger and uncertainty in the maze. Due to our own poor rolls, they never needed a full rest – but it was never too easy or comfortable in the maze either. Just a massive success all around.

If you are having trouble running labyrinths, mazes, or even just very complex dungeons for your players, if the problems are that they’re just too tedious, boring or fiddly – we can’t recommend trying this method enough. Alter it to your maze and taste, go forth and get lost.