Dwellings of Eldervale Is the Best Solo Fantasy Box I've Hauled Up Here

Big box for a fourteen by fourteen room, I’ll say that up front, but it earns the space it eats on my one table. Dwellings is worker placement with a monster brawling layer bolted on, dice for combat, an engine you build out of items your workers drag home, and somehow none of that collapses into noise once you’re actually playing it.

Solo is where I live with this one, weeks going by with nobody up the trail but me and the radio. The AI opponent, actual real opposition, not a scoring bar to beat, plays evil in a way I didn’t expect from a box this pretty. It’ll bank a monster and let it rot near your dwellings for three turns just to force your hand. I lost my first solo game outright, badly, and came back the next week for more, which tells you something.

The storage system deserves its own paragraph. Trays for everything, a real organizational system built into the box, not an afterthought foam liner. One thing worth flagging, the lids on a couple of those inner trays run a hair too tight, easy enough to work around once you know, but it’s the kind of small manufacturing thing that’ll trip you up on your first setup at altitude with cold hands.

Combat dice are swingy, no getting around it. Lost a fight once at five dice to one, which felt absurd in the moment, the kind of roll that would make a table full of people laugh or curse depending on who it happened to. It balances out over a full game, mostly, but that one battle stays with you longer than the math says it should.

Rulebook’s genuinely well done, answered every question I had without me hunting a forum, and after a couple plays I could run through the turn order from memory, no player aid needed. That matters more than it sounds like when the nearest other person to teach it to is four miles down a trail and only shows up in August.

Rating a 5. Rare that a game this loaded with production still gets played mostly alone and still delivers.