In Ruins Is A Clever Tabletop Game About Making (And Then Breaking) The Dungeon Of Your Dreams

By Cameron Kunzelman | September 18, 2025 | 12:15pm

Tabletop Features in ruins

In Ruins Is A Clever Tabletop Game About Making (And Then Breaking) The Dungeon Of Your Dreams

The normal experience of playing a roleplaying game is sitting down with your friends, rolling up some characters, and adventuring in some place. It might be a keep or a haunted fishing village or the local 7-Eleven that’s so cursed you wouldn’t believe it. In Ruins gives players the opportunity to create dungeons rather than simply exploring them. It’s an elaborate ruleset for making a place, aging it centuries, and populating it with little weirdos that some players later on might come to discover. It rules.

In Ruins doesn’t ask much of players. You can play it solo or with up to six players, although I think it probably works best in the two to four range. To play it, you do need a real “gamer’s toolkit” of stuff that games like this often demand: a few six-sided dice, a deck of playing cards, some tokens, and some paper. The play of the game is using these different objects to generate, draw, and populate a castle that will, over the course of the game, turn into a ruin. This is a fun thing to do, I promise.

The game went quickly when I played it solo, and I imagine that it would also go pretty fast with a few friends. You start by making a castle. You answer some lore questions about it—What is the land called? What is the castle’s name? Who are its neighbors?—and then you start with the actual building. Each player draws cards from the deck, and from that, they build three rooms. There are some specific, fiddly mechanics here but just know that you’re making rooms and you’re putting cool stuff in there. This is really and truly just gamifying the work of creating any kind of interior space for your own TTRPG, which is probably an experience that anyone who has run one of these games is familiar with. The novelty (and the restrictions) that emerge based on the cards are what give this real intrigue—you sort of just end up making the castle you can rather than the castle you might necessarily want.

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Then it all goes to hell. You come up with some ways that the castle gets wrecked. Other people invade. Earthquake. Wizard from space. While you get to make up the exact shape and narrative of these events, they’re all supported by a kind of inverted building process in which you’re dealt hands of degrees of ruin and then you choose how to apply them to the castle. Want to make sure the kitchen you built and wrote cool lore for is preserved for all time? Guess you need to have the library burn when demons crept out of the basement when the stablehand dug too deep in his free time. Whoops!

In Ruins

Then comes what the game calls “fill the dungeon” time, which sounds like a terrible euphemism but actually means what it says. This is where the real dungeon design happens, and again it occurs by drawing cards from the deck. This is where you get to start making decisions about your faction (think kobolds and goblins) and how they have repurposed these ruined rooms in the time since disaster struck. There’s a great set of designed mechanics for how to get you thinking about that, and there’s some random drawing that encourage you to put yourself in situations you might not normally—the cards you draw might ask you to think of what kind of defensive structures a bunch of skeletons would have erected in that burned-out library, for example. This is also where you put down traps and place random other enemies and NPCS, filling out the contours of the ruin.

What you end up with at the end of an In Ruins game is something close to an early Dungeons & Dragons module dungeon. There’s history, there’s an ecology of creatures, and there’s clear connections between all of the rooms and the creatures that live there. Better yet, you have the documentation for the whole thing, so you could take it directly into a game that you’re running for anything that might need a dungeon and have all the items, creatures, and layouts done and ready to go. It’s like they tricked you into doing all that game prep you avoid!

In Ruins is a delightful thing, and if I have criticism it is that I found the booklet laid out in a pretty confusing way that made me flip back and forth a lot. The rules of some sections are described before processes and orders of operations, which means you learn about the intricacies of doing something before you have a bird’s eye view of why you’re doing it in the first place. It doesn’t get in the way of playing, and these questions of ordering can’t be that bad across a 30ish page book, but it was notable enough to me that I thought you should be forewarned that it is worth powering through that initial confusion.

I like games that let you build things, and I like when you have a nice little notebook full of creativity at the end of some solo play. In Ruins has the structures, and the follow through, to get you to fill a couple hours making a small world that you can take around with you in any other game that you might want to. It’s fun and profit, if profit is defined as having a dungeon you’ve created and can pull out whenever necessary.

Cameron Kunzelman is an academic, critic, co-host of the podcasts Ranged Touch and Game Studies Study Buddies, and author of The World Is Born from Zero. He tweets at @ckunzelman.