For Those Who Like To Have Fun Thinking - 12-25-2025

We hope everyone is having a good end of the year. We wish you a happy holiday season and to spend good time with family and friends and to make lasting memories together.

The Caravel team has been busy this year. To wrap up 2025, we have some news to share.


DROD v5.2 beta

A beta for DROD version 5.2 has been released for evaluation on the Caravel Forum. This latest version includes many, many improvements and fixes, which you can read about here:

https://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=45921

Registered users are able to download the full game version installer for Windows here when logged in on the Caravel Forum:

https://forum.caravelgames.com/downloads.php

A big thanks to forum member hyperme for driving this release to completion!


3rd Thinky Awards Nomination

The Descent of King Hesper has been nominated in the 3rd Thinky Awards in the "best expansion" category. Congratulations to the architecture team and everyone who submitted content to this amazing hold!

Vote for it here:

https://thinkygames.com/events/awards/


2025 - Year of DROD RPG Voting

On the heels of the release of DROD RPG 2, you can vote for your favorite usermade holds for a new "Year of DROD RPG" contest. In this contest, users created a small hold of 16 or fewer rooms and at least one scorepoint. You have until the end of the year to vote for the best entries. You can play and vote for the best submissions here:

https://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=47166

A big shout-out to forum member kieranmillar for running this contest and compiling all the entries into a single hold!


Wishing everyone a happy 2026!

-- The Caravel team

• (Discuss this article - 0 replies)

Time to Run the Dungeon - 08-11-2025

DROD RPG 2 is available!

Years in the making, Caravel has released DROD RPG 2: A Courageous Rescue.

[attachment]

If you liked DROD RPG, this sequel improves on the formula in every way.

This is a "Magic Tower" game with RPG-lite features, deterministic encounters, and DROD game elements, in which you're rewarded for finding clever ways to optimize your run through each area.

Kieran Millar is the primary producer, and he has done amazing work crafting an engaging and well-designed 3-chapter campaign. Acquire new weapons, armor, and upgrades as you battle your way through a fresh series of dangerous foes. Experience many new items, secrets, and surprises along the way, plus many optional challenges for those who want to push the limits of what you can puzzle out.

There are multiple ways to play through these level sets, and they support a dynamic difficulty setting. You can switch to playing through the game on "beginner mode" at any point if you'd like to experience "A Courageous Rescue" in a more chill way.

Hyperme likewise has performed excellent work, implementing the vast majority of new features in the game engine and improved level editor, including porting over many DROD 5.x app and engine upgrades into the RPG engine and level editor.

Schik implemented the back-end Caravel server support, including leaderboards, hints & solutions, tracking orders and registrations, and making sure everything just works.

Nuntar has published a great series of designer posts covering new features in the game. Please check these out if you'd like an overview of new game elements and new and improved game engine features.

Our team would also like to give a shout-out to the many other individuals in the community who have performed play-testing, contributed art, music, voice acting, or otherwise helped make DROD RPG 2 shine.

Get DROD RPG 2 here from the Caravel Games site. It's available now on Windows, and Mac and Linux versions are forthcoming.

Also, if you purchase the game from the Caravel Games site and register your order to your Caravel Forum user account, you will get a free month of CaravelNet service and you may redeem a Steam key to claim a license to the game on Steam when it's available there in a couple weeks. Also, you may wish to mark the game on Steam now:

Wishlist on Steam

Twisty Little Passages Reprint

By popular demand, we're crowdfunding a mass-reprint of our Twisty Little Passages puzzle book!

Check it out if you missed the original campaign or would like to pick up additional copies for yourself, friends, or family.

In this reprint, we'll be addressing noted errata, fixing minor issues encountered in some puzzles.

Go to the campaign preview page and click "Notify" to be informed immediately when the campaign goes live.

Time Fenix Re-launch

We've published a new crowdfunding campaign preview page for Time Fenix.

Multiple early tabletop game reviewers have called Time Fenix one of their favorite solo campaign games, and it has received the "Father Geek Seal of Approval" accolade. We're working to upgrade the prototype art featured in the first campaign, so you'll be able to see how the finished version looks in all its glory when we re-launch.

Time Fenix is a fresh take on "Magic Tower" games like "DROD RPG" and "Twisty Little Passages" in tabletop game form.

Play through a non-linear Metroidvania-style campaign, solving dungeon crawl puzzles, building and managing your resource deck, and upgrading your stats to defeat the Mechlord at the lowest level of a sprawling 16-area underground facility. Rewind time to reach multiple Time Crystals in each area -- 59 missions in all.

Go to the campaign page and click "Notify" to be informed immediately when the campaign goes live.

Happy DRODing!

-- The Caravel Games team

• (Discuss this article - 3 replies)

More Magic. More Tower. - 01-06-2025

Hi, all. My wife and I are writing this together, and we would like to wish everyone a happy new year.

The Caravel Forum has been around for nearly 23 years now, and we've enjoyed watching how it's grown from its humble beginnings. We want to express our appreciation for everyone who is contributing to the Caravel community. So many good things have happened this past year! We want to take a moment to reflect on these things and what's upcoming.

We've noticed heroes of the community who have worked tirelessly to produce so much of this goodness.

Entry Point is released!

First off, we'd like to give a shout out to everyone who contributed to the epic "Entry Point: The Descent of King Hesper" hold, which is now released as a free download to the community! This hold is of high quality and absolutely massive in size. Seriously, it will probably stand as the biggest hold ever. Dozens of forumites contributed to this hold over many long years, and we consider it a fantastic accomplishment. Enjoy the puzzles!

Download "Entry Point: The Descent of King Hesper" here:
https://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=46328

19th People's Choice Awards

A big thanks to mauvebutterfly for running the People's Choice Awards in 2024 for user content that was released the previous year. If you missed it, stop by here to check out what was rated highest by the Caravel Forum community:

https://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=46213

Now that 2024 is a wrap, we're looking forward to a new People's Choice Awards getting run for 2024 and excited to see who the new winners will be (*cough* Entry Point *cough*...though we would be amiss to discount all of the other creative work that has happened).

DROD RPG 2: The Roach Strikes Back

Kieranmillar and hyperme have taken front-seat roles on the Caravel team in the driving development of a sequel to DROD RPG, which we'd estimate as being over 80% completed.

The game will have three chapters that continue Tendry's story. These can be played at standard and easy difficulty levels, with special challenges thrown in to spice things up once you've beaten the main game.

We're targeting a 2025 release. Stay tuned for a new progress bar to appear!

In the near future, we'll be recruiting for voice work, so stick around if you're interested in participating.

Time Fenix

Level design and map art is complete for Caravel's upcoming board game offering, Time Fenix, which is a spiritual successor to "Twisty Little Passages". Alex Kowalczyk, who created the amazing art for "DROD: The Second Sky" is back to design and create art for the game.

The game features some legacy, non-linear, and deck management elements. Your deck gives you extra resources for each level, and you start out with one or two special abilities to manage these resources. Play starts out easy with just a few simple options for managing your resources, then becomes increasingly more involved as you add to your deck and gain permanent stat boosts and new special abilities to take on more challenging levels.

We're targeting this year to kick off a crowdfunding campaign to manufacture and ship the game. You can sign up to be notified about it here:
Time Fenix Kickstarter Preview Page

As a preview, here's pending art for a few of the resource cards you'll come across in the game.

• (Discuss this article - 2 replies)

It’s a numbers game - 05-25-2024

Exciting news is like waiting for the bus. You wait ages and then multiple show up together!

Time Fenix

Twisty Little Passages, Caravel’s puzzle book based on the gameplay of DROD RPG, is getting a spiritual successor, Time Fenix. Much like its predecessor, Time Fenix is a solo-only, fully resettable, puzzle-adventure resource management campaign game, and it's in board game format. Time Fenix improves and innovates on this formula in a number of ways. There’s vastly expanded play flexibility, increased player freedom with Metroidvania-style player progression, a deck of resource cards to manage, and more.

For more information, visit the forum thread and then head over to the Kickstarter preview page to sign up to be notified when the campaign goes live later this year.

DROD RPG 2

Twisty Little Passages isn’t the only Caravel RPG product to be getting a sequel! DROD RPG will be returning with a brand new full-blown adventure!

While we aren't ready to disclose too much at the moment, development is well underway. The project is being spearheaded by community members kieranmillar and hyperme. The game engine has been undergoing a lot of improvements, with many features from The Second Sky engine ported over, alongside some TSS features being given an RPG twist, plus brand new elements and features beyond those seen in the DROD RPG 1.3 alpha.

Keep on the lookout for new information as things develop. We're estimating DROD RPG 2 will release sometime in 2025.

Leaf’s Odyssey

We’ve really been enjoying "Leaf’s Odyssey", and we think fans of DROD will feel the same. It’s a stepping puzzle game by Alex Diener, a longtime community member and prolific DROD Let’s Player. The game has heavy DROD inspirations and its own forum thread with more information and player impressions. Leaf's Odyssey can be purchased from Steam and itch.io:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2880750/Leafs_Odyssey/
https://themsalltook.itch.io/leafs-odyssey

Entry Point

This massive DROD hold envisioned by forum member Nuntar remains in active development. The progress bar on this incredible creation has been steadily creeping upward and is now closing in on 99%! Given the unprecedented scope of this effort, there's still a lot to do, but I expect the team can now see the light at the end of the tunnel. If I were a betting man, I'd give good odds this long-running project could release sometime this year.

--Mike (with a big thanks to Kieran for wordsmithing most of this info!)

• (Discuss this article - 9 replies)

Out Of The Oven - 12-12-2022

Out Of The Oven

We've been holding our breath for this one... but, with a sigh of relief,

The Main Course - TREACLE STEW is PUBLISHED

• (Discuss this article - 4 replies)