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It really wasn’t much of a roleplaying system. You play a small party of adventurers moving around in a randomly generated dungeon that is constantly evolving as you draw new room tiles out of a cup, encounter creatures and kill them, get treasure, and etc.

They didn’t sell very well, I guess the true fantasy geeks scoffed at them and the wargamers didn’t want to have much to do with fantasy back then. Deathmaze was part of a series of small format SF/F pocket games that fit in a ziploc and didn’t cost much. SPI was trying to make inroads against that sprawling cash cow called Dungeons and Dragons back then, and were producing a lot of material that fit solidly in that realm. I played that constantly for a couple years, because it worked just fine solitaire, and could fit in the outer pocket of my college backpack. Many games get relegated to shelf space over the years, but not DeathMaze. One of my favorite SPI products of that era was their very small SF and Fantasy line of Quad Games, and my favorite one of those was a tiny ziploc game called DeathMaze. You can find almost all of them as PDF files now in the Internet Archive, if you wish to examine the source material.

( “the Day” in this case being the 1980s). Some Background: Back in the day, SPI had a perfectly respectable monthly magazine with a game in it, called ARES.

Download the new version for ipod Critadel