The narrowest range on our board — no axis below 3, none above 3.5. A well-built dark-fantasy RPG for your phone that does everything competently and nothing yet that is only its own.

Master of Dungeon is a solo dark-fantasy RPG for phones, made by Bitforge, a studio in Kraków, Poland. There is no web version: it is an Android app on Google Play, and an iOS app that was in soft launch in Poland and Germany when we played it, with the rest of the App Store taking pre-orders for 9 October 2026. The game master sets a scene, offers a few suggested actions, and lets you pick one or type your own. Underneath the prose sits a real rules layer — tactical combat decided by your skills and the dice, experience and abilities that carry over between adventures, and equipment you choose to bring with you.

You play pre-written adventures (a bandit problem on the road to Oakvale, a missing daughter, a sealed manor with a bell ringing inside it) or ones other players have built and shared. The game does not name the model it runs on anywhere.

What It Scores

Master of Dungeon scores 3.3 out of 5, fifth of the twenty-five platforms on our benchmark, level with Tidefall. The two share a number and almost nothing else. Tidefall has the widest spread of any product we have scored — three 5s and two 1s. Master of Dungeon has the narrowest: every axis sits at 3 or 3.5. It is the highest score we have given to a platform without a single 4 on any axis.

That is the whole shape of it. It is good at everything and best at nothing.

Mechanical Depth — 3.5 is a lot of game for a phone. Combat, skills, dice, inventory, experience and a hero who levels up are all really there and work as systems rather than as words the narrator mentions. It stops short of 4 because it has no map of any kind — no hex map, no map modes — because world creation is thin, because the game lacks breadth, and because none of its systems is anything the category has not seen before.

Memory & Continuity — 3.5 is how most developers in this niche handle memory. An engine is present and stores the game’s state; the story itself is held by summarising, and then summarising the summaries. That works for now, and it is the model that tends to cause trouble later in a long campaign.

NPC Fidelity — 3.5: characters are not flat, and they hold a personality once they have one. But there is not much variety between them. The cast is mostly the familiar set — the hardened veteran, the sleek rogue, the pure priest — dressed in whatever skin the story needs. Nobody has a distinct mannerism, a niche personality or an original twist.

Signature Design — 3.5 for the same reason, one level up. The features are there, they work, and they are well designed. None of them is something you would point at and say “that is Master of Dungeon”.

Determinism & Fairness — 3: the game tries to be fair, and it is the axis where we hit the worst bug of this testing round. We went to a smithy to buy equipment and paid 160 gold. No items arrived. We asked to equip them — one of the game’s own suggested actions — and still had nothing. The narration then said we had equipped the items, still showed none, and took another 160 gold, leaving us with nothing: we had paid twice for zero items. We tried to fix it out of character, and the game master does not acknowledge out-of-character input at all.

Player Agency — 3: in play it does not railroad you much, and there is some puppeting. But with no way to step out of the fiction, you cannot correct the game when it goes wrong or change how it is behaving, and that is a form of railroading too — one that is felt most exactly when something has broken.

Longevity — 3: summaries of summaries, plus bugs that are still present, set a limit on how far a campaign can go.

Pricing

Free to play, with a daily action allowance, a subscription, and one-off action packs. Prices below are from the in-app store as we saw it in euros on 18 September 2026; your store may show a different currency and amount.

Plan	Price	Daily actions	Also includes
Free	€0	15	—
Pro	€7.49/month	70	Unlimited adventures, community stories, up to 5 heroes, longer messages, faster responses

Action packs add extra actions that do not reset and do not expire:

Pack	Actions	Price
Small	200	€3.09
Medium	500	€7.49
Large	1,000	€13.99
Extra Large	5,000	€64.99
Mega	20,000	€239.99

Pro is the far better deal: at 70 actions a day it is up to about 2,100 actions a month for the price of the 500-action Medium pack. The game pushes that subscription hard, though, and the prompts interrupted our play often. The Google Play listing also states that the app contains ads.

Verdict

Master of Dungeon is a competent, well-built mobile RPG with a real rules layer under it, and on a phone that alone puts it ahead of most of this category. What it does not have yet is anything that is only its own: characters from a familiar list, features that are good but not new, and a memory model the whole niche shares. Add a bug that charged us twice for nothing and a game master that will not hear out-of-character input, and it lands at 3.3 — the same number as Tidefall, reached the opposite way.

Product names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Arcanum is not affiliated with Master of Dungeon or Bitforge.