You might assume a game titled Thousand Hells: The Underworld Heists would be a grim, punishing slog through darkness and despair. It is not. Developed by the designers behind King of Dragon Pass, this choose-your-own-adventure RPG anthology is sharp, funny, and surprisingly upbeat despite being set entirely in the land of the dead. It’s the kind of game that makes you laugh while your party member gets cursed, punctured, or mentally unravelled by supernatural forces beyond human comprehension.
A Heist Crew Worth Dying For
Each run in Thousand Hells begins with your character accepting One Last Job from a shady power-broker in what the game calls the ‘Byzantine-flavored’ Eternal City. The job might involve investigating the untimely deaths of some princelings, or escorting a murderer to parts unknown. Either way, the destination is an underworld that pulls inspiration from Ancient Greece and Mesopotamia, rendered in handsome painted backdrops of monoliths, catacombs, bazaars, and shorelines.
Before you descend, you shape your character through a selection of backgrounds, strengths, and faults. These aren’t just cosmetic choices – they feed directly into how the game plays and how your crew reacts to you over time. The opening character creation has a genuine sense of personality baked into every option, making the process feel more like writing a character than filling out a stat sheet.
Assembling Your Ragtag Crew
After building yourself, you recruit a party of four. Each character comes loaded with their own quirks, skills, and baggage. You spend Question points during recruitment to determine how much you actually know about each crew member going in – a clever mechanic that sets up mysteries to unravel mid-heist. One character might be a diplomat, pickpocket, and shaman who is dream-dogged and impulsive. Another might be a catfooted spymaster with a memorable description that falls somewhere between unflattering and endearing.
These characters form loose relationships during a run, shaped by their individual traits and the nature of the job itself. The story might push you to keep secrets from your own crew, or force you to quietly accept that not everyone is making it back from what the game calls the Great Below. The relationships feel earned rather than scripted, because they grow from the encounters you face together rather than from cutscenes.
280+ Encounters and a Bag Full of Tokens
The heist structure is built around a series of round-based encounters pulled from a pool of over 280. Each encounter offers multiple solutions depending on your party’s combined skillset, so no two runs will play out identically. The mechanical hook that makes all of this work is a token bag system that feels tactile and unpredictable in the best way.
Each round, you draw up to four tokens from three separate bags. One bag belongs to the character you’ve assigned to lead the encounter, giving you more of their specific tokens to work with. A second bag covers the rest of the group. The third bag holds boons and knowledge you may have collected along the way – perhaps by befriending a grieving spirit or, as the game puts it, jailbreaking a god.
The tokens themselves reflect character traits, both useful and obstructive. A token might tell you that one crew member is knowledgeable, while another flags that someone else is greedy or burdened by a troubled past. You then assign these tokens to one of three actions tied to the current scenario. If you’re navigating the rapids of the Styx, you might choose between focusing on the rocks ahead or managing the restless dead crowding the stern of your boat. If you’re sitting with the Fates as they weave your destiny, you decide whether to throw the shuttle yourself or offer to cut the warp threads entirely.
Tone That Actually Works
What’s striking about Thousand Hells is how it holds two tones at once without either cancelling the other out. The setting is legitimately eerie – you are literally doing jobs for dark powers in an ancient underworld – but the writing leans into wit and warmth rather than dread. Characters have voices. Scenarios have jokes. Even catastrophic failures tend to arrive with a line that makes you smile before you groan.
Generic utility tokens add another layer of flexibility to each encounter. Tokens like ‘Show Some Swagger’ can boost a character’s morale if played correctly, while ‘Get The Measure’ earns Insight points that let you calculate the odds of a given action succeeding before you commit. It gives you just enough information to feel informed without eliminating the tension of the draw.
The game’s 10 heists provide the backbone of its replayability, and with over 280 encounters reshuffled across each run alongside different crew combinations and relationship dynamics, the experience shifts noticeably between playthroughs. The painted art style grounds everything in a distinct visual identity that feels appropriate for stories about Orphic descents and bargains with infernal powers.
Worth the Trip Below
Thousand Hells: The Underworld Heists is the kind of game that earns goodwill fast. The writing is sharp, the mechanics have personality, and the tone manages to make a game about death and demons feel genuinely fun. If you’ve been looking for something with the flavour of a tabletop session run by a very well-read storyteller, this may be worth your time. The designers of King of Dragon Pass have built something that takes its mythology seriously while never forgetting to entertain.