Spire of Dioronna
A modular map escape card game
Enter a spire where a magician bent space. Lay the map as you explore it, and race three rivals to the magic at the top.
The game
Modular Map · Puzzletale · Light Strategy
The Spire of Dioronna is a modular map strategy card game. The spire belonged to Dioronna, a magician who cast magic inside it until the space itself came apart — corridors that fold, floors that arrive in the wrong order.
You play a student from the magic academy, sent in to find what she left behind. There is no fixed board: you lay map cards as you go, so the spire is built by the same players trying to escape it.
Place map cards, move across the map you are building, complete quests, and compete with the other students for the resources you all need. The player who reads the shape of the spire fastest gets to the magic first.
The map is the game
Map cards are placed during play. The spire's floorplan is different every session, and so is the route to the top.
Puzzletale structure
Quests unfold as a light narrative puzzle rather than a static scoring track.
Light strategy, real decisions
Twenty to forty minutes, ages 8 and up — but the placement decisions genuinely matter.
A borrowed legend
Dioronna is a character from Cixin Liu's Three-Body Problem — a 15th-century Byzantine wizard who found a higher-dimensional shard.
The campaign
What actually happened on Kickstarter
The full public record of this campaign — funding, tiers, and the updates we posted while it ran. Every figure comes from the campaign page itself.
| Status | Successfully funded and delivered |
|---|---|
| Funding period | 12 November 2024 – 12 December 2024 (30 days) |
| Goal | $3,000 |
| Pledged | $9,202 — 306% of goal |
| Backers | 186 |
| Reached goal | 100% in 36 hours, per the campaign’s own first update |
| Delivery | Promised March 2025 |
| Shipping | Anywhere in the world |
| Comments | 37 |
| Designer | Rio |
| Project location | Xiamen, China |
| BoardGameGeek | Game entry |
Pledge tiers as they were offered
| $29 · Early Bird | 1 copy, standard edition |
|---|---|
| $35 · Kickstarter Special | 1 copy, standard edition |
| $49 · Double Pack | 2 copies |
| $49 · Newqz 2 Game Special | Spire of Dioronna + Crow Drinks Water |
| $119 · Five Pack | 5 copies |
| $299 · For Retail Store | 12 copies |
| $588 · 2 Newqz Game For Retail Store | 12 copies of each game |
| $8 add-on | Limited Canvas Bag — Spire of Dioronna |
| $10 add-on | Limited Canvas Bag — Crow Drinks Water |
In the box
- Modular map cards — the spire is laid out during play
- Three magic items to find: a wizard hat, a cat and a key
- Character cards for the magic-academy students
- Wooden meeples and a custom die
- A rulebook folded in an unconventional "magic drawing" style
Where it comes from
Dioronna, and the shard that left
In Cixin Liu's novel, Dioronna lives in the 15th century as a wizard in the Byzantine Empire. She stumbles on a higher-dimensional shard and hopes to use the fourth dimension to help Constantine eliminate the Ottoman leader — and fails, because the shard has already left Earth. The game takes that failure as its starting point and puts you inside the spire she left behind.
Coverage
What the press wrote about Spire of Dioronna
Verbatim, with a link to the full article.
Newqz Culture is thus back with Spire of Dioronna, an ambitious-looking title which boasts a Kickstarter page full of how-to-play demonstrations, stunning artwork, and heaps of player feedback.
Mechanically there is something unique about the modular nature of the title too.
Players are also given an outline of the map, the functions of each map card, and an overview of how these gorgeously designed elements all interact with one another.
With narrative cards depicting hats, cats and magical keys which can prove to be the path to victory, audiences should find that this simplistic system is easy to pick up.
It's important to note that this is not an officially licensed game, but fans of 3 Body Problem will definitely find something to love!
A Spire of Dioronna board game has gone live on Kickstarter. This card game is based on the 3 Body Problem novel series written by Liu Cixin, which was recently given a streaming series adaptation on Netflix.
At time of writing, the Spire of Dioronna Kickstarter campaign has raised $8,780, almost tripling its initial funding goal of $3,000.
Also available
Spire of Dioronna in the shop
Stay in touch
Spire of Dioronna is available now
The Kickstarter delivered and the game is in stock on the NEWQZ store.