Tabletop Sweet Sixteen - Under the Floorboards vs Cairn

 Cairn is a classless OSR-adjacent adventure game descended from Into the Odd and Knave. Characters are defined by what they carry, combat is fast and dangerous, and you can run almost any adventure you already own with this system.

Under the Floorboards is a cozy dungeon-crawl game about small creatures exploring the spaces humans leave behind. It has a scouting phase where players build a mental map of their target, and then the game tests that memory against what they actually find when they go in.

These two games are both working the same territory: light, fast, dangerous-feeling play, and arriving at completely different feelings at the table.

Cairn

Classless characters defined by what they carry cuts character creation down to almost nothing and immediately puts the fiction first. What you have is who you are. It also means every item decision matters in a way that class-based games can't quite replicate.

Converting adventures is easy. I've run conversions for Feast, Aberrant Reflections, and The Rot King's Sanctum. The system gets out of the way and lets the adventure do its job.

The detachment rules are the quiet star of the game. Combat scales from a tense one-on-one knife fight to a full street battle without changing the pace or the mood.

We fled the Rot King's Sanctum with an overwhelming force behind us and spilled back into the streets above. What had been a tense single-combat turned into a full engagement between the town watch and the cultists pouring out of the dungeon entrance. We ran the same rules at detachment scale. The game kept moving. The excitement level never dropped. Nobody noticed the system shift, which is exactly how it should work.

Under the Floorboards

The scouting phase produces something most dungeon games can't: earned confidence before the delve, and earned humility during it. Players build a mental picture of the space, make plans, and go in feeling prepared.

Then memory does its work. What did you miss? What changed while you were planning? The gap between the map in your head and the reality you find is where the game lives.

The cozy register is doing real work, too. Small creatures in human spaces, looking for candles and scraps, produces a tone that's genuinely different from most dungeon games without sacrificing the tension.

The players had scouted the cellar carefully. They knew the layout, marked the shelving, planned their route. Then they went in and found it flooded. The cellar hadn't stopped changing while they planned. They needed a raft to reach the candles they'd come for. That moment, the gap between the plan and the reality, is what Under the Floorboards is made of.

The honest case for the loser

Cairn is a lens I can put over almost any adventure I already love, and that utility compounds over time. The detachment rules scale seamlessly from a knife fight to a street battle without a break in the action. That's the kind of design that earns a permanent shelf spot.

The pick

Under the Floorboards consistently produces more memorable individual sessions than Cairn. The scouting phase creates investment that most dungeon games skip, and the memory mechanic generates surprises that feel organic rather than arbitrary.

That's my pick, and I'll stand by it. Who got robbed? Tell me in the comments.