Dungeon Crawler mechanic

Well, tile reveal maps are pretty well tread ground by now. Off-hand, I'm thinking Warhammer Quest, Claustrophobia, Dungeons and Dragons: Castle of Ravenloft, Descent, Dungeonquest, Room 25, Dungeon Twister, Mansions of Madness, Betrayal at House on the Hill . . . and so on. There are a lot, particularly if theme isn't an issue. Betrayal is generally regarded as one of the better ones in terms of what you are looking for.

One option would be to place tiles face down at each "open" edge of the map.

In reality this is no different from drawing a random tile when the player moves off the edge, but psychologically it is different because the left and right choices are "already there" so it feels like the player is making a choice (even though it's a fake choice).

The other upside is that it allows you to have abilities which peek at face down tiles, thus truly giving the players a choice.

The downside is that you need more tiles in the deck than if you only draw them when a player moves off the edge.

Regards,
kos

In my prototype, each player develops its own dungeon that later get invaded by the other players. One cannot invade its own dungeon. This way, the dungeon makes sense, has logic behind its design because a player thought of it, for example by protecting its heart room or by trying to add forks to divert the invaders to dead-ends. When a player places a tile, the other players do not see what it is because it is covered by a "mask" tile (another tile from storage that is flipped recto-verso, the verso being white). This way, one can only guess the general shape of the neighbor dungeon, not its exact content.
Of course, once done in reality, lifting each mask in order to do some dungeon action below is not practical, but it has advantages.

You could also pre-build 100 layouts of a dungeon (ask 4 players to design 25 layout secretly) then pick one at random, so that nobody would know the layout for the first half of the game. Sooner or later the designer would recognize his/her own design but not at first. Once the designer recognizes its design, he can keep quiet to let the other players enjoy the surprise and discovery feeling.

So much of “discovery” is thematic.

I have a fun idea for a dungeon crawl, but revealing tiles isn’t enough on its own. If you want the exploration of the map itself to be a hilight, you really need to add sections of unexplored “mystery spaces” or something similar.

I always liked the idea of what happens in Caverna, where tiles build on top of each other and modify everything underneath. I just have a hard time getting that to work with my dungeon crawl in development.