Hello from Minor Planet Games. We’re a small studio—occasionally small enough to fit in one chair—and we’re making Par Under Review.

It’s a turn-based golf roguelike built around the strategic side of golf: choosing equipment, finding a route, weighing a risk, and trying to finish further under par. The rules come from real golf. What keeps surprising us is how much more we find there as we put that idea into practice.

“Think of something.”

It’s the 1930s. You work for a vast corporation that designs and builds everything. After the building boom of the twenties, it seems to have enough golf courses planned for the next two hundred years—and the paperwork to match.

Somewhere underneath that paperwork is you. You have no intention of being buried alive in it, and you know enough about golf to suspect there’s a better way of getting through the work.

Your boss’s advice is to “think of something.”

So you do.

Why cards and dice?

Imagine being that person. What have you got in your pockets?

A deck of cards already gives you suits to sort clubs into families and numbers to tell them apart. The seven of clubs becomes a seven-iron. “Clubs” is a useful coincidence. A five of hearts needs a little handwriting to become a 56° wedge. Dice give you a golfer whose execution varies from shot to shot.

We want learning the game to feel like inventing it yourself. You adapt the things at hand into tools. Your understanding of golf makes the method work.

Golf keeps answering our design questions

We began with the decisions around a shot. How much distance is worth giving up for control? Is a club still useful when it only works well in particular situations? Where does the safe route leave you for the next stroke?

As we implement those choices, we keep finding more material in golf. Equipment history supplies experiments, specialists, and clubs that eventually got themselves banned. Course architecture gives us ways to make a hole interesting. A limited bag makes choosing what to leave behind a decision of its own.

We set out to borrow from golf, and it keeps offering more than we expected. There’s enough to explore without inventing monsters, loot, or another set of rules to make the game deeper.

What already works

The core already generates complete rounds, playable from the first shot to the final scorecard. It also does the calculations: shot outcomes, probabilities, and par, measured through hundreds of simulated plays of each hole. The rules have no interest in making you fail; the target comes from how the hole actually plays.

We've connected that same core to our internal editor. We can draw a course, play it, and run simulations using the same rules as the game. We've started drawing holes after real ones, to see how well golf's own designs translate to paper.

The surprising part is how well they fit. On the holes we've tried so far, the bunkers stay where they were, the doglegs keep their angles, and the distances carry over at our scale. Even the par our simulations measure comes out the same as the real one.

What’s ahead

For clubs, the plan is the whole family. Irons and wedges are already playable. For the demo, we're aiming for a typical bag, with woods and a putter in it. Hybrids, hickory clubs, cameos, and legends will come after that.

We’re also planning weekly tournaments: four rounds of nine, with the same holes and dice for everyone. You play in your own time and compare scores, without needing a live multiplayer session. Making sure those separate rounds give everyone the same conditions is an interesting technical challenge in its own right.

We want to bring over as much of golf as makes sense for the game. Working out how these systems fit together has become one of the pleasures of making it, and we’ll share our new discoveries in future posts.

And if you’ve been thinking about handicaps: yes, that’s coming too. Golf has systems for measuring performance and allowing players of different abilities to compete. We want to explore those alongside the equipment.

Thanks for following along.

Par Under Review is available to wishlist on Steam.

— Minor Planet Games