Coin Crypt, which was the first entry in my Roguelike Deck-building Game chronology, turns 10 years old today. I’m delighted to present an interview I had with its developer, Greg Lobanov (Chicory: A Colorful Tale, Wandersong) on November 9th. I’m no natural-born interviewer, but Greg gave insightful answers, and I’m proud that how meaningful this was to both of us comes across as strongly as it does.
Discard Pile #1: One Deck Dungeon (2018)
Released on Steam early access on February 28th, 2018 by Handelabra Games, I was on the fence about One Deck Dungeon for some time before coming to the conclusion that it doesn’t actually meet my criteria for the full-entry treatment here. It’s close, though, and is fully worth checking out if what I’m about to describe sounds like something you may enjoy.
You choose a character class and enter a dungeon with several paths, which in turn feature several rooms. Most actions you take cause a turn timer to tick down, and you want to explore as much of the current dungeon floor as possible before the timer runs out and you’re forced down to the next floor. Survive as many encounters and traps as you can, accumulate XP, items and skills along the way, and move on until the run ends.
Combat and traps are a little hard to explain without some hands-on experience, but here goes. You roll several six-sided dice of various types, corresponding to different attributes of your character: strength, dexterity, magic. The class you chose at the start will affect how many of each type of dice you have. Let’s say you chose a mage and you’ve run into a skeleton. You can easily bypass its block because you’re likely to have rolled many magic-type dice, but you’re less likely to be able to stop it wasting your time or hitting you because you have fewer dexterity and strength-type dice at your disposal. Ultimately, it becomes a game of resource management and deciding when it’s best to use potions, special abilities, or even just taking damage – if you can survive even one round against most enemies and traps, you automatically win and can just move on.
Why isn’t it getting the esteemed accolade of being the twelfth ‘real’ chronological entry in this project, then? Simply put, despite the name, there isn’t enough deck-building, guv. I don’t mean in the strict sense that the game must feature literal cards to be a roguelike deck-builder – it actually refers to most of its on-screen elements as ‘cards’. I’m talking about the player having a rotatable, semi-random loadout of skills that comprise the core of engagement with the game. Even Solitairica compelled you to use its solitaire interface as a medium to constantly trigger complementary deck-like special abilities in order to offset your opponent’s abilities or damage them directly. In ODD, you can pick up a limited number of skills that affect your rolls, number of dice, health, and such, but these are more akin to potions in Slay the Spire, or triggerable D&D class features that are on cooldowns. They are very much a secondary method of negotiating challenges or mitigating risk – your primary tools are always the dice rolls and how you choose to parcel them out against the challenge’s numbers.
If you’ve played this game, you may disagree with my call here, and I’d love to hear why. My choice to omit it is not a judgement of its quality. ODD is great fun and has a ton on offer. Not only are there six character classes, there are a further TEN available as DLC if its infectious, Dicey Dungeonsesque gameplay loop gets its hooks into you. Most unique is the ability to take two characters of different classes into the dungeon at the same time and try to compensate for the need to split your rewards with the benefits brought by having more diverse dice types at your disposal. There’s no shortage of clever stuff going on here.
…After all that, I realised that it is actually based on a physical game of the same name that was released in 2016… which disqualifies it from consideration here entirely, as I’m only considering games that were originally conceived as video games. The name suddenly makes a lot more sense, though!
RDBG #11: Slay the Spire (2017)
Here we go, The Big One. If you’ve played only one game featured here, it’s extremely likely to have been Slay the Spire. If you have enjoyed almost any other game in this subgenre since its release, it likely owes inspiration (a little more than just ‘inspiration’, in some cases) to Slay the Spire… or at least the nerve to take the plunge in bringing something similar to market following its success. Indeed, this is the roguelike deck-builder’s Super Mario Bros. or Doom moment: others of its kind existed before it, and by certain criteria it has been surpassed, but here is a perfect storm of great vision and execution that guarantees its place in gaming history.
Slay the Spire was released on Steam Early Access on November 15th, 2017 by American dev team Mega Crit (incidentally in the news recently for coming out against Unity’s ludicrous per-install engine usage fee). With the majority of its core gameplay locked in, the game was given regular bug and feature patches up until January 23rd, 2019, at which point it was released for computer platforms. Far and away the most financially and critically successful game we are likely to ever look at here, it is now available for most modern console platforms and mobile. It now even exists in physical board game form… surely the greatest sign that you’ve ‘made it’ as a, er, video game.
Premise and Gameplay
Your first run will start the exact same as your thousandth. Pick one of four character classes (the latter three are unlocked over time) and away you go to see Neow, a whale-like creature that guards the spire entrance and offers you a choice of blessings, such as raising your maximum health or upgrading one of your cards at random. Your run to reach the spire’s top is split into three acts, with each ending with a boss fight. Your paths to these bosses branch, offering a variety of scenarios. There are midboss battles (here called ‘elites’, a term that seems to have stuck for other such fights in roguelike deck-builders), shops, rest areas that allow you to heal or upgrade cards, random events that may help or hinder, and the like. Some of these are signposted well in advance of you reaching them, while others are randomised, so you are able to look ahead and plot whatever path to the boss you feel may be the most beneficial. You may know you have an elite fight coming up soon, but you won’t know exactly what enemy you’ll be facing, so you may want to choose an alternate (if less rewarding branch) where possible.
We’ve already seen earlier games with both more choice and diversity in their character classes, but StS’ Ironclad, Silent, Defect and Watcher are so tightly designed and well-executed that they are genre all-timers. (I mean, bias notwithstanding… I’m writing this wearing my shirt that features all of them, aren’t I.) The Ironclad is a high-risk, high-reward fighter option, often committing to high-damage builds that often jeopardise their own health. The Silent offers more of a health-whittling, death-by-a-thousand-cuts approach. These are certainly the two that you’ll be wanting to wrap your head around the basic run flow with, but the other two aren’t that much more impenetrable – they just have greater complexity and depth.
The Defect and the Watcher, who were added later after initial early access release, are surprisingly unique and deserve more detail. The former is a robot that can stockpile ice, electric, or dark energy to either provide or block chip damage every turn, or spend it all at once in order to strike or avoid decisive blows. The latter, my personal favourite, is a monk who can switch in and out of three different stances – Calm, Wrath, and Divinity. Calm allows you to shore up card-playing energy (think Magic mana). Slipping into Wrath forces you to deal and receive double damage, so making sure you have cards in hand that take you in and out of it before the turn passes to the enemy is vital. Divinity grants you an extra 3 energy to play cards with *and* lets you deal triple damage without the fear of double-damage that comes with Wrath, but takes far longer to reach than the other two states. Indeed, all of these playstyles are so unlike one another that it almost feels like you’re playing a different game, but for none of them to feel even remotely inferior to any other (besides whatever your personal preferences are) is incredible.
Randomised Elements
Compared even to other games that came before it, StS actually feels a lot less random, and I think this has actually helped it endure in the long run. You are likely to come across certain enemies almost every run, but because your deck build will have changed, you are forced to approach them in new ways. Another thing is that most of the classes only have three or so main ‘builds’ (several variations and derivatives are possible depending on circumstances). The Silent, for example, is likely to be stacking poison on their foes or drawing and playing many as many low-damage shivs as possible. As such, you are better able to form builds earlier in runs. I think this has actually added to the game’s longevity with streamers and speedrunners. The curve of learning what your enemies and cards are capable of doing is gentle and engaging, and even masters of the game who seemingly know every ramification of every scenario like the back of their hand keep coming back for more with self-imposed challenges and a healthy modding scene.
This nicely leads me into the game’s capacity to add difficulty modifiers, called ‘Ascensions’. Completing a run with the first Ascension active (which simply adds more elite battles) unlocks the next Ascension (regular enemies deal greater damage). The wrinkle is that these stack upon one another, all the way up to Ascension 20, by which point you’ll be laboring under all manner of handicaps, such as decreased maximum HP, limited inventory slots, or mandatory unplayable cards cluttering your hand. There are people out there who are capable of beating the game at ‘A20’ with a starting deck of only eight mid-tier cards or speedrunning it in 5 minutes. None of these feel like poor design, either. Like many RPGs (and unlike competitive CCGs), working out ways to break the game over your knee is simply another valid way of enjoying it, if you’re into that. Make no mistake though, you’d have to be really bloody good.
I’ve heard it said that at their core, a video game’s enjoyment factor can be boiled down to the quality and frequency of meaningful decisions you can make during your time with it. I find that a tad reductive, but it must be said that pretty much everything you do in StS is a meaningful decision that comes with a tradeoff. Do I drink this potion now or later? Which of these boss rewards should I take? A surprising way you can bring this game to life is to grab a friend (not even necessarily one who knows how to play) and try to ‘co-op’ a run. Revel in how it suddenly takes either of you ages to work up the nerve to actually commit to a play as you argue the merits of every playable card in your hand and come closer to understanding the tightness of the design. Marvel at how situations you’d mindlessly click through and potentially misplay when alone suddenly need you to crack out the whiteboard to justify the potential consequences a turn or two from now. Complexity does not always equate to depth, and depth does not always equate to fun. Slay the Spire isn’t the most complex or deep game we’ll ever look at here, but I contend it always stays fun.
Presentation
Slay the Spire was never a knockout in the looks and sound department (excellent character design aside), but it oozes with a premium Flash-era charm with its gently-animated enemies and backgrounds. There isn’t exactly what I’d call lore to it, but the way it’s been designed gestures toward the notion that there’s a lot more going on in this place than is explained. Who are these hook-wielding cultists who dress as birds? What happens to our brave heroes after slaying the spire? You won’t get any answers, but you probably won’t want any, you’ll be too absorbed in the game itself.
The card design and artwork is nothing short of phenomenal. This is what every card-based computer game should aspire toward. Clear, legible, tonally appropriate fonts. Mechanics that can be clearly understood as keywords, and cards that can be moused over to bring up a tooltip for a reminder of what those mechanics are. Cards that rarely contain more text than 15 words. Artwork that reduces nicely to smaller displays and retains legibility. It’s all here, it’s all textbook. For a laugh, if you want to see how important good artwork can be to these games, it is possible to unlock and switch to ‘beta art’ cards that look more like the MS Paint-style cards of Dream Quest. A bit of credit is due to the UI as well: if you haven’t played it, these screenshots likely look extremely busy, but in a game with a lot of stockable and stackable mechanics, the icons, counters, and timers are very easily read and understood without being intrusive.
Closing Remarks
Slay the Spire could be both the starting and end point of your exploration into the little corner of gaming that is the roguelike deck-builder. (Obviously, I would hope you would stick with me a little longer, but you’d get the majority of all you’d need to know here!) Here’s a story that’s just about the most ringing endorsement I can give it. A year or so ago I was recovering from deviated septum surgery, which is where they basically widen one of your nasal cavities to help you breathe. Really, I should have just tried to sleep as much as possible, because staying awake through two nostrils full of constantly bleeding gauze is something you want to be awake for as little as possible. I had a Switch full of major releases I hadn’t started and an e-book full of unread stuff that this would have been the perfect opportunity to catch up on. Instead, I bought a second copy of StS for my smartphone and just started from the beginning. The hours melted away for next few days. It did a far greater job of keeping the constant discomfort out of mind than the copious painkillers.
Less anecdotally, StS could be the perfect gateway into the broader genre of CCGs without the hassle of buying physical cards and tracking down people willing to teach you the basics. The mobile/online versions of the big names like Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh! leave a lot to be desired for a number of reasons, and exist mostly to hook people into their respective franchises rather than serving as spaces for people to get a feel for if the genre is ‘for’ them in the first place. When you buy StS, there are no booster packs or metagame mechanics to worry about. Immediately accessible, easily understood, infinitely enjoyable. A credit to videogames.
Standout Cards
When I said earlier that this is a tightly designed game, one example is that you can actually feel the rigorous playtesting throughout. There aren’t a million cards in it, and most of them only do two things at most, but they are extremely well-considered and versatile puzzle pieces. YouTube has countless tier lists of what experts consider the best cards to be, with a surprising lack of consensus. This suggests a remarkable balance that caters to a wide range of playstyles. With that in mind, here’s one I like for each of the four classes:
RDBG #10: Hand of Fate 2 (2017)
Released on November 7th, 2017, Hand of Fate 2 is the first direct sequel we’ve seen to something covered here. Unbeknownst to me at the time of writing about the first game, it is also Australian dev Defiant Development’s final game – the company went defunct in July 2019. Founder Morgan Jaffit has chalked their closure up to a failure to adapt to the changing nature of the game market and the risks taken in making their games. Ultimately, it sounds like the games weren’t selling enough to recoup what they were spending on making them. This is deeply unfortunate, because the Hand of Fate games are some of the most polished and graphically impressive things we’re likely to see in this genre, and the refinements made to the game’s formula make it easy to recommend over its already enjoyable predecessor.
Premise and Gameplay
Largely being an enhancement of the first Hand of Fate’s formula, I will not go back over much of the background in my post on the first game. In brief, the Dealer, having suffered his first loss at your hands in the first game, returns to narrate your traversal through “22 paths of wisdom and despair”. As before, you navigate your way around a card-based game board, managing resources and equipment as you make choose-your-own-adventure style story decisions and fight enemies in real-time action rather than turn-based card combat. Rather than collecting and playing cards during a run, you select a pool of cards you may or may not come across during the run, affecting the equipment and scenarios you will encounter.
The biggest modification is the expansion of the concept from simply surviving a run to taking risks through exploration. The object of the original game was to endure movement around the board long enough to get to the next floor, eventually reaching and defeating a boss. Exploration is now encouraged by walling off access to the boss until certain criteria are met. There are different extents to which runs can be completed, as well. Many will deem you successful if you rout the boss, but extra rewards can be obtained for completing all the objectives.
You aren’t adventuring alone anymore, either: you can have a companion alongside you. Companions offer a variety of support, such as using ranged magic or acting as a secondary melee attacker to draw enemy attention while you focus on walloping someone else. Enemies now have different resistances and weaknesses to certain equipment, and you can even unlock further benefits from your weapons by using them a set number of times in a specific way. This helps to mitigate a problem with the previous game where equipment choice was almost always a no-brainer exercise in sticking to the weapons and armour with the highest stats.
Combat is still melee focused and feels a little more responsive this time around. Little icons appear if an enemy can be hit with a special or finishing move, which I’m grateful for because it used to be easy to forget to ever use them and just hammer the normal attack button if things got hairy. You will likely still do a lot of that anyway, but with the greater variety in enemy types, you are encouraged to at least think about changing your approach from time to time. Your character still does the thing where they will ‘slide’ toward the nearest enemy in range if you press attack but you aren’t close to anyone, as though ice skating in their direction, but it isn’t as egregiously obvious. I don’t think it does anything particularly innovative or exciting to sell you on this style of combat if you aren’t already a fan of it, but I think credit should be given that this is still a novel form of engagement for this early in the genre.
Other improvements may not be apparent unless you played the original. A big one for me was the moment I noticed that travelling over previous-visited spaces no longer consumes food, enabling exploration greatly. You can now camp at any time to restore health and trade for items, but the risk of running out of food and starving remains. On the whole, a greater amount of important decision-making is on offer at any one time, and that’s usually a good thing.
Randomised Elements
Not a whole lot new on this front, but there are two things I deem worth bringing up here. The first game had a bit of a difficulty issue whereby 85% of the campaign missions could be fairly easily blasted through on your first try if you were good enough at the action combat and were careful with your equipment, until the last two or three missions stonewalled you by making you likelier to come across bad cards that sapped your health and resources, leaving you in poor stead for the boss fight. This has been addressed by rebalancing the difficulty curve. I started getting game overs around the 5-6 mission mark, but these were rarely things that couldn’t be overcome without a little more thought about rebuilding my deck and a second try. By endgame, you are spending a good bit of time before a run choosing exactly what you hope to come across in your deck instead of just hitting the ‘Recommend’ button and hoping for good RNG, as it now makes more of a difference.
Another feature that I think may be more controversial is the addition of more purely luck-based minigames on top of the random success-failure cards from the first game (which also make a return appearance here). The most curious of these is a dice game, where you roll three dice and must beat a certain number for a positive outcome. This is novel the first time you play it, but because the only action you can take if you fail is to reroll one dice, it quickly becomes uninvolving. I can think of an easy way that this could have been improved: have the Dealer roll against you (perhaps within a certain range) and have the result of his roll hidden until you make your own, not unlike rolling against your DM in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Perhaps there was a development reason they wanted these instances to have a definite hard-set number you must pass, but as it stands, there’s little engagement to it, especially as you can’t quit partway through.
Presentation
It’s hard to tell in static screenshots, but a lot of care has been taken to liven up enemy encounters and locations. Enemy typing is a lot more diverse now, and I’m happy to notice that the lighting has better direction now, meaning you can get a much better look at the models now. Your own character’s appearance and clothing is now even partly customisable. The font is less ye-olde-traditional looking, but it is much more immediately readable, which is definitely the right call to make for a text-heavy game.
The vocal performance of Anthony George Skordi as the Dealer is once again the standout here. I honestly think the HoF games would only be half of what they are without this character, and that’s very unusual for a genre that lives or dies by its gameplay mechanics. HoF2 is a great example of how a little bit of good writing goes a long way to keeping someone coming back to a game, and the Dealer’s voice samples invite you to consider the worldview of the game beyond what’s simply written on the cards. At times aloof and condescending while always waxing philosophical, he seems to equally delight and despair when you overcome his challenges. Lines like “I never understood the duel. If you’re at war, use every tool at your disposal. If you’re not, let things lie” give you a bit of a window into his mindset but he’s every bit the enigma he was in the first game. I also noticed a bit less repetition in his voice clips between runs, which greatly helps his credibility as a ringleader overseeing your whole journey.
Jeff van Dyck returns on the OST, doing a spectacular job staying within the tone and motifs of the first game while expanding on the instrumentation. Voices, wind instruments and acoustic guitars get more of a look in here. Surprisingly, some of the tracks border on Zimmeresque bombast. Defeating any encounter brings with it an almost deafening celebratory blast of synthy horns. I’m personally delighted that winning a run brings with it a new but equally exciting guitar piece while you pore over the spoils you can carry into future runs. I’m going to make a point of looking into other games purely on the basis of his scores.
Closing Remarks
It saddens me to think that this is perhaps the last we’ll see from Hand of Fate as a series. I think 2 came very close to perfecting its formula. Having said that, given how hyper-competitive the indie space is, perhaps we should be grateful it even got a sequel with this much love and refinement to begin with. There’s three packs of DLC I have yet to dive into. Quite honestly, I actually would like to keep them to one side as a treat. I know that it’s only a matter of time before I will get the itch to challenge the Dealer once again.
Standout Cards
Cards in HoF2 are significantly more involved than their predecessor. As such, the compendium doesn’t offer up full details of a card’s dialogue or functions – those surprises are saved for the game itself. The compendium simply shows how cards can affect a run mechanically.
RDBG #9: Monster Slayers (2017)
Monster Slayers has a little history that goes beyond even the earliest-released game we’ve looked at on this blog. Its roots lie in a 2010 browser game on Kongregate with the same name, which you can play for yourself here. Mechanically, this 2017 overhaul (released on March 23rd) doesn’t have a lot to do with that earlier game, despite some surface resemblances. While it does share a good deal of that Newgrounds-era Flash charm in its character designs, the original had none of the deckbuilding, so I’m not going to be making any further comparisons between the two. Both were developed by Malaysian one-man-studio Nerdook Productions. We’ve seen a good few small-team games in this chronological series already, but in terms of raw features and content, Monster Slayers is fairly staggering in its scope.
Premise and Gameplay
Monster Slayers isn’t too big on story, as you may be able to surmise from its rather plain title. (I don’t want to rag on it too much, but as game names go, my eyes just slide over the words Monster Slayers and they do not stick in my brain.) Start a file, choose a class for your character and a handful of cosmetic elements affecting their appearance, and away you go to clobber evildoers and explore dungeons. In addition to the roguelike deck-building, the game also wants to give you the added gradual joy of developing a character, not unlike how you would in classic dungeon crawlers like Wizardry. Your character can come across bits of equipment, level up, and gain companions with abilities you can trigger to help your party leader out of tight spots by drawing new cards, blocking incoming damage, and so on.
Strengthening your character is as key to your chances of surviving a run as the cards you gather. Similar to Dream Quest (which openly receives an acknowledgement in the title screen), the dungeon maps show you a few locations around where you currently are, allowing you to plan the order that you take on enemies. You can fight things of similar or lower level for safer battles, or you can take on something higher level to get more experience points and level up sooner. Levelling up also restores all of your health, which doesn’t automatically regenerate between fights, so this can be something fairly integral to consider. You will take on three dungeons before fighting the final boss, so even choosing the order you want to clear the maps is important. For example, if you have a fire-based card or two, it’s probably in your interests to do the ice dungeon sooner than others because the enemies are more likely to be vulnerable to those attacks. Your main character is likely to be strong against a handful of enemy types and weak against certain others, so developing a sense of which enemies your class is going to struggle against over multiple runs also becomes part of the strategy.
Combat? Take turns choosing the best possible cards from your hand and hope it’s not you who stops moving first. There’s a lot of plates to keep spinning that you need to keep an eye on. Besides health and blocking points, there are two major energies to keep track of, mana and ‘action points’, which are required to play magic and action cards respectively. Wizards will be more reliant on stockpiling the former rather than the latter, whereas clerics may want to balance both so that they have access to various spells and standard attack cards. There are a lot of classes here, too: 14 of them, with 6 being ‘base’ classes, 6 being ‘advanced’ unlockable variants of those 6, and then a further 2 that come with the Fire and Steel DLC pack. In fact, you can even pay to unlock the advanced classes if you so desire, but doing so could rob you of one of the largest incentives to beat the game in the first place. Further to this is weaponry and armour that not only change your character’s damage resistances and output, but even the cards in your deck. If you like your deck-builders to be fairly granular in their systems, this is probably the most involving one we’ve looked at yet.
Randomised Elements
Monster Slayers has randomness for days: the enemies you can encounter, the rewards you can choose upon levelling up, the cards, items and upgrades that healers offer, and the order you take on the dungeons… all these and more are different every time. Given the genre, it’s redundant to trot out the ‘no-two-runs-the-same’ selling-point line, but certainly we’ve seen games that feel very similar run-to-run even if they’re not literally repeating themselves on a move-for-move basis. Monster Slayers can feel radically different every run. This is good, because I don’t find it an easy game, so having the variety between runs kick in early stopped me from getting bored fighting my way back to the point my previous run ended. Obviously, different classes lend themselves to alternative playstyles. If you enjoy playing as a Wizard, for example, you may find that the big ‘kill’ card in your deck is different each time and needs to have certain elements in place to be triggered: enough mana, an enemy with certain weaknesses, and so on. Physical attackers like the Barbarian won’t be waiting around for certain cards because all of their attacks will do heavy damage – unless, of course, an enemy resists physical, which will require a backup plan of some sort.
A little credit I want to give in an area where randomness is noticeably absent: the player themselves has a good bit of input in the rewards they unlock between runs. Upon a run’s end, players gain ‘fame’ points based on how far they progressed and how many enemies they fought. (This also functions as a placement system for players to participate in an online leaderboard.) These can be spent on unlocking things like new cards, equipment, and passive advantages for future runs. The nice thing is that you choose each reward yourself. If you prefer to play as the Knight, then you need only buy perks that affect the Knight or all the classes in general, rather than being rewarded with boons for classes you aren’t as interested in.
Presentation
Definitely another one of those games that you will know immediately from a few screenshots whether or not it is something you can put up with looking at for several hours. I’m old enough to remember spending afternoons after school watching Flash animations on Newgrounds that looked a lot like this. I look at this and it gives me a little nostalgia that I appreciate won’t be the case for everyone. Most of the characters look like souped-up stickpeople – take them for what you will.
The UI puts a lot of the information you may need in front of you at all times. It’s a little cluttered, and the font sizes are a bit small, but because combat turns play out very quickly (not a bad thing from a time-saving perspective) you may need access to all this information at any moment. Another minor irritant is that it doesn’t always tell you what cards do in every context. For example, if you visit an altar, you may be able to gain a powerful card in exchange for some downside, like enemies being buffed. Unfortunately, there’s no way to know what the card does until you pick it up. Hovering over the name of the card won’t provide you with a tooltip or anything. Sadly, this means I’m almost never inclined to take these exchanges because not having access to the information you need to come to a decision makes it too random to be worth doing.
In my time with the game, I would say that I heard roughly 10 or so minutes of original music in it. With dozens of hours of gameplay if it gets its hooks into you, you may want to switch it out with your own after a while. It’s faux-orchestral bombastic fare; thematically fitting as background noise but not melodious enough to lodge in the memory. Something about the synthetic quality of the music in combination with the hand-drawn art certainly does add to the general uncanny sense that you’re playing an extremely well-developed Flash game, despite obviously being far more mechanically complex than anything Flash could run. It feels like I should be using a proxy site to get around an URL blocker on the school computers just to access it. Good times.
Closing Remarks
I have an inkling that, years from now, when this project is a few dozen or so posts deep and I start winding down on it, Monster Slayers is one of the games that I’ll come back to first so I can more fully take in the enormity of its depth. I found myself taking too much time thinking about each round, but that’s on me. Ultimately, the only thing that matters is maximising your chances of drawing your best cards as often as possible and always having the requisite resources to play them. However, because there is a lot of minutiae you can take advantage of, I sometimes lost sight of that and would get paralysed by my own decision-making process. Still, that’s hardly the game’s fault, and I look forward to coming back for the many stones I’ve still left unturned.
Standout Cards
Choosing just three cards isn’t easy, as there are four major card types (attack, support, magic, and interrupt) and many are upgradeable, but hopefully these three provide a taste of the level of depth going on here.
Shrunken Shrine 
