Slay the Spire
One of the absolute defining games of its genre, Slay the Spire is great fun for virtually endless hours of play. It is a game where your decisions have a massive impact on performance (and while RNG does play a role, it typically won’t make or break a run unless you need an absolute miracle to succeed in a given fight. It is however, very light on lore and exposition. I personally don’t mind the lack of frills, and it does come together very nicely thematically and aesthetically. However, to try to provide a well-rounded review, I admit that is the one complaint I have heard from one or two friends who play the game.
– Real player with 1367.5 hrs in game
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Quite simply, the best deckbuilder I’ve ever played. I only have one other game in my library that I’ve played more than Slay the Spire, and it’s a multiplayer survival game which is made to eat time.
The balance in StS isn’t perfect, of course, but it’s the closest I’ve seen. The developers really have a talent for incorporating interesting card mechanics that don’t devolve into a slew of broken effects. Decks tend to snowball if you build them intelligently (and probably get a little lucky), but I find this to be extremely rewarding - more often than not, the game is extremely brutal at higher difficulty levels, so it feels great when a well-played deck demolishes everything in sight. This works in the other direction as well: a few bad card choices will get you dead with a quickness.
– Real player with 553.3 hrs in game
Poker Quest
For reference, this is a game I’ve played for hundreds and hundreds of hours since late 2019, so it’s seen me through some times. At first, it was killing downtime doing research, then it was procrastination through exam times, now it’s more an evening waltz after work. I’ve also seen the game go through various changes and improvements and for me there’s a few things that are intrinsic - a baseline attraction.
At its essence it’s a permadeath crawler; there are modes with upgrades and custom runs to sustain all that modding goodness for different audiences too, but Classic is the core. Discrete runs, with randomness as a key feature. That’s actually a strong positive; that there are thousands of items, different map nodes and cards in battles and you have to figure a way through it all. There is a lot of variety, but the beauty is that there is almost always a path through to victory. Fidelity to randomness is great, it gives the game an innate value of honesty and keeps runs fresh. I think realising that even though there’s a devotion to true randomness, essentially every run is winnable makes it exciting and not ‘unfair’ for example.
– Real player with 297.5 hrs in game
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Poker Quest is a fantastic roguelike, With a lot to offer in its current state! As mentioned in the description, the combat is very similar to Dicey Dungeons, but with a Poker card deck instead of dice. If you aren’t familiar with Dicey Dungeons, essentially the way this combat works is that you draw a hand full of cards (the amount you draw per turn can be upgraded), and then you have various equipment that you collect and upgrade throughout the run, that are triggered by inserting cards into them, and all have various requirements for what cards can be put inside of them (Needing a flush, straight, or pair of a certain size, occasionally the equipment effects are increased based on the value of cards inserted, etc)
– Real player with 241.6 hrs in game
Dicey Dungeons
Dicey Dungeons is the best card-based roguelike out there.
I love card-based roguelikes, and I love Dicey Dungeons even more than Slay the Spire, heck, even more than Dream Quest. I’ve enjoyed over 200 hours of play (including pre-release versions I helped playtest, for which I received a free copy of the game) and will enjoy plenty more. Why? Depth, replayability, and sense of humor.
Once you’ve completed episode 1 with each character, you’ve barely scratched the surface of what Dicey Dungeons has to offer. Unlike some of Terry Cavanagh’s other games, Dicey Dungeons’s difficulty is pleasantly curvy! Casual players can enjoy the game, starting with the simpler classes. Hardcore players will be challenged by the more complex classes, and episodes 4 and 6 for each class.
– Real player with 226.1 hrs in game
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tl;dr: If you like tactically tussling with RNG, Dicey Dungeons is easy to get into, but has a lot of surprises in store for you whenever you think you’ve gotten the gist of it. Terry Cavanagh is an excellent developer.
Full review: Great visuals, fantastic music, and quickly becoming one of my favorite indie games yet. Be warned, it’s moderately buggy and could use some small QoL improvements. If you don’t like RNG you probably shouldn’t play this (do I gotta say this?) but it’s not strictly unfair, rewarding on-the-spot thinking a lot. There’s a lot of ways to optimize your gameplay. Be prepared to get dunked on, as enemies can roll well just like you can, but runs are short for a TBS “roguelite”, at 30-45 minutes, so losing isn’t devastating in a vacuum~ This game opens up in unexpected ways as you go. Be prepared for change, and chaos.
– Real player with 162.7 hrs in game
DungeonTop
Beware that initial playthroughs may frustrate you. It is recommended you start out with the Warrior and the Shield icon, it’s just easie to surviver. Also you need to remain picky about cards. If you die, you have to start over. You can save after each battle and you can kill program if you’re losing.
Really love this game. Graphics, music, mechanics, it all comes together very well and it’s highly addictive.
Much less random than other rogue games like Darkest Dungeon and more strategic, giving more choice each turn. It also has more interesting cards to offer than most deck builders and a game board adds brilliant chess like strategy element where position matters a great deal.
– Real player with 40.9 hrs in game
Story
At the beginning of the game, you select and play as a hero. Long ago, there were legends of a place known as the Grand Forge. This was a city whose citizens were so adept at creating that they could bend the fabric of reality itself, using their skills to create whatever they wanted. The story begins three years after something called the Steel Curse has blighted civilization, causing black iron gates to crop up and manifest countless waves of monsters within the walls of major cities. The hero you select will gather an army (and minions and strange cards that do other things) and traverse the levels of the dungeons in an attempt to quell the monster attacks forever.
– Real player with 31.6 hrs in game
Card Quest
This game is like if FTL and a modern digital card game had a baby with most of the fun parts of both and none of the flaws.
You build your run from the start out of pieces of equipment, each of these pieces of equipment come with cards that make up your deck. For example, a sword comes with 3 sword hacks and 1 sword stab. This is how you build your deck. Unlike any other roguelike i’ve played, there are very little upgrades you can get within the middle of a run. In fact, there isn’t really any. Every single stage comes with a piece of equipment or upgrade to a piece of equipment, but these carry over run to run and mostly serve to give you more options. You don’t slowly build up a run as you play it, you build your run from the start and see how far you can get.
– Real player with 126.2 hrs in game
This is a tentative recommendation. I enjoyed the game, but not quite for the reasons I expected.
When I bought this game, I expected it to be something of a ‘deck-building’ game, when it’s really more of a resource-management game. That is to say I expected to theorycraft some overpowered decks by finding hidden synergies between card packs, but the way the game is designed causes most card packs to only work with a few others, and it’s fairly obvious which ones go together and which ones don’t.
– Real player with 106.3 hrs in game
Solitairica
Introduction, basics of gameplay
It’s a really interesting spin on your typical Solitaire formula. The addition of different enemy types (with own skills and passives), spells, equipment slots and deck types gives the game surprising depth. Solitairica also requires some real thought, especially if you want to get through to the end, regardless of whether it’s a Normal or an Elite run.
The “meat” of the game is gauntlet-type journey, with 18/28 battles and final boss. A single successful run takes anywhere from an hour to three, luckily there’s option to save & quit. And you’ll have to do plenty of runs to unlock and complete everything. I’ve spent well over 60 hours so far and I still have few deck types that I didn’t complete Elite difficulty with yet. If you like puzzle, strategy and/or card games then you should enjoy your time here.
– Real player with 155.7 hrs in game
Target Audience: .Those who like spider solitaire and Roguelites.
Summary:
While the base game may not EXACTLY spider solitaire, it uses the core game concept, and adds a layer of combat and skill to it. And what does that do? It makes an addictive game that I planned to play 4 hours to get my first impressions. Instead, I ended up playing 14+. This should tell you something. Using skills to turn a defeat into a victory was always satisfying, and a game that was great to play in the background while I was watching YouTube videos. The different classes and items helped to keep the variety up, while buying news skills and changing up strategies was great to see what new combination I could put together next. The game could use a few tweaks to make it more of a streamlined experience, and the developer seems to be taking feedback after he watched the video review I produced. And I would like to see the game on the iOS/Android platform, as I think it’d work really well there. But even for what may seem like a higher price compared to other solitaire/card games out there, Solitaircia delivered in some addictive gameplay, and made my other reviews that much harder, with the time I spent on this one.
– Real player with 96.3 hrs in game
For The Warp
As others have pointed out, this game has a lot of great features and has some compelling gameplay. However, there are three things that kill it for me because they lead too far down the path of heavy RNG.
- The shuffler makes no sense. The fact that you don’t discard cards and that every time you draw a hand that you are pulling from your entire deck is against the foundation of what a deck builder game is supposed to be. It has all of the other facets of how to build and manipulate your deck but the player should be drawing from a shuffled stack and continue to do such until the discard pile needs to be shuffled back in. I might have been less opposed to this if you could freely discard cards from your deck without needing to pay for it or have NPC’s want to buy them during events. But as it stands, it is far to easy to get a 18-20 card deck and that is far too much RNG when doing pool draws.
– Real player with 12.2 hrs in game
As others have stated, FTL meets slay the spire.
HUGE potential here. I think a few things need reworked.
1. Balance: jmzero’s review goes in depth.
2. No discard pile: this i feel is an odd design choice, since there’s no discard pile, all cards used immediately go back to the deck, so attaining any new card is a constant lower percentile of getting any card in your deck on every turn. So you may never see your new card in play…ever. Since the deck is shuffled every turn. This is poor design, you cant structure synergy here, as you are constantly threatened to draw the same cards over and over. This just feeds into the balance problem, of “just grab the most OP cards and scrap the rest”
– Real player with 9.3 hrs in game
Banners of Ruin
I do not play deckbuilders if I can help. I’m not really down for the whole card system usually and I think Slay the Spire was the only exception. I’ve tried others in the past and none of them really stuck. This one was baller, I dig the art style and the card system isn’t overBEARing. I’m sure some folks that play this games primarily may find it easy but for a noob, it’s awesome. Even the music gets you pumped and it is very much like a choose your own adventure.
That being said, there’s not really a lot of content to the game and I kinda wish there was more to it. I didn’t even know I beat the game, I thought it was just the first part or something and then abruptly ended. Still, that didn’t keep me from coming back and playing it again and again.
– Real player with 40.0 hrs in game
TLDR: If you don’t have enough patience to read this review then you don’t have enough patience to play this game I assure you. That being said, it has a LOT of redeeming qualities and is worth a look for anyone who likes deck builders or games similar to Slay the Spire.
Let me start off by saying that I REALLY want to love this game and it is pretty good in spite of its faults. I was raised on CCGs and the advent of deck builders has given the genre a fresh and new take that I thoroughly enjoy and Slay the Spire, a game which I have played into the ground. (Ascension 20 on most characters) Ever since I have been looking for the next StS and there have been some decent offerings, but none have managed to capture my attention in quite the same way. Because of this when I saw this game come up on my store page and watched some gameplay I was immediately sold.
– Real player with 27.2 hrs in game
Blood Card
Yeah so, this is a Slay the Spire-esque game. That type of labeling can cut several ways. If you dislike this game, then it’s a cheap rip-off. If you like Blood Card, then it’s an homage that gives you more of what you like.
This purchaser and player likes this Slay the Spire inspiration quite a bit. I’m up to 45 hours with it and it’s getting even more enjoyable.
PROS:
1. You love Slay the Spire, this follows in its footsteps.
2. TONS of CARDS with all kinds of advantages and disadvantages. Some are pretty much what you see out of StS but so many are not. I’m only a couple of hours in and I’m thinking over and over about which cards to use and how.
– Real player with 170.8 hrs in game
TL;DR - Blood Card is what would have happened if The Kid from Bastion came back into an alternate reality after fighting the Zaun where he hung out with the crowd from Darkest Dungeon and got really into Magic the Gathering.
My actual opinions: Blood Card is a game I genuinely took a risk on purchasing. Games are starting to get more expensive because of taxes but I saw the aesthetic of the game and I thought “Huh this might be the first deck building game I’ll ever own” and to be honest? Blood Card is amazing. Its replayability is super high. Its' aesthetic is great. It’s so inexpensive and so well-crafted and constantly being updated. I can’t honestly really speak any negatives about it.
– Real player with 65.4 hrs in game
Monster Slayers
This game has more than what meets the eye. From the other reviews I am sure you have a good idea of what game this is, but I am here to talk about the depth of the gameplay. I know for a lot of card game fans and rogue-like gamers out there this is important.
The game can seem to get boring after you find yourself discovering everything. After you seen the cards, beat the boss, played the rogue class, farmed some items, maxed out talents, etc. But, you haven’t tried legendary mode. This is where the real game begins.
– Real player with 112.3 hrs in game
This is a fantastic rogue-lite deck-building RPG.
The various classes are almost all very interesting, and often lead to varying play styles. The rogue-lite progress allows you to upgrade both individual classes in interesting ways (e.g. replace some crappy cards in the starting deck with one or another set of replacements), and generally upgrade all characters (e.g. make it more likely to get better loot at the end of combat).
The moment-to-moment gameplay is very solid. It’s got a good set of mechanics that allow for some strategy and making interesting choices during combat, and the enemies you face are playing by exaclty the same rules (albeit with very different decks).
– Real player with 46.3 hrs in game