Card Crawl

Card Crawl is an odd mix of game elements.  It says that it's designed as a sort of solitaire card game, which is accurate.  The idea is to get all the way through the deck of cards using the swords, shields and potions to overpower whatever monsters come up.  There are also cards with coins and a few special powers.  

The dealer deals 4 cards on the top row.  You can put sword, shields, potions, specials or coins into your hand or you backpack on the bottom row.  The idea is to play higher numbers onto those monsters and take the remainder as damage.  Once you clear three cards, the dealer deals three more.

At the very top of the screen it says how many cards are left in the deck.

It's pretty simple.  I'm not feeling a lot of strategy or depths here.  It boils down to whether you get the cards you need or not.  If four 10-point creatures come up on top, there's not going to be much you can do about it.  But it is balanced nicely, and I was able to win a few.  My very first game, I beat the deck but lost my very last hit point on that very last card, so that was a loss.

After a few games, I gave it a shrug, but after looking around the main menu I found more options.  There was an Arena page with various challenges.  These are pretty interesting: you start with different HP, and it tells you what other tweaks will affect the hand, whether swords are worth more, shields are worth less.  It looks like there are special cards that only come up in these challenges, including one called Champion which you can drag onto your character to win the hand right away.

It looks like there are a variety of extras to unlock.  I will poke it some more this weekend and see what I can find out.  It is a low-key game with simple but likeable graphics