Card Crawl Adventures

 

As much as I like the Card Crawl app with its streamlined deck of battle cards, I have had a hard time trying to figure out the more elaborate Card Crawl Adventures.  It's very similar, with a lot of the same card graphics, but it has been expanded to a world map full of taverns with different parameters, each leading to a table with a 3x3 grid of cards.  It looks like you are supposed to select some path through those cards, spending an action point for each card, and possibly taking HP damage along the way.  But the cards have a lot of text and symbols on them, and it's not clear to me what the outcome is going to be.

 

Overall, for each tavern you have 3 goals: defeat a set number of mobs, defeat the boss, and get the treasure.  There are cards for all of these, and a card to leave the maze.  At the end it will remind you whether you met all the objectives, but I didn't pay much attention to whatever points or rankings it used.  But I don't get the mechanics of why cards come back from the discard pile or why they don't.

The tutorial said it was keeping things simple, but it feels like it skipped all the important details.  It sounds like, if you choose a card certain actions are triggered, but if you leave it on the table, it's Endure action is triggered instead.  Other cards have an Ambush option which triggers when it is dealt. I get that some cards can refill you action points or HP, and there are interludes that offer you refills or other options.  After each battle, you get an option to add a card type or upgrade a card type.



To get the treasure, there are various pieces of keys to find.  On the first battle, there are just two halves of the key, but in later battles I saw three key pieces and they had to be opened from a specific direction.  Once you get the keys, the chest card is shuffled into the deck.  I also saw a chest that could only be opened by destroying a card, but I saw no way to select a card to destroy it, so maybe it meant you destroy the chest card (by selecting it) to unlock it?

Once you beat the required number of mobs, the boss card is shuffled into the deck.  If the flow of the actions made more sense, I'd say this was a very inviting puzzle to wade through.  I guess I will keep poking at it.

I like the graphical style of this developer's games.  I installed a few others and will describe them soon, but I want to spend more time on the Card Crawl apps before moving on to others.

I had fun watching this video just now, of player called Retromation trying to understand what was going on.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Idle Planet Miner: Selling Your Galaxy

Image
Back in Idle Planet Miner, production was starting to bog down, with crafts taking an hour apiece, and sometimes needing hundreds of items to unlock new research.  So, I figured it would be a good time to test out their "Sell Your Planet" feature, which has so many people online asking questions. These idle games can't level up through an infinite many items, so they all have this same kind of game reset mechanism.  In Idle Planet Miner, the Sell Galaxy button shows you the value of your galaxy and how many credits you will get for it.  These credits are a kind of meta currency, letting you buy new rooms for your ships, with each new room offering a different game boost.  Clicking the Sell button will show you exactly what you will lose: all planets, cash, ores, alloys, items, research.  Which sounds terrible.  But you get to keep your dark matter, your managers, your beacon buffs (though you will have to research the Beacon again to get it back on screen),...
Read more

Ancient Games Book

Image
I had a former coworker contact me to say her mom had a weird book of old games, so we met up, and it turned out to be the classic Irving Finkel "Ancient Board Games" produced by the British Museum.  Dr. Finkel is a leading expert on ancient board games, and the book covers four classics: Senet, Mehen, Hounds an Jackals and the Royal Game of Ur.  The Royal Game of Ur is one of our favorites from this era, and was one of the first games I covered in this blog series.  I was familiar with the others, but never had a decent board to play on. The book comes with a little plastic tray with four throwing sticks and 8 playing pieces for each of two colors.  In each set, one piece is larger than the others, being the "lion" in the Mehen game. After dabbling with these games for about 45 minutes, we kept having problems picking up the perfectly smooth throwing sticks, and there was no clear distinction between the flat side and rounded side, aside from the subtle shape. ...
Read more

Hounds and Jackals

Image
Continuing with the book of ancient board games, the Hounds and Jackal board is gorgeous.  Every painted crack or chip in the supposedly wooden surface added character.  The original artifacts had holes in the board, and the pieces were little carvings of hounds and jackals on pegs.  Moving chips around the board was good enough to get the feel of it.  It's a simple race game, trying to get your pieces to the top of tree and off the board first.  There were no tricky rules for the throwing sticks.  You roll, you move. Since there were a few spaces with "slides", it's hard to not feel like you're playing a scaled down Snakes & Ladders game.  Some of these game ideas really do span most of human history.  There are also a few spaces with a little cross on them, where you roll again if you land there. The game was simple, and only took about 10 minutes.  This one had the most interesting set of variations discussed on the back page, since di...
Read more