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.