Card Crawl Analysis

I spent a long afternoon in an E.R. waiting room over the weekend and poked away at the Card Quest app to help pass the hours.  It's an interesting little game, and I can now beat it about 3 times out of 4, but I'm not sure I can articulate an actual strategy for it.

Overall, you get cards that are either swords, shields, monsters, coins, potions, or special abilities.  The values on the cards range from 2 to 10.  Special ability cards don't have a value, but you can long-press them to see what effect they will have.  You have a hot bar with your character and three other slots: left hand, right hand, and backpack.  You drag swords and shields onto the left or right hand to equip them. 

From there, drag swords onto monsters to damage or remove them, or drag monsters onto shields to represent their attacks on you -- any points in excess of what the shield can handle are subtracted from your player, who starts with only 13 hp.  Drag potions onto either hand to heal by that number of points.  Some special ability cards have to be dragged onto your character card to activate them.  Try to drag coins onto your hotbar as well, to cash them in later.  You can always drag a card from the top row to your pack to hold onto it, and drag a card from your pack to an open hand when you need it, but sometimes you do run out of spaces to put cards.  When you are left with just one card on the top row, coins will be banked and three new cards will be dealt.

The overall flow of the game is to try and keep the total balance of mobs, swords, shields and potions in the top row less than your available hit points.  A typical play might be to pull down a shield(3) then a mob (6) and a potion(3).  That would keep your HP unchanged and call forth the next three cards.  Sometimes you just get a bad deal and might have 5 hp left but 20 points of mobs come up.  You can maybe use a special ability card to sen

d one card back to the deck, or redraw all cards.  Once in a while, you have to discard a card by dragging it to the box above the top row -- ditching a few coins is not so bad, but once or twice I have had to discard a mid-level potion.



You leave the main game and go to the Collection screen to spend your coins on new Special Ability cards.  These abilities get more interesting as the game goes along, like Reflect (take a mob's attack and send it back to random cards), Steal (which will put the next card into your bag if it's empty -- who knows, it might make a big difference) or Revive (if you die, you come back with 1 hp).

The game does not seem to level up as you play.  There are always 54 cards in the deck, and the mobs and potions never get above a strength of 10.  There are some challenge levels which start by altering one or two rules or numbers, and a daily game where you try to out-score other players, otherwise it's just the same game every time.  It's an interesting, well-balanced combination of elements.