![]() You have to balance your offense and defense but not just with attack and block cards – the swapping of your characters’ positions is a huge factor, too. You need to know how to build combos and, more importantly, how to then execute those big threats and work on making them more consistent. To succeed in this game you need to know how to manage your resources very well. What it does with the lean selection at hand is what really counts, though. There’s hardly any story and the list of unlockable cards and gems is worryingly short. These are things which Roguebook doesn’t have at all. I recently reviewed Tainted Grail: Conquest with high praise for its interesting, dark narrative and huge array of cards and classes to unlock and revel in. The downside for some is that this makes Roguebook probably the most complex video game adaptation of the deck-builder/card game medley available. Garfield, if you’re reading this, please help get Netrunner back on its feet! I suppose this isn’t much of a surprise when the team have as much experience as they do in exactly these spaces plus the mind of Richard Garfield. Many games handle this mish-mash of design well – Roguebook may just do it best. Card games are also infinitely more complex in their design, which is easily seen by the amount of text and keywords a single card can contain. Card games, however, limit the player because of each card’s inherent cost, or via some other mechanic (see Keyforge ), and, more often than not, don’t fully replenish a player’s hand each turn. In fact, it actually provides you with the resources to buy new cards. The main difference between these ideas is that in a classic deck-builder you pretty much always want to play your entire hand every turn because it doesn’t cost resources to do so. Video game deck-builders are actually a hybrid of deck-builders and card games, like Magic the Gathering or, my personal favourite, the Final Fantasy Trading Card Game (available now at your local game store *wink*). The thing is, board game deck-builders are very, very different. The trick? Take inspiration from card games. So, naturally, as that genre started to move across into the digital space I was pumped, if a little nervous, but fortunately it has been a huge success! They very easily could have flopped by not innovating during the transition but developers quickly discovered how to build on those core concepts in ways you can really only do via video games (without adding a ton of upkeep and melting your brain). See, I’m a big board game fan and deck-building is easily one of my favourite mechanics – it just feels great to see what you’ve created mesh together as you snowball momentum or crumble as you hurry to find the missing piece of the puzzle. All told, a very unsatisfying experience.Over the past year I have played a lot of deck-builders, rogue-lite or otherwise. But I have a feeling that the game literally goes easy on you for your first play, and if that's true, I don't like it. Now, this COULD be because they keep adding new cards as you progress (you pick up these map pieces that add cards, I think I ultimately got about 80 of them), and IMHO the new cards never impressed - maybe my hands literally got worse. I read online of a few people saying they got super far on their first attempt. Then reality hit and I never got past the 2nd boss. Oh, one other thing that was weird: Literally my first or second time through, I got through to the 3rd (final? I'm not sure) boss, farther than I would ever get again, after perhaps 50 runs. Indeed, sometimes I'd even get cards that DID kind of play off one another, but I'd literally lose quicker than when I simply had a bunch of stand-alone high-damage cards. There is a certain joy I've felt with games like Slay The Spire, where I get a deck that really works together and it feels awesome. I don't think I ever played a single round where I felt my deck had any sort of strategy - you simply don't have enough control over your hand to accomplish that. Very few cards play off one another, and there is a heavy bias in favor of continually adding new cards to your hand (lest you miss some rather key abilities that are based upon the number of cards you have). But the cardplay itself (the essence of the game) is positively terrible. This game is physically beautiful, the map dynamic is novel, and after my first few runs, I really felt like this was a winner.
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