“Reload,” for example, is “Ranged,” “Stacks” and “Dissolves.” “Bullfrog Berzerker” is an “Ally,” “Aggressive,” and has a “Spirit” value. I have scarcely had a single encounter with a weakling enemy, and now I have six cards to spend my money on, each with a unique set of features. For now, I have no real idea how it all interacts, but let’s assume it’s a Magic: The Gathering/Keyforge type thing.Īh, look! A vendor! I have barely gotten a sense of this world or why it matters, and I can already purchase crap to fill it with. OK, I guess it’ll make sense later when it matters. Suddenly, I feel like I am doing 11th-grade math homework. Some of these cards are basic and obvious, deal damage to all mobs, etc., but then we get some classic Garfield complexity: a card that has five different qualifiers. Next in the tutorial, we get a chance to purchase our first card draft. So now I can only move in the direction of the map that my particular collection of paint spatters allows? How is this fun? Is it a puzzle? OK, fine, I guess. At first blush, though, this complexity feels like unwelcome additional tedium. You can blot a circle of tiles or straight lines to reveal them. Right off the bat, there is a seemingly new mechanic: ink, which you use to paint in the tiles of the map. I mean…the combat screen in Roguebook couldn’t be more similar to Slay the Spire, down to the location of totems, special items, buffs and the discard deck. The game would have to do much to reverse this inevitable fatigue with the ubiquity of these sub-genres. To be honest, even with all my hopes and expectations in place, I was tired of Roguebook before it even began. Though the game is heavily marketed as being a Richard Garfield joint, it is clear that he is lateral and not central to the project as a whole. Add to that hex-based maps and talent trees and JRPG-style combat using the aforementioned decks. So I was doubly curious and extra excited to see what Richard Garfield teaming up with the Faeria crew could create, especially if they were going to take on a seriously overwrought set of game trends that we see everywhere: Rogue-likes, deck-builders, and Rogue-like deck-builders. In fact, there is a direct tie-in to the Faeria world, though you’d only really get this from the opening crawl: “The Lore Book, a relic containing all the world’s legends, was lost in a well of Faeria and developed a wicked free will of its own.” With this disruptive game system, Roguebook players will want to collect lots of cards in order to unlock new skills for their pair of heroes and create explosive synergies!” “Roguebook gives players the chance to explore the subtleties of Roguebook’s gameplay, such as inserting gems to upgrade the cards in your deck or exploring the world through its ingenious inkwell system, not to mention the concept of the Tower Deck, which reinvents deckbuilding. The marketing copy for this new AA Game title from the makers of Faeria is as follows: He has a knack for streamlining extremely complex concepts into manageable, approachable packages like Magic: The Gathering, Bunny Kingdom and Keyforge. I want to talk to the yaks, basically.Roguebook is interesting to me because Richard Garfield is a game-systems master if ever there was one. When I die to the yakapult again I get to spend some of the book pages I found on the map unlocking a perk for the next run, but I want more than that. After racking up over 100 hours in Hades, I want every roguelike to put more effort into the narrative, to make each loss feel less like a punishment and more like the beginning of the next chapter. Like Heroes of Might and Magic, or indeed Shandalar, the overworld puts context and a little story between the fights. You might earn rewards from these like treasures that provide some significant boons, or gems that can be socketed into cards to alter how they work. Areas unfurl like it's Minesweeper, and may contain shops, gold, piñata faeries to wail on for more gold, and short text adventure scenes. There's also the overworld, a land inside a magic book (hence the name), shown as a hexgrid with fog of war that's rolled back by spending the ink and brushes you earn winning battles. I burned out on Monster Train because of the need to plan an upgrade path and surgically remove everything that didn't fit, so a deckbuilder that encourages choosing fun options, experimenting even after finding that broken combo, might hold my interest for longer.
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