"Very rarely did I feel I'd been handed a properly unwinnable turd of a map." The trick is in getting it all uncovered. Roguebook is fair to you in this regard: every single chapter map, no matter how it generates, will hold everything you need to sail through its final boss with ease. The former because the map's hexes conceal fights, resources and treasures to pick up, and the latter because you're trying to work out how to reveal it all as efficiently as possible.Īs in most roguelikes, the more fights you can have before reaching a boss, and the more loot you can find, the higher your chances of progression. Rather than Slay The Spire's bastard-haunted flowchart of a map, here you're presented with a hex-based world obscured by a fog of war, which reminded me weirdly of both the Heroes Of Might & Magic games, and Minesweeper. The other big differentiator for Roguebook, and my personal favourite, is the exploration layer. While they've definitely got defined roles - your tortoise lady does healing and card draw, your big frog bloke is a tank with loads of area-of-effect abilities - they've each got a wide array of more subtle specialties, whose full power you only realise once you experiment with them. It helps that the four characters on offer aren't entirely shoehorned into archetypes, either. Proper success in the game comes about as a result of working out how to build synergies between the different sets (like in Magic, innit), and doing so requires a surprising amount of lateral thought. There's a little bit of Darkest Dungeon to it, at times. Some cards get cheaper after you play another hero's, for example, while others offer benefits if they're played from a hand comprising only their stablemates. Each has their own library of cards, reminiscent of the tribal system from Monster Train, but with way more emphasis on the way you blend the flavours during play. The first is that, on each run, you control a duo of heroes chosen from a roster of four. There are two big factors which set Roguebook out as a winner for me. Easy to learn, hard to master, and so on. The TL DR is that Roguebook has rules simple enough to pick up by your second or third encounter (with barely any tutorial), but with enough emergent complexity that you'll find yourself still learning new tricks after eighteen hours of play. It would be meaningless to describe the ruleset to you, and it wouldn't be hugely surprising to anyone who's played Slay The Spire, Monster Train and company. What about the design, though? Well, Richard Garfield sure can put together a card game. There are tons of unlockable trinkets to play with, as there should be with any good spire-'em-up. But I suspect that for me, Roguebook's good looks will pay dividends. You might feel totally differently, of course. But it might have been postponed, at least a little, if I hadn't found its weird, slightly MS-Painty aesthetic so bleak and pared-down. The point at which Slay The Spire tipped over my mental break-even point from "must play again" to "don't really feel like it" took a long time coming. And if you've ever been stuck in a lift, you'll know how important small details become, once you reach a certain level of familiarity. Games like Roguebook, after all, are games you play over and over again. And while that might seem irrelevant in a subgenre of products that feel more like drugs than games - as if you'd rate disco biscuits according to how uncannily Donald Duck had been printed on each tabs - I'm surprised how much it mattered. I think he's some kind of amphibian, anyway. That big geezer on the left is Sirocco, your battletoad. It shares a setting with 2017's Faeria (a digital CCG which was also developed by Abrakam, and which was also mostly overlooked despite being a solid card game), and while it's extremely light on narrative, I gather the setting involves quite a lot of frogs. You almost certainly know the drill.Īgain, as with most deckbuilders of this ilk, Roguebook is set in a fantasy world. If you lose you have to start again, albeit with some new perks to boost your chances, and some new aspects of the world unlocked. If you win the fights, you get to add cards to your deck, or improve the ones you've already got. You progress across a map via a series of encounters, in which you play a card game against monsters who bob up and down on their knees like excitable toddlers. It is easiest to describe games like Roguebook by comparing them to Slay The Spire.
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