![]() You may want to reduce a card’s cost, add card draw or perhaps always start a battle with it a particular card in hand. ![]() If you have the relic Flame of Ignus, you’ll get an extra energy orb any time a card grants you one, which means you should aggressively draft cards that do just that – as well as more expensive cards and card draw, as you know you’ll be able to take advantage of them.Įven the cards in your deck can be modified thanks to Roguebook’s gem system. With blocking taken care of, this also means you can prioritise attacking or deploying allies that turn. If an enemy’s looking to attack for low damage repeatedly, then, you’ll want to end your turn with that hero at the front to basically negate the damage. If you have the relic Sturdy Shell, for instance, it gives the equipped hero five block each time he or she takes damage. These perks, after all, fundamentally inform your choice of cards to draft, as well as how to approach any given fight. How well does your strategy fit together, and are you taking full advantages of the two heroes you’d chosen at the start of the run? Can you deal with multiple foes or work around status effects? And do you have enough lethality to topple enemies that steadily build their power? There’s generally a lot to keep in mind, especially as the row of relics and talents at the top of the screen gets longer and longer. Working out how to best gather and use ink makes for an absorbing layer of overworld strategy.Įach enemy encounter, meanwhile, is an opportunity to test the cards, abilities, buffs and modifiers you’ve cobbled together so far. You’ll discover piles of gold that can be spent at each chapter’s shop, you’ll collect relics that can potentially power up your gameplan, and you'll stumble upon standalone events and mythical creatures. As you paint, you’ll come across opportunities to draft more cards, to transmute existing cards, and to build up your in-battle energy reserves. Every map starts out with large swathes of blank parchment and it’s only by using brushes and ink pots that you can reveal what’s on each tile. Some runs you barely find any, others you end up socketing even your bad cards.One of Roguebook’s most interesting points of differentiation is its overworld exploration. I loved another, the boomerang gem, that made it so instead of being discarded when cast, the card would always be shuffled back into your deck. They range from mundane, like +3 damage, or -1 cost, to pretty exotic, like one that always places the card in your starting hand. Those gems provide an upgrade to that card, adding bonus effects or boosting existing ones. Roguebook's most interesting twist is in gems, which you pick up mid-run and place in sockets on your cards. Finally there's Aurora, an awesome deck design that's fragile on the face of it but can turn clever cardplay into a stream of healing that becomes damage as she overheals. Seifer's a weird one, a pain-fuelled wolf whose all-out offensives are backed up by demon allies. There's Sorocco, an ogre whose deck is all about shrugging off hits while you wind up a giant punch. Sharra's fast and aggressive, but relatively fragile when you can't manage her tricks to avoid damage. Out there you find gold to use at the shop, magic cubes to draft new cards from, adventure events with weird consequences, and combats to flex your deck's muscles against.Ī new run is a chance to experiment with the characters you pick. With your two picks you move into the book's blank pages, a hex grid, and explore by spending limited brushstrokes and ink splats to reveal unmapped parts of the book. ![]() Your deck is a combination of two out of the four characters, each with their own unique card set and talents. Its familiar parts are arranged in a new way with a few clever twists. To its credit, and to its detriment, nothing in Roguebook is particularly novel. Your deck itself even levels up, with your card count giving you points to spend on randomized talents. It even relies on an old deckbuilding staple, asking you to mix-and-match two card pools each run, which was used to such great effect in Monster Train. It has Slay the Spire's flurry of weird artifacts to collect and use. It pulls in a Hades-esque buffet of advanced challenges to mix and match after you first "beat" the game. Roguebook lifts some great design from other recent roguelite games.
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