On the other hand, you could have him summon Ally cards that statically sit on the battlefield and confer benefits to your team. You can specialize Seifer the demon-possessed rat, for example, into a character who deals damage to himself to confer combat benefits. The four playable characters (of which you can use any two in any given run) each have their own broad build paths you can go down. In practice, this means that some of the joy of Roguebook is simply “going with the flow,” of picking strategies and trying to intuit how they work within the constraints of the game’s substantial card pool.

Other turns might present you with a hand of cards that only allow you to block, and you are forced to sequence that hand perfectly in order to get your character placement correct (many cards switch the place of the characters, meaning that sequencing is key). Sometimes you might have a turn where 90% of your cards are for one hero. The game’s deck-based combat has familiar and intuitive systems for drawing and playing cards that quickly become complicated as character abilities, items, and card effects begin to stack onto each other over the course of the battle. With the addition of towers that reveal more space or items that permanently upgrade your character, the game creates a small set of navigation puzzles that legitimately add to the experience.Īnd, of course, instead of a single powerful character with an associated deck, you have two characters whose abilities are shuffled together into one deck of cards. It doesn’t translate well to paper, but the end effect is a careful management of items that allow you to optimally reveal as many new tiles as possible. You move your characters around a hex grid, uncovering the fog of war (and revealing items to pick up or new battles to have) by deploying different kinds of inks to “draw” them into existence. Instead of a direct line of encounters that are approached in a string, Roguebook plops players into large procedurally-generated levels that are navigated in roguelike fashion. It is thick in every place that Spire is thin. Roguebook’s reversals of the design ideals of the deck builder make it resonate strongly with me.

But along the way, they keep inverting the logic and strategies that undergird Slay the Spire. You battle monsters with a deck of cards, you choose more cards to add to that deck, and you slowly build toward specific strategies that allow for unique tactics for your given playable characters. It is impossible to make a game in this space that does not evoke comparisons to the titanic Slay the Spire and heavy hitters like Monster Train, and developer Abrakam clearly owe much of the core of this game’s design to these other major players. At its core, Roguebook is about progressing through a few randomized levels while building up a deck that allows you to fight enemies. This is the best analogy that I could come up with to speak to how special Roguebook is within the deck building game genre.

Roguebook mac