itch.io

Thank you for playing the game, and for the feedback! Being that this was a jam game and made frantically under time constraints, the difficulty curve is definitely a bit more punishing that we would have liked. However, we did playtest to make sure each fight is possible to win.

Triggering the Enrage effect while low-health is a great strategy for beating Muros, especially if you’ve built up a good deal of strength beforehand. However, the unpredictability of the hero character is always liable to throw a wrench into your plans if he plays the wrong card at the wrong time. Part of the strategy of the game is based around using your limited influence to limit the cards available for the hero to pick, so that he has no choice but to pick the “right one”. For example – did you know it’s possible to ensure that the hero always plays Opening Gambit on the first turn? The buffs conferred by this card are pretty huge, so making sure to start each fight this way is a consistently solid way to set yourself up for success.

One big mistake we made during the jam was not explaining the “mana” system in any way whatsoever during the tutorial, as understanding the mana economy is a big part of strategizing. Players of card games like Hearthstone and Magic the Gathering are likely already familiar with systems like these, so we simply took it for granted that players would already know how it works. To briefly explain: each card has a “mana cost” that the character has to spend to play it. Each character starts each of their turns with an amount of mana equal to the count of the current combat round. This is to say, on the first round, the Hero will have 1 mana to spend on playing cards, on the second round, 2, and so on. If a character only has 1 mana, they can’t play 2-cost cards, for example, so if they only have 2-cost cards in their hand, they simply have to end their turn and wait until the next one to keep playing cards.

The last missing piece that might help you with their strategy is to explain CPU card-picking behavior – it’s basically completely random. On their turn, characters simply pick cards that they have enough mana to play in a random order, until they no longer have enough mana to play any cards in their hand. At that point they end their turn. As you’ve no doubt already encountered, this will oftentimes result in your Hero making suboptimal plays – for example, buffing himself after attacking rather than the other way around. Fortunately, this liability also applies to your enemies, so really the game is about setting up the deck so that your hero only has good options to pick from, and so that the enemy only has bad options to pick from.

Hopefully this helps a bit! We had a ton of fun making this game so we hope that you had fun playing it.