Card Crawl 2.4.12

Dungeon delvers and thrill seekers, gather around! Are you tired of real life Iron Man mode? Are you stressed that your guild insurance isn't going to cover your likely demise? Well fret no more! With Card Crawl, you can now gain riches and fame from the relative safety* of your favorite tavern. Say goodbye to muck, skeletons and ugly monsters! Card Crawl is a gentleman's game.

*_{Soft112 cannot guarantee on the safety of your preferred drinking establishment.}

Card Crawl is a solitaire style game with a heavy dungeon crawl theme slapped on cards and everything else. Gameplay consists of going through a deck of 54 cards without hitting 0HP. Standard playing cards have been re-purposed to represent swords (spades), shields (clubs), life potions (hearts) and coins (diamonds). Aces, as well as big numbers (11, 12 and 13) have been removed to make way for a fifth suit - monsters. You start with an avatar card that has 13 life points. I must mention that the art on the cards is very nice. So nice in fact that it kept me smiling even though it became apparent that my poor knight would not see the light of day again.

Initially you are dealt 4 cards. In each turn you need to remove 3 cards from the display in order to draw 3 more and so on until you reach the end. Monsters are removed by taking damage equal to their value. Everything else needs to be equipped. There are three slots at your disposal (2 hands and a backpack). Once you've equipped a sword, you can use it to reduce a monster's value. Shields can withstand part of a monster's damage before hitting you, while potions and coins have an immediate effect. The backpack simply stores items to be used later. Coins however are scored irrespective to what slot you assign them to.

Although survival is the main focus, getting a high coin score is also very desirable. In addition to coin cards you can sell any unequipped item to the shop box. For example, you may want to sell that 9 point potion if you already have three laying around. Obviously, monster cards cannot be sold... most of the time. But what's the point of coins? Well, despite giving you a shot at appearing among the daily top players, coins are spent to unlock special ability cards. 5 of these cards are included in the deck for every game. These have powerful effects such as forcing monsters to hit each other, turning any card into a coin card, reviving you in case of death, and so on. In normal mode, they will be randomly inserted, but you can also do a bit of deck-building and customize the selection beforehand.

Once you're skilled enough with the base setup, you can visit the Deck Market and try out custom dungeon decks or create and test your own. Using the deck merchant section is a bit cumbersome. I don't think I'll be visiting it often.

Conclusion

Card Crawl is a neat little card game that you could actually recreate with real components. The game itself has some replay-ability with the unlocking of special cards and game modes. The art is very nice, although the limited number of cards makes it rather repetitive. Learning the deck and counting cards will really improve your score. However the concept does not go very far, and the gameplay will lose its luster eventually. But until that point, for the price of a MTG booster pack you'll get plenty of gameplay.