Card Quest

This is to me one of the best "deckbuilder" games ever made. There's almost zero randomness, you build your entire deck at the start of the game (which is how actual physical deck building card games work) and try to survive until the end picking the right challenges suited for your cards. There are a couple of extra abilities and stat increases to gain along the way and further tailor your build, but most of the toolkit you have from the start. There is 4 classes, each with their own unique card pool, subclasses to unlock with their own unique spin on the main mechanic, dozens of equipment configurations. If you want to unlock everything this game has to offer, there is a lot.

Genuinely a great game and pacing. You discover new things that open up easier pathways and tactics in increasing complexity and satisfaction. Learning moments stay with you and improve your skills. The graphics are retro but still creative and detailed. One mixed aspect (both good and bad) is that it feels very very calculated. It isn't totally 'random' card drawing - if it was, you'd probably lose a lot more. The game is figuring out the best strategies using the cards on hand, typically there's only 1 or 2 "right" choices on what action you should choose next. Sometimes not taking action is the right choice. Sort of feels a bit like a +1 0 -1 situation - and the cards you pull are sometimes in "response" to the good or bad choices. To either teach you a lesson, or reward your considered action. Gambling seems to not be rewarded as much as "making the obvious/safe choice" which is really just rewarding tactical decision making. There are tons of little surprises, the stories are enough to give some mild fluff. It can get frustrating not being able to progress sometimes - this often means you need to try a different area and path to find some new equipment that 'busts t…

Card Quest is one of the best deckbuilding roguelites I stopped playing multiple times. The combat is great. Building your loadout before the run and then being forced to live with your choices the whole way through makes every fight feel tense. There’s also a ridiculous amount of stuff to unlock. New gear, new archetypes, weird interactions, hidden mechanics. I recently learned there are secret classes (at 50 hour mark!) and my immediate reaction was: “that sounds awesome.” My second reaction was: “there is absolutely no way I’m surviving long enough to unlock those.” Because man, this game is brutal. Still didn't finish one of the 3 levels... Dwarf level... Keep dying on last boss... Runs are LONG, (too long) and mistakes are punished insanely hard. One bad turn or one misclick can completely kill a run. That’s honestly my biggest issue with the game. The difficulty itself is fine. The problem is how much time you lose when things go wrong. Dying near the end of a run doesn’t make me want to instantly retry, it makes me stare at the screen like I just lost a save file in 2004. Still, I keep coming back to it because the actual gameplay is so damn good. It fe…

Great solo card game. Awesome classic medieval fantasy aesthetic. Fun personnalisation that you unlock gradually. Good class feeling gameplay wise. The only downside i would say is that some things are not well explained, but by continuing to play, you finish by learning them fast. My favorite card game, i recommend it.

Card- Quest is a card-driven, campaign-centered game with rouge-like/lite aspects. One of the defining characteristics of this game is that it is card-driven, but is not really a deck-builder in the traditional sense. At game start-up, after choosing one of the four common archetype toons (wizard, archer, etc.), you will select up to four pieces of equipment. This equipment primarily serves to populate your deck. After this selection process, your deck will not change (outside of one-time only unlocks, which allow for card swaps). You are unable to trash cards. You are unable to get new cards. You are unable to upgrade existing cards. There are no relics to find to make a run unique. What you start with is what you roll with for the entire run. The run will take place in one of three areas, each of which has different paths of nodes representing different locations. Each path of nodes is identical from run-to-run. Within each location you will fight multiple battles. Upon finishing a node for the first time you will unlock a (fixed) piece of new equipment for the given character. For the most part, the new equipment probably isn’t strictly better than what you are using now, thoug…

Card Quest is like half a deckbuilder: you're not actually building any decks, just choosing equipment sets that contain the cards in your deck. It's also about half a roguelike: battles have slight variations but are generally the same from run to run. While these things on their own aren't half bad, this game is full grind and full drain. Initially this game seems really fun. The puzzle like nature of arranging your hands, drawing, discarding, and playing combos that make you feel smart when you "solve" each section with minimal loss of resources. Finding cool combos that let you play 10-15 cards in one turn are really wild and engaging when they happen. However, after a few hours you start to get stuck. Ultimately, you are going to playing the exact same card combinations from section to section and while this isn't necessarily unfun, it gets tedious quickly. Worse, there's some hard gates that prevent you from progressing past certain points: in order to get better equipment for your characters, you have to beat a series of sections. If you can't beat them, you have to start again from the beginning. This gets frustrating when you get to a certain point and find that you …