Roots of Yggdrasil

I went back and forth on this one. I had a poor first impression, because the mechanics weren't clear to me. I warmed to it as I understood it better, but after running 4 expeditions ("loops") I got bored because each game seemed pretty much like the last one. Not enough changes between games, either in the kinds of maps you see or the upgrades you get from the meta-progression. It's a tile laying game with deck building mechanics. You build villages on floating islands, with the goal of blooming 2-3 trees on each one and then getting off before the creeping darkness kills you. You're mostly doing two things, building up your Supply income and increasing your Might. Almost all cards cost Supply to play, and to expand your village, you need to spend Might to unlock new zones on the island. Every game plays pretty much the same. You start with in a cramped area, play a bunch of houses, and then play a couple of Barracks to gain one-time Might awards from those houses so you can unlock new zones. Once you've got some room, you place mines and logging camps to increase your Supply income. As your population grows, you draft more cards. Some of these are better mines and logging ca…

so... I've played around 5 or 6 loops and I'm bored. The art is beautiful, and the concept of basebuilding deckbuilder is novel, but each new loop feels more tedious than interesting. Adding difficulty feels more tedious than it is challenging. The characters don't strike me as particularly interesting so far, there's just not enough of them for me to really feel like they're people rather than talking heads meant to push plot along.

Roots of Yggdrasil is a difficult game for me to review. At its core it's a turn-based city building Roguelike deckbuilder. It's got all the hallmarks - runs, meta progression, story that you unlock piece by piece, etc. The art style is really charming and the gameplay works really well. The story so far is interesting, if a little played out in terms of the subject matter. It's a great time killer and in general runs don't take too long. It's significantly more relaxed than the average roguelike. However, there are several things that annoy me with this game and encouraged me to put it down. The metaprogression is sloooooooow. You do 3-4 runs to unlock the ability to start the game with 1 extra resource (which is 1/5 of the cost of most buildings). The story progression (at least when tied to the characters) is gated behind adding difficulty modifiers to your runs very early on. Also there is a clearly best option for a "hero" - the one that gets to blop down a free building every few turns. The others don't even compare, but you need to take them along to progress their story. Essentially adding another difficulty modifier for yourself The variety is not really there - the…

City builder with deckbuilding. There is not much that sells the idea why it is good to play this, so it became pretty boring really fast.

Do you like turn based rogue-likes? Do you like less-intense city builders? You'll love this game.

Pretty interesting adjacency game with metaprogression