A lot of the times I place some blocks that have no effect on the level, which damages the strategy aspect of the game.

Tiny and nice rouge-like repetitive dungeon crawler with some tile puzzling and card duel aspects. Each dungeon run starts with a naked hero and takes about 5-15 minutes, where you trying to loot a good equipment by a chance through several battles from weak to strong monsters before the final boss in the run. Between runs you can improve start state of the naked hero or getting a more interesting loot (by spending collected golds). Funny fairy songs and joking atmosphere, interesting card duel (for first several hours) with very limited deck-building aspect. The main disadvantage that between runs nothing significant is kept. I complete this game in 34 hours and in the last ten hours it seemed to me a little boring in final stage - nothing new, very same card duels (Cartomancer looks a little bit dis-balanced hero).

Guild of Dungeoneering is a mediocre dungeon-delving cardgame. It is similar to games like Shatter the Spire and the like in that as you go through a dungeon, you improve your character’s abilities by getting better cards in your deck as well as improving their base stats by levelling. The “twist”, as it might be called, is that your cards are based on the equipment you get, with each piece of equipment levelling up one kind of card, giving you better cards of that type. Mechanically, you have limited control over your “dungeoneer”; when you go into the dungeon, you don’t actually directly control them. Instead, you get a hand of five cards, which can include dungeon passages (with 1-4 entrances), monsters, or treasure, which is worth points at the end of the dungeon. Each dungeon has some objective, and your goal is to complete it by levelling up your dungeoneer by having them fight monsters. Your dungeoneer will tend to seek out monsters, especially monsters of their level, as well as gold, so you basically manipulate your dungeoneer into going the right way and fighting the enemies to level. The actual fights are a card game – you draw 3 cards, and see what card your opponent drew. Each card can deal damage (either physical or magical), block damage (either physical, magical, or both), heal you, draw you cards, or apply some benefit or drawback (like setting your opponent on fire to deal ongoing damage, or making it so you can’t die temporarily). Each turn you draw a card and play a card from your hand – hopefully one that stacks up well against whatever your opponent played. In addition to all of this, there are various static abilities – some tied to adventurers, some tied to particular pieces of equipment – which can boost you in various ways. One might cause you to deal bonus damage if you take 3+ damage on a turn; another might cause you to make it so that if you would take a single point of damage on your turn, you instead take zero, but yielding no protection against higher damage moves. Unfortunately, the game’s primary flaw is pretty simple: it just isn’t all that fun. The card game is ultimately quite simple, and it is mostly dependent on what kind of adventurer you’re using. Higher ranked adventurers are better than lower ranked ones, and your levels reset every time you enter a dungeon, but in the end, the game ends up evolving very little; you are playing a very similar game throughout its length, which means that it gets old pretty fast. Worse, the game is fairly RNG dependent in some dungeons, ironically mostly because of the dungeon tile mechanic, which can cause you to not draw the right tiles fast enough and lose because you run out of time. The attempted cutesiness of the bard narrator doesn’t manage to make the game any better, and some of the rhymes are outright painful (though maybe in a good way). In the end, it’s just hard to recommend this game. The problem is really just that the core gameplay isn’t interesting or varied enough, making it so that you’ll be bored well before the end of the game.