Choosing the right cards isn’t necessarily a matter of picking the ones that give the biggest numbers.

You get a lot of opportunities to acquire new cards as the party goes about its quest, as well as a large number of boosting artifacts and other items that can customise your characters further. Each hero is generally tuned towards one type of play (aggressive, support or defensive), but within that, there are many different specialisations that you can shape the characters towards, based on the cards that you add to their respective decks as you play. There are four different heroes to play as, and you can take two on any given adventure (or “run”). Garfield clearly loves the idea of blending player agency and randomness in card games, allowing them to build decks to suit their personal play style, and then encouraging them to spend hours trying to tweak those decks for the best results. This game had the input of the man who was, in a very real sense, responsible for the invention of the collectible card game, which in turn directly led to the deckbuilder. If “Richard Garfield” isn’t a recognisable name to you, perhaps if you saw “the creator of Magic: The Gathering,” you would be better clued into the value he brings to the project. It’s a genre that needs a break, and while Garfield’s Roguebook is yet another one… despite myself, this one really hooked me in. I’m going to review a really bad example of the genre soon enough, too (stay tuned for that). 2017’s Slay the Spire is excellent, but didn’t need to spawn an entire genre over the course of just five years, and we’ve already reached the point where the likes of Monster Train, being both perfectly competent and yet utterly boring, highlights perfectly that we’ve hit the point of saturation and there are just too many of the things now. Trust Richard Garfield to reinvigorate my interest in deckbuilding roguelikes.

Roguebook game switch