This is one that I picked up not too long after its release. It’s a small indie title that in my opinion is best described as Dungeoneer done right. The dealer lays out encounter cards that form a dungeon of sorts. You move between them, triggering bits of story or combat as stated. Rewards include better equipment, food, gold, blessings and permanent health increases and so forth. There’s only one hero so there’s no party system here and there’s no choice of classes either. Your character is basically a melee-based barbarian and you can’t even choose what he looks like, let alone the hero’s gender.

Out of combat conflict resolution is performed through a shell game using cards. There are cards which denote Failure and Success. They’re at first shown to you face up. Then the dealer turns them face down and shuffles them and you pick one. It’s not quite pure chance since the quick eyed can track where each physical card goes, but I’m horrible at it. Combat uses a fairly basic third person real time action game with the essential mechanics of the Batman games. You can counter attacks with a shield, dodge, reflect missile attacks and there’s a combo system. Not great, especially since you have no control over the camera and it sucks sometimes, but it gets the job done.

Some parties have described it as a rogue-like. If so, it’s a very lightweight one. One mode has you exploring an endless dungeon of cards and the point is simply to see how long you can last, especially since the enemies get more and more powerful the deeper you go while you’re burdened with more and more curses. It’s aptly called Endless Mode. But most players will probably spend most of their time in Story Mode, in which the dungeons are finite in size and at the end of each of them, you’re supposed to defeat the boss of the dungeon. In keeping with the theme of everything being represented by cards, there are four main “suits” of enemies, Dust, effectively human bandits; Skulls, skeletons; Plague, ratmen; and Scales, lizardmen. The bosses are the Jacks, Queens and Kings of each suit so there are twelve bosses to beat in total.

So far, so standard, even if the card-based tricks are rather nifty. But what makes this game really addictive is that you continually unlock new cards as you play and you can use the cards to customize the equipment and encounter decks. You might get an encounter and if you beat it, you might unlock an equipment card and in some cases another encounter card. In this way, the game sort of tells multiple stories across multiple dungeoneering sessions. The White Minotaur series of encounters for example involve befriending the hunter tracking the minotaur, following on the creature’s trail for yourself and finally beating in its Labyrinth. You’ll only succeed after many, many dungeon runs with the appropriate Minotaur card in the encounter deck.

To add pressure to the player, some cards can’t be removed from the Encounter deck. For example, the Ratmen cards represent them hunting you for killing their leaders. They’re combat encounters that give no rewards when defeated so you really don’t want them in your encounter deck. The only way to get rid of them is to get the special encounter card, essentially hiring a ratcatcher, and have enough money for it when you run into it. Plus, of course, each boss will change the rules of the game slightly to make things more challenging. One nasty boss forces you draw a Pain card for every four steps you take in the dungeon.

The game starts out being so easy that you’ll like mocking it but the difficulty ramps up to insanely hard at the end. I haven’t beaten the true final boss yet and given how random the game must necessarily be, I doubt I’ll ever put in the effort to do it. It’s a lot of fun as you continually fight new enemies and unlock new card. You feel like a kid in a candy store with all of the new equipment and encounter and wonder what they do. (You can’t read cards you unlock until you encounter them in the dungeon.) Eventually though the flow of new cards dry up and the remaining ones become very difficult to unlock. For some, you’ll effectively need to make a special deck and multiple runs just to prioritize unlocking a particular encounter card. I found that rather tedious and probably only the most dedicated would do so.

Still by the time you get to that point, you’d have over a dozen hours or so of pretty cool and fun gameplay and that’s more than enough that anyone can ask out of a small game like this.