Roguebook

[Cobra Kai]

Roguebook is a new roguelike card-based adventure game, designed with help from Magic: The Gathering's very own Richard Garfield. His name being attached pretty much convinced me to buy this, and I have not been disappointed. 

 

It's VERY similar to Slay The Spire, in fact I can't imagine any fans of that game not instantly liking this game. I will say that Roguebook is better than STS, as it features a top-down adventure exploration mode as a mechanism for building your deck of cards. Where as STS simply has you choose branching paths on a map, with the exploration being abstract, in Roguebook you actually control your character/s on the screen and explore the map in a way of your choosing (with limitations, you can only open up so much depending on your ink reserves).

 

The deck building, item collecting and treasure acquiring aspects are almost identical to STS. A newer aspect which again gives a better advantage to Roguebook is the addition of Gems, of which you can attach Gems to your cards permanantly. These Gems have various bonuses, such as extra block, or Draw A Card etc... So, you can enhance your cards with these gems to make them much more powerful, and it's better than how Slay The Spire handles upgrades, since you get to choose which cards get which upgrades, you're making your own custom cards.

 

Another slight improvement to this game over STS is that not only are there 5 characters to choose from, all with unique card decks, but you also choose a companion character at the beginning of the game, so that you are always a pair and are building one deck out of two pools of cards. So, you kind of have to balance your drafting and not overload on one of the characters cards because each character can only do actions with their cards. You really need to have both characters to have cards to use each turn.

 

Good game, get it.

[Cobra Kai]

Just wanted to follow up with my OP, and say that after a month I'm still playing this every day. It's highly addictive thanks to plenty of random elements, adjustable difficulty, and the 10 different character pairs to play with. It's really the only xbox game I want to play at the moment. I feel I've gotten my money's worth.