For now, I have no real idea how it all interacts, but let’s assume it’s a Magic: The Gathering/Keyforge type thing.Īh, look! A vendor! I have barely gotten a sense of this world or why it matters, and I can already purchase crap to fill it with. OK, I guess it’ll make sense later when it matters. Suddenly, I feel like I am doing 11th-grade math homework. Some of these cards are basic and obvious, deal damage to all mobs, etc., but then we get some classic Garfield complexity: a card that has five different qualifiers. Next in the tutorial, we get a chance to purchase our first card draft. So now I can only move in the direction of the map that my particular collection of paint spatters allows? How is this fun? Is it a puzzle? OK, fine, I guess. At first blush, though, this complexity feels like unwelcome additional tedium. You can blot a circle of tiles or straight lines to reveal them. Right off the bat, there is a seemingly new mechanic: ink, which you use to paint in the tiles of the map. I mean…the combat screen in Roguebook couldn’t be more similar to Slay the Spire, down to the location of totems, special items, buffs and the discard deck. The game would have to do much to reverse this inevitable fatigue with the ubiquity of these sub-genres. To be honest, even with all my hopes and expectations in place, I was tired of Roguebook before it even began. Though the game is heavily marketed as being a Richard Garfield joint, it is clear that he is lateral and not central to the project as a whole. Add to that hex-based maps and talent trees and JRPG-style combat using the aforementioned decks. So I was doubly curious and extra excited to see what Richard Garfield teaming up with the Faeria crew could create, especially if they were going to take on a seriously overwrought set of game trends that we see everywhere: Rogue-likes, deck-builders, and Rogue-like deck-builders.
In fact, there is a direct tie-in to the Faeria world, though you’d only really get this from the opening crawl: “The Lore Book, a relic containing all the world’s legends, was lost in a well of Faeria and developed a wicked free will of its own.” With this disruptive game system, Roguebook players will want to collect lots of cards in order to unlock new skills for their pair of heroes and create explosive synergies!”
“Roguebook gives players the chance to explore the subtleties of Roguebook’s gameplay, such as inserting gems to upgrade the cards in your deck or exploring the world through its ingenious inkwell system, not to mention the concept of the Tower Deck, which reinvents deckbuilding. The marketing copy for this new AA Game title from the makers of Faeria is as follows: He has a knack for streamlining extremely complex concepts into manageable, approachable packages like Magic: The Gathering, Bunny Kingdom and Keyforge. Roguebook is interesting to me because Richard Garfield is a game-systems master if ever there was one.