I feel like there’s a kind of randomness at the ends of card chains. So if you can clear out 2-3 ‘random’ cards, you’ve got an open chain somewhere between 3-? available to you. And sometimes the random cards are beneficial, and sometimes chains feed into other chains. Something like randomized clumping.
Makes the accessory that lets you always see the second row surprisingly valuable, and it’s why I really enjoy the DLC class that has the ability built in (at the cost of an extra row of cards per fight).
Edit: Especially because if you blow up a chain unintentionally, the fight can get incredibly iffy. I’m not a fan of abilities that pierce multiple cards from a single row for that reason, but wiping out the entire front row can turn a match completely around.
For those of you out there who like playing Star Realms, they added a new mode called Arena. Description from their website:
Star Realms Arena
Star Realms Arena is a weekly tournament format with trophy stars and foil cards as prizes. If you want to play in Arena, you need to download the Star Realms update, then go to the Play Online lobby and click on the Arena symbol in the top right-hand corner. Each week, there will be a different tournament format, and you can win prizes based on how many games you win. Once you join an Arena, you may play until you reach 6 wins, or 2 losses, whichever comes first. All Arena games will be real-time, but we’ve added extra time to the clock so you won’t feel too rushed.
Arena Formats
Arena will feature a new format each week with its own special rules. Often these formats will be from the Scenarios set. For example, one week Arena may be Flare Mining, which allows each player to pay 1 trade to draw a card, then discard a card, once per turn. The next week’s format might be Rushed Defenses which puts bases directly into play when acquired and scraps them when destroyed.
Arena also uses specific sets each week, however players will be able to play Arena using those sets even if they don’t own those sets!
Prizes
Arena prizes are awarded based on the number of games you win. Some prizes are available in every Arena tournament (like Trophy Stars). Other prizes are only available once per week (like Credits or weekly Foil Cards) or once per season (like Season Avatars or Season Foil Cards).
Wins Prizes
1 3 Credits*
2 1 Star Trophy. Season Foil Card**.
3 7 Credits*
4 2 Star Trophies. Season Avatar**
5 20 Credits*
6 3 Star Trophies. Foil Card*.
* Awarded once per week. ** Awarded once per season (typically there are 4 weeks per season).
* Trophy Stars
Trophy Stars are a way to track how well you have done in Arenas. Each time you finish an Arena, may can win a trophy with 1, 2 or 3 stars based on the number of games you won. Your Trophy Stars will be displayed next to your level, and top winners will be displayed on weekly, monthly, and yearly leaderboards.
Credits
After your free entry each week, you may join additional Arena tournaments using credits. Each week’s credit prizes are one-time rewards. After you win all the credits that an Arena week has to offer, you’ll have to wait until the next week to win more.
Season Avatar
Each Arena Season (typically there are 4 weeks per season) will have an Avatar reward that can only be earned that season. Season Avatars are one-time rewards, so you can’t win multiple Avatars in the same season.
Foil Cards
Foil cards are premium cards with a foil finish making them look shiny. They also feature minor animation that suggests motion. Whether a card is foil or not has no effect on gameplay. Foils just look cool. If you own a Foil Card, whenever you acquire that card during regular gameplay, both in and outside of Arena, it will turn into a foil. Both you and your opponent will see it as a Foil Card once you acquire it. You only need one copy of a Foil Card and then every version of that card you acquire in games will appear as a Foil Card. You may only win one copy of each weekly and seasonal Foil Card (because you only need one).
Race for the Stars
The first 100 players to reach 100 Trophy Stars will receive the Brain World avatar in the app! This has been one of the most requested avatars, so let the games begin!
Cost
You don’t have to pay anything extra to gain access to Arena, it is a free feature that comes with the full version of Star Realms. Your first Arena tournament each week will be FREE. After you reach 6 wins or 2 losses, you may join again for 20 Credits. You can win credits in Arena or you can buy credits as an in-app purchase (80 credits cost 99 US cents).
Don’t worry, we aren’t taking any features away. Traditional Star Realms matches are still free, unlimited, and completely separate from Arena. Arena is just a cool extra.
See you in Arena!
I'm currently 4-1 in my first Arena run. Nice addition to the game, although I doubt I'll ever buy Arena passes.
Need a voice actor? Hire me at bengrayVO.com
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051 Steam ID Twitch Page
Can anyone recommend any good single player card battle games? I know multiplayer tends to suck all the air out of the room, but I love a good PvE card battle, and Dream Quest’s brutality is wearing on me at this point.
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
Can anyone recommend any good single player card battle games? I know multiplayer tends to suck all the air out of the room, but I love a good PvE card battle, and Dream Quest’s brutality is wearing on me at this point.
Hearthstone's new dungeon modes are free, don't use your collection at all, and were designed by the designer of Dream Quest... so they're brutal, but in a more friendly Hearthstone way.
Can anyone recommend any good single player card battle games? I know multiplayer tends to suck all the air out of the room, but I love a good PvE card battle, and Dream Quest’s brutality is wearing on me at this point.
Hearthstone's new dungeon modes are free, don't use your collection at all, and were designed by the designer of Dream Quest... so they're brutal, but in a more friendly Hearthstone way.
I knew dungeon mode existed, and I knew the designer moved to Hearthstone, and somehow never connected these things at all. This sounds perfect, thanks!
admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
After going 10 and 9 fights in my first two attempts I've died somewhere in the first five fights of Solitairica every single time. Mostly in the first three.
I’m trying to run Barbarian right now. Man, that class is rough. I have come around to agility, even beat a normal run with Acrobat.
But Barb has no easy access to mitigation or healing, can actively hurt itself, and sucks at sustaining energy. Unless you get that targeted strikes attack, you have a very hard cap on how much defense or willpower you can get period, which means every fight is on a timer. Win before you die and also you’re not great at winning fast like agility is.
I think the class *must* get lucky with early access to “gain on damage” items to succeed.
I’m trying to run Barbarian right now. Man, that class is rough. I have come around to agility, even beat a normal run with Acrobat.
But Barb has no easy access to mitigation or healing, can actively hurt itself, and sucks at sustaining energy. Unless you get that targeted strikes attack, you have a very hard cap on how much defense or willpower you can get period, which means every fight is on a timer. Win before you die and also you’re not great at winning fast like agility is.
I think the class *must* get lucky with early access to “gain on damage” items to succeed.
I struggled with Barbarian and only played enough to get the two wins, so I don’t remember my strategy super well, but you want to be using attack power pretty much as often as possible, because that damage from overstocking adds up fast. I also avoid the row piercing attacks (usually attack based) where possible because it’s too easy to muss up a streak.
It’s definitely one of the most luck based of the lot until you can put some items away.
Edit: Starting health and defense items are HUGE, especially in the early game. Later on having a couple of healing potion cards can be shockingly helpful.
I actually think that class might be a little easier on Epic than normal, even. You get less money, but the extra fights mean you get to rotate the item shop more often and be a little pickier.
Few mini reviews (check toucharcade/appunwrapper/etc for more detail, as usual), of games that cost money and I've finished and think other people will like:
Bring You Home. Imagine if the people that made Love You To Bits were behind Framed, I guess? But with less swapping the order of things and more switching in entirely different story elements, and substantially cuter animation.
Tiny Bubbles is a sort of match-three (but it's four) puzzler, except that instead of tiles / candies / etc, you're matching bubbles. And instead of swapping things, you're filling the bubbles with colour. And instead of a square grid, it's a network of physically modeled bubbles that pop in an _incredibly_ satisfying way. Even on my older iphone 6, the animation is still completely smooth and entertaining to watch even when I'm utterly failing to solve things.
Part Time UFO. By HAL Laboratory (Kirby, Super Smash Brothers, Mother/Earthbound), it's a physics-y sort-of-puzzle, sort-of-getting things to do what you want while the physics gets in the way. You fly your UFO around and pick things up and stack them up, in various increasingly fiddly / complicated / puzzle-y ways, and it is, just like the others, a game where I was sad when it was done.
All well worth the few bucks they'll cost you -- none of them are so short as to feel trivial, none of them are so long as to feel like I was never going to beat them, either,
(also, I only just discovered "offload" for apps, so I can finally uninstall these but keep my saves around, which is nice if I want to go back and replay bits of these later)
Part Time UFO. By HAL Laboratory (Kirby, Super Smash Brothers, Mother/Earthbound), it's a physics-y sort-of-puzzle, sort-of-getting things to do what you want while the physics gets in the way. You fly your UFO around and pick things up and stack them up, in various increasingly fiddly / complicated / puzzle-y ways, and it is, just like the others, a game where I was sad when it was done.
This game is infuriating. Maybe it's just me, but the controls get in the way, too.
Don't get me wrong, it's fun, but it also makes me want to throw my phone through a wall.
I found that while I had trouble on some levels, the levels are short enough that even when I dropped something the wrong way, it wasn't too bad replaying that level until I got it right. I think I three-starred everything until the very last level, which was the point where my patience did eventually run out for redoing things.
Part Time UFO is more interesting to me because of who released it and what they did with the platform than it is as an actual game. I feel like it kind of leans into the feeling of imprecision that touchscreen controls have and wouldn't be quite as entertaining with a real controller, similar to how DS games did all sorts of things that only make sense on a system with a two screens and a stylus.
Part Time UFO is more interesting to me because of who released it and what they did with the platform than it is as an actual game. I feel like it kind of leans into the feeling of imprecision that touchscreen controls have and wouldn't be quite as entertaining with a real controller, similar to how DS games did all sorts of things that only make sense on a system with a two screens and a stylus.
I don't find it very fun, but it's interesting.
It’s basically taking the unpredictability of a pizza parlor claw game and giving it a light plot.
I thought it was pretty "fair" with how the mechanics worked -- it's definitely wobbly and loose, but that just meant I had to work out how to compensate for that. The levels where the things you have to balance show up in a random order, sure, those were a bit of a pain, and those are the ones where I had to go through a couple of times to get all the stars, but the actual picking things up and carrying them around never felt like it was harder than it's meant to be.
Have there been any notable iOS games released recently? Suzy Cube (a Super Mario 3D Land homage) and that Star Ocean gacha are the only ones that come to mind.
knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
Alto’s Odyssey is a sequel to Alto’s Adventure. First one was an endless snowboarder, this one is set in a desert. Very pretty, good music, fun to play.
I enjoyed The Witness, although it’s not exclusive to iOS or anything.
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Six Ages, a follow-up to King of Dragon Pass, is very good if you’re into the strategy/Oregon Trail/lore angle of that game. I enjoyed it a great deal, though I’ve only played one extremely long game so far.
Why didn’t anyone tell me there is a new Kingdom Rush game coming out?! I was nervous after the letdown that was Iron Marines, so seeing this makes me hopeful again.
From the looks of it, we’ll be playing the bad guys this time around. Neat!
Need a voice actor? Hire me at bengrayVO.com
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051 Steam ID Twitch Page
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
Kingdom Rush games always pop up with so little fanfare.
And they're basically the benchmark for every tower defense mobile game.
I've recently done a quick casual run of the first one, i feel underwhelmed after the normal runs that you have to separately do the hero and iron and it feels tedious when everything is unlocked.
I hope to see some new content or mechanics, something that corresponds to a 'new age' tower defense game. Because at this point i feel like GemCraft did the better job when they first came out long time ago. XD
Kingdom Rush games always pop up with so little fanfare.
And they're basically the benchmark for every tower defense mobile game.
I've recently done a quick casual run of the first one, i feel underwhelmed after the normal runs that you have to separately do the hero and iron and it feels tedious when everything is unlocked.
I hope to see some new content or mechanics, something that corresponds to a 'new age' tower defense game. Because at this point i feel like GemCraft did the better job when they first came out long time ago. XD
Tiny Guardians does the formula backwards, controlling a group of heroes moving along a path fighting the monsters they encounter. Its style borrows heavily from Kingdom Rush.
Incursion is a pretty good TD game that lets you do some interesting things like mixing troop types on a given control point. It's been a while but if I remember rightly.. mixing troops on a spot gives them some versatility, very useful if they're more isolated protecting a minor route (you can have like 1 tank, 1 healer, and 1 dps troop doing a decent job of everything instead of 3 troops doing a good job of only one thing), or if you keep a control point all the same type of troops, they have some extra upgrade options.
They're both modest deviations from the standard formula that are worth getting.
Monster Hunter Stories (ported from 3DS) and Professor Layton and the Curious Village (ported from DS) hit the App Store today. This is interesting because Nintendo handled the localization for both of them; this is the first time they've appeared on non-Nintendo devices outside of Japan.
Anyone grabbing Marvel: Battle Lines today? Basically, it is Hearthstone on a 4x3 grid with gorgeous art.
I have this now on android. I don't feel that its very much like hearthstone, it's more a like tera battle or whatever.
Still fun and playing for 2 days I haven't encountered any need to spend money. There's not even an energy system?
Card packs are probably needed for pvp but I'm fine with the single player content.
Kingdom Rush: Vengeance — the fourth title in the Kingdom Rush franchise — will be released for iOS and Android devices on Nov. 22. Pre-orders for the game are currently available on the App Store and Google Play, and will set players back $4.99.
Unlike other Kingdom Rush games, Vengeance is all about the bad guys. Vez’nan, the dark wizard from the first Kingdom Rush, has returned to cause terror and havoc. But this time, players will be working for Vez’nan instead of trying to stop him.
Players will be able to build 16 different towers — a step up from each past entries eight unique towers — to take on the ever-marching forces of good. But unlike past games in which players wielded druids, elves, dwarves and men, Vengeance will set players up with orc fortresses and zombie crypts to control. As always, Kingdom Rush: Vengeance will offer player-controlled heroes to fight alongside their allied towers.
My biggest surprise was that it's weighing in at 1GB in size?! That's more than all 3 prior games combined.
Need a voice actor? Hire me at bengrayVO.com
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051 Steam ID Twitch Page
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EDIT: I do get the feeling sometimes that the cards aren't really random. Like, random but weighted.
Makes the accessory that lets you always see the second row surprisingly valuable, and it’s why I really enjoy the DLC class that has the ability built in (at the cost of an extra row of cards per fight).
Edit: Especially because if you blow up a chain unintentionally, the fight can get incredibly iffy. I’m not a fan of abilities that pierce multiple cards from a single row for that reason, but wiping out the entire front row can turn a match completely around.
Star Realms Arena
Star Realms Arena is a weekly tournament format with trophy stars and foil cards as prizes. If you want to play in Arena, you need to download the Star Realms update, then go to the Play Online lobby and click on the Arena symbol in the top right-hand corner. Each week, there will be a different tournament format, and you can win prizes based on how many games you win. Once you join an Arena, you may play until you reach 6 wins, or 2 losses, whichever comes first. All Arena games will be real-time, but we’ve added extra time to the clock so you won’t feel too rushed.
Arena Formats
Arena will feature a new format each week with its own special rules. Often these formats will be from the Scenarios set. For example, one week Arena may be Flare Mining, which allows each player to pay 1 trade to draw a card, then discard a card, once per turn. The next week’s format might be Rushed Defenses which puts bases directly into play when acquired and scraps them when destroyed.
Arena also uses specific sets each week, however players will be able to play Arena using those sets even if they don’t own those sets!
Prizes
Arena prizes are awarded based on the number of games you win. Some prizes are available in every Arena tournament (like Trophy Stars). Other prizes are only available once per week (like Credits or weekly Foil Cards) or once per season (like Season Avatars or Season Foil Cards).
Wins Prizes
1 3 Credits*
2 1 Star Trophy. Season Foil Card**.
3 7 Credits*
4 2 Star Trophies. Season Avatar**
5 20 Credits*
6 3 Star Trophies. Foil Card*.
* Awarded once per week. ** Awarded once per season (typically there are 4 weeks per season).
*
Trophy Stars
Trophy Stars are a way to track how well you have done in Arenas. Each time you finish an Arena, may can win a trophy with 1, 2 or 3 stars based on the number of games you won. Your Trophy Stars will be displayed next to your level, and top winners will be displayed on weekly, monthly, and yearly leaderboards.
Credits
After your free entry each week, you may join additional Arena tournaments using credits. Each week’s credit prizes are one-time rewards. After you win all the credits that an Arena week has to offer, you’ll have to wait until the next week to win more.
Season Avatar
Each Arena Season (typically there are 4 weeks per season) will have an Avatar reward that can only be earned that season. Season Avatars are one-time rewards, so you can’t win multiple Avatars in the same season.
Foil Cards
Foil cards are premium cards with a foil finish making them look shiny. They also feature minor animation that suggests motion. Whether a card is foil or not has no effect on gameplay. Foils just look cool. If you own a Foil Card, whenever you acquire that card during regular gameplay, both in and outside of Arena, it will turn into a foil. Both you and your opponent will see it as a Foil Card once you acquire it. You only need one copy of a Foil Card and then every version of that card you acquire in games will appear as a Foil Card. You may only win one copy of each weekly and seasonal Foil Card (because you only need one).
Race for the Stars
The first 100 players to reach 100 Trophy Stars will receive the Brain World avatar in the app! This has been one of the most requested avatars, so let the games begin!
Cost
You don’t have to pay anything extra to gain access to Arena, it is a free feature that comes with the full version of Star Realms. Your first Arena tournament each week will be FREE. After you reach 6 wins or 2 losses, you may join again for 20 Credits. You can win credits in Arena or you can buy credits as an in-app purchase (80 credits cost 99 US cents).
Don’t worry, we aren’t taking any features away. Traditional Star Realms matches are still free, unlimited, and completely separate from Arena. Arena is just a cool extra.
See you in Arena!
I'm currently 4-1 in my first Arena run. Nice addition to the game, although I doubt I'll ever buy Arena passes.
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051
Steam ID
Twitch Page
Hearthstone's new dungeon modes are free, don't use your collection at all, and were designed by the designer of Dream Quest... so they're brutal, but in a more friendly Hearthstone way.
I knew dungeon mode existed, and I knew the designer moved to Hearthstone, and somehow never connected these things at all. This sounds perfect, thanks!
I just started this, but I think I love it. Thanks!
Bard is hilarious.
So sad.
But Barb has no easy access to mitigation or healing, can actively hurt itself, and sucks at sustaining energy. Unless you get that targeted strikes attack, you have a very hard cap on how much defense or willpower you can get period, which means every fight is on a timer. Win before you die and also you’re not great at winning fast like agility is.
I think the class *must* get lucky with early access to “gain on damage” items to succeed.
I struggled with Barbarian and only played enough to get the two wins, so I don’t remember my strategy super well, but you want to be using attack power pretty much as often as possible, because that damage from overstocking adds up fast. I also avoid the row piercing attacks (usually attack based) where possible because it’s too easy to muss up a streak.
It’s definitely one of the most luck based of the lot until you can put some items away.
Edit: Starting health and defense items are HUGE, especially in the early game. Later on having a couple of healing potion cards can be shockingly helpful.
I actually think that class might be a little easier on Epic than normal, even. You get less money, but the extra fights mean you get to rotate the item shop more often and be a little pickier.
Bring You Home. Imagine if the people that made Love You To Bits were behind Framed, I guess? But with less swapping the order of things and more switching in entirely different story elements, and substantially cuter animation.
Tiny Bubbles is a sort of match-three (but it's four) puzzler, except that instead of tiles / candies / etc, you're matching bubbles. And instead of swapping things, you're filling the bubbles with colour. And instead of a square grid, it's a network of physically modeled bubbles that pop in an _incredibly_ satisfying way. Even on my older iphone 6, the animation is still completely smooth and entertaining to watch even when I'm utterly failing to solve things.
Part Time UFO. By HAL Laboratory (Kirby, Super Smash Brothers, Mother/Earthbound), it's a physics-y sort-of-puzzle, sort-of-getting things to do what you want while the physics gets in the way. You fly your UFO around and pick things up and stack them up, in various increasingly fiddly / complicated / puzzle-y ways, and it is, just like the others, a game where I was sad when it was done.
All well worth the few bucks they'll cost you -- none of them are so short as to feel trivial, none of them are so long as to feel like I was never going to beat them, either,
(also, I only just discovered "offload" for apps, so I can finally uninstall these but keep my saves around, which is nice if I want to go back and replay bits of these later)
This game is infuriating. Maybe it's just me, but the controls get in the way, too.
Don't get me wrong, it's fun, but it also makes me want to throw my phone through a wall.
I don't find it very fun, but it's interesting.
It’s basically taking the unpredictability of a pizza parlor claw game and giving it a light plot.
Time to find a new impossible time waster.
I actually have this on Steam as well. It's a turn based squad game, essentially a knockoff of the 40K game Deathwatch, but with more RPG elements.
Comparatively simple graphics but pleasingly deep gameplay.
That’s the same price as Legend of Grimlock, which is out now!
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051
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Twitch Page
I enjoyed The Witness, although it’s not exclusive to iOS or anything.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Why didn’t anyone tell me there is a new Kingdom Rush game coming out?! I was nervous after the letdown that was Iron Marines, so seeing this makes me hopeful again.
From the looks of it, we’ll be playing the bad guys this time around. Neat!
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051
Steam ID
Twitch Page
And they're basically the benchmark for every tower defense mobile game.
Edit: oops! Looks like they are Steam codes. Still up for grabs if interested.
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051
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Twitch Page
Five bucks? That's the same price as Legend of Grimrock!
And it's out now!
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051
Steam ID
Twitch Page
I've recently done a quick casual run of the first one, i feel underwhelmed after the normal runs that you have to separately do the hero and iron and it feels tedious when everything is unlocked.
I hope to see some new content or mechanics, something that corresponds to a 'new age' tower defense game. Because at this point i feel like GemCraft did the better job when they first came out long time ago. XD
Tiny Guardians does the formula backwards, controlling a group of heroes moving along a path fighting the monsters they encounter. Its style borrows heavily from Kingdom Rush.
Incursion is a pretty good TD game that lets you do some interesting things like mixing troop types on a given control point. It's been a while but if I remember rightly.. mixing troops on a spot gives them some versatility, very useful if they're more isolated protecting a minor route (you can have like 1 tank, 1 healer, and 1 dps troop doing a decent job of everything instead of 3 troops doing a good job of only one thing), or if you keep a control point all the same type of troops, they have some extra upgrade options.
They're both modest deviations from the standard formula that are worth getting.
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I have this now on android. I don't feel that its very much like hearthstone, it's more a like tera battle or whatever.
Still fun and playing for 2 days I haven't encountered any need to spend money. There's not even an energy system?
Card packs are probably needed for pvp but I'm fine with the single player content.
Kingdom Rush Vengeance out now Nov. 22, is $5!
Game details:
Kingdom Rush: Vengeance — the fourth title in the Kingdom Rush franchise — will be released for iOS and Android devices on Nov. 22. Pre-orders for the game are currently available on the App Store and Google Play, and will set players back $4.99.
Unlike other Kingdom Rush games, Vengeance is all about the bad guys. Vez’nan, the dark wizard from the first Kingdom Rush, has returned to cause terror and havoc. But this time, players will be working for Vez’nan instead of trying to stop him.
Players will be able to build 16 different towers — a step up from each past entries eight unique towers — to take on the ever-marching forces of good. But unlike past games in which players wielded druids, elves, dwarves and men, Vengeance will set players up with orc fortresses and zombie crypts to control. As always, Kingdom Rush: Vengeance will offer player-controlled heroes to fight alongside their allied towers.
My biggest surprise was that it's weighing in at 1GB in size?! That's more than all 3 prior games combined.
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051
Steam ID
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