Roguebook is out with Slay The Spire-inspired battling from Richard Garfield and Faeria devs
Get a big deck now
Ah yes, Roguebook! That game about venturing across the pages of a book and-- No, wait, that was Trials Of Fire. Roguebook is instead the new game from the developers of Faeria, and it's a deckbuilder constructed with help from Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield. It's out now.
It seems clearly inspired by Slay The Spire, albeit with a handful of twists. You select two heroes from an available four, then build your deck of cards out of their special abilities. There's exploration via a hex-based overworld and then turn-based battles that happen from a side-on perspective.
There are ways to tweak and transmute cards, and it's designed in such a way that you're encouraged to build a big deck rather than throwing cards away to build a refined machine. It's also a roguelike so you have to start over again after each defeat, but you keep hold of unlocked cards, skills and certain upgrades for your next attempt.
Faeria was liked by Brendan in his Faeria review, finding it had more brains than vanilla Hearthstone. It never found an audience as large as Blizzard's juggernaut however, switching from free-to-play to a premium model in search of sustainability.
Richard Garfield, meanwhile, has become a gun-for-hire in recent years, popping up as designer or consultant on all sorts of PC games. Perhaps most notable among them was Artifact, Valve's deckbuilder whose house of cards went tumbling earlier this year.
If you've space in your life for another game trying to muscle in on the Spire/Monster Train duopoly, you can pick up Roguebook from Steam now for £20/$25/€25.