Why has nobody done this before? The moment I type this I start to suspect that maybe they have. Wasn’t there an early card-based entry in the Apple Arcade line-up that did something similar? Wasn’t there a…
It doesn’t matter. Someone’s done it now and with real class and atmosphere. This is Bardcard. Remember that game where you put a bunch of cards face-down in a grid and you turn them over two at a time looking for the pairs? Bardcard uses that game – the bored bank holiday game, the Mario 3 game – as the engine for a roguelike. And it works as well as you might imagine.
So you have health and energy. Health goes down when you take a hit in combat. Energy goes down as you turn over cards. Each level of the dungeon here is an arrangement of these cards, face down. Start turning them over in pairs. Two coins? That’s money in the bank. Two wearables? That’s a new piece of armour to equip. Two piles of rubble? Want to hunt through it? You might find something cool in there.
