Aces & Adventures Reviews

Good game to play when the cat won't let you use your keyboard.

Ah yes, nothing better than real-time achievements in my turn-based game.

The Spiral and Branches paths are really excellent.

Aces and Adventures is a unique blend of deckbuilding, poker mechanics, and turn-based RPG combat that carves out a distinctive identity in a crowded genre. Developed by Triple.B.Titles, this game takes an inventive approach to card-based gameplay, combining the strategic depth of roguelike deckbuilders with the probabilistic tension of poker hands. Set in a mythical world filled with Norse and Middle Eastern influences, the game merges narrative-driven campaigns with quick, replayable challenges, offering both story and strategy in equal measure. While it may fly under the radar compared to more mainstream deckbuilders, Aces and Adventures is a tightly designed and imaginative game that rewards tactical thinking and risk management. The core gameplay revolves around building poker-style hands to power your attacks and abilities. Unlike traditional deckbuilders that use custom-designed cards for combat, this game uses a standard 52-card playing deck, which is shared between offense and defense. The twist comes in how these cards are utilized: building poker hands (pairs, straights, full houses, etc.) boosts the effectiveness of your attacks or defenses. For example, a straight might grant a powerful combo move, while a pair might simply add damage. This system forces players to constantly evaluate risk versus reward, as you're not only drawing cards to build a better hand, but also managing a pool of ability cards that provide RPG-style effects—healing, shielding, debuffs, or status attacks. What elevates Aces and Adventures from a simple poker gimmick to a deep strategy game is how it intertwines these mechanics with distinct character classes and narrative-driven missions. Each of the five playable characters—Rogue, Enchantress, Hunter, Warrior, and Wizard—has their own unique deck of ability cards and a signature style. The Warrior thrives on brute force and blocking, while the Rogue focuses on critical strikes and card manipulation. The Enchantress, for example, can unleash devastating spells by stacking buffs and chaining magical abilities. This class system brings strong RPG flavor to the table and ensures that every run or mission feels meaningfully different depending on your chosen hero. The game is divided into two main modes: Campaign and Adventure. The Campaign mode follows a story-driven path with handcrafted encounters and narrative events. It’s presented through stylish storybook pages, fully voiced narration, and hand-drawn artwork, lending the game a fairy-tale aesthetic with darker mythological undertones. The writing is surprisingly rich, offering cryptic lore, character flavor, and immersive world-building without overwhelming the player. The story unfolds in short, digestible missions that gradually introduce more complex mechanics and enemy types, making it an ideal entry point for newcomers. Adventure mode, by contrast, embraces roguelike design, throwing randomized encounters, modifiers, and escalating difficulty at the player. This mode offers high replay value as you attempt to conquer increasingly difficult runs with your character’s evolving deck and strategic builds. Each run is filled with important decisions: which ability cards to add, when to sacrifice cards for health, how to mitigate bad hands, and when to go all-in on a risky combo. The randomness of the standard deck adds unpredictability, but the game smartly balances this with skill expression—victories are never purely about luck, but rather how you adapt to the hands you’re dealt. Visually, Aces and Adventures presents a polished and consistent art direction. Characters, enemies, and environments are brought to life through detailed card illustrations and stylized animations during combat. The UI is intuitive, clearly displaying card interactions and ability effects, which is crucial for a game where parsing hand information is key to success. The atmospheric soundtrack complements the mythical tone without overwhelming the action, and the voice acting, while not always top-tier, adds warmth and personality to the campaign narrative. These elements combine to create an immersive experience that feels greater than the sum of its parts. In terms of challenge and pacing, the game strikes a solid balance. Early missions introduce mechanics methodically, but the difficulty ramps up quickly in Adventure mode, where enemies gain access to their own nasty combos and effects. Some battles can feel brutal, especially when you're dealt a series of bad hands, but the satisfaction of overcoming tough odds is real. The game offers strategic depth in not just optimizing your deck, but learning how to bluff, manage risk, and play defensively when necessary. It encourages a poker player's mindset—calculating odds, reading patterns, and adjusting tactics on the fly. Where Aces and Adventures may fall short for some is in its reliance on RNG and its relatively modest variety of enemies and encounter types. While the card mechanics are brilliant, the game could benefit from additional enemy archetypes, more environmental variety, and perhaps deeper narrative branches to enhance replayability further. That said, the foundation is incredibly strong, and the existing content is more than enough to engage players for dozens of hours, especially those who enjoy card games that reward thoughtful planning and adaptability. Overall, Aces and Adventures is a standout title in the indie card battler space. It successfully fuses the familiar mechanics of poker with the tactical structure of deckbuilding RPGs to create something fresh and exciting. Its mythological storytelling, compelling class diversity, and challenging gameplay loop make it a gem for fans of strategy games and card-based combat. While it may not have the sheer breadth of content seen in larger roguelikes, its unique identity and clever systems more than make up for it. For those seeking a cerebral yet accessible card battler with a distinctive twist, Aces and Adventures delivers an experience that’s as rewarding as it is inventive. Rating: 8/10

Choose a character class and fight your way through a DnD campaign where you attack and defend with poker hands! If the above sentence sounds good to you, you might like it as much as me - it feels like a hidden gem! Meta progression gradually improves your class abilities and gives you more ability cards to build your deck with (ie. pay a club to dodge an attack; pay two hearts to heal). Aside from the main campaign, you then unlock modes with slay-the-spire like node maps. I've rocked the rogue, and now want to play through as every other class. My one complaint would be that you have to come out into the game's hub to level up and edit your deck rather than being able to do so quickly between campaign chapters, but it's a minor niggle.

This game has solid progression and strategy. Nothing phenomenal, but workable. Where it really shines is in the narrative, which has the most beautiful and poetic prose I've ever seen in a video game. Worth buying just for the story.

This game was not for me. Everything about this game is really good. Art, UI, audio, voice acting. However I did not enjoy the game play. I thought it was boring.

Got the game on sale. It is way worth the price I paid. Highly recommended.

Very fun deckbuilder that uses the basic hands of poker. Will inevitably be compared to Balatro but has a very different feel. The adventures are short with just a few battles each and I can see buying this game at anywhere near RRP not worth it but when heavily discounted it's more than worth your time.

Strong recommend. Story-based Slay the Spire with poker hands, great writing and voice acting.