Toads of the Bayou Steam Charts & Stats

Not the best game in the world but I enjoyed finding a way to beat it with the first couple characters.

Not much depth of deck strategy or tactics. If you want something very light this would work, but I found it it pretty dull.

Toads of the Bayou is a roguelite deckbuilder which has tactical turn based combat similar to Into The Breach. The player must help a group of toads free their home from the evil Baron Samedi. Combat takes place on small maps, the player controls one character, and will play cards which are randomly drawn into your hand, to move or attack. You can see which tiles each enemy intends to attack on their turn, which helps you to plan your turn. Most missions ask you to kill 8 enemies while protecting friendly buildings or characters. Completing objectives gives you resources to buy new cards, relics, potions and traps at the shop between missions. However, if enemies kill or destroy something you’re supposed to protect, a curse card is placed in your deck which you’ll have to pay to remove. Each run has three acts, and the final mission of each act is a boss fight. There are a few different bosses, which provides some variety to each run. There are three playable characters. You have to win a run with the Leader to unlock the Sister, win with the Sister to unlock the Seer, and then win with the Seer to unlock the final boss fight against Samedi. It takes around 2 hours to win a run, and defeating Samedi unlocks 5 more corruption difficulty levels. So there’s enough content for a game which is already very cheap. The Leader is focused on melee attacks, and I won my first run with this character thanks to some very useful cards which increase his strength, making attacks more powerful for the rest of the turn. The Sister is focused on ranged attacks, and is the most difficult character to play as. Her default ability increases damage, but if you shoot at an enemy in an adjacent tile, you’re knocked back, and if you collide with an object or enemy you’ll lose health. Because the maps are so small, I was frequently in a position where I’d take self damage because of the knockback. But playing cautiously meant killing enemies slower, giving them more chance to destroy side objectives, so I ended up with lots of curses. The run that I won actually involved picking a bonus option at the start of the run to remove that default ability. My attacks were weaker, but at least I didn’t have to worry about the knockback effect. The Seer is focused on poisoning enemies, and swapping tiles with enemies to make them attack each other. This character is the most fun to play as, and the starting cards are so useful, I only added a couple more cards to my deck because I wanted to draw them every turn. I actually killed the final boss in 1 turn by stacking an incredible amount of poison. My only complaints are relatively minor. Firstly, I think the resource economy could be improved. Completing objectives will give the player either oil or gold. Oil is used to buy cards, relics, potions, and traps. Gold is used to unlock more slots in the shop (which is a one time purchase that applies to all future runs), and buy starting bonuses (like how Slay The Spire offers the player a random choice at the start of each run). Gold can also reroll the shops, but what’s the point if I don’t have enough oil to buy anything? Gold is kept between runs, so after only a few runs I’ve got loads of gold saved up and nothing to spend it on. I feel like we should be able to buy things from the shop with gold, even if the costs are more expensive than oil. Or we could pay gold to upgrade cards. Sometimes you can buy upgraded cards from the shop (with oil) but I can’t see any way to upgrade cards that are already in my deck. The other thing that can sometimes be annoying is when the bonus objectives ask you to protect a scout (who has a ranged attack with a rifle) and a building. Every turn the scout will shoot in a specific direction, sometimes he might kill an enemy, but sometimes he’ll shoot the building you’re supposed to protect, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. This just seems dumb. He’s a friendly NPC, why is he intentionally shooting a friendly building?