Arcane Board Reviews

I'm enjoying the design, lots of unlocks with interesting synergies, hope they add more. Even a story underpinning the progression that has more to it than a gimmick. Runs smooth and nice SNES-style graphics

This showed up in my discovery queue and I could tell right away it would be my jam. I don't write many reviews but I want to make sure this game gets its flowers. The battles are similar to Puzzle Quest, except with Tetris-like pieces instead of Bejeweled gems. The board will be prepopulated with some empty tiles, the enemies trap/curse tiles, and other magical tiles with symbols on them which you place as well. Some of them are your basic attacks + block generators, but you can set up various archetypes and synergies (I won the tutorial run with an Axe + Fire build, for example). You draw three tiles which you can place. Clearing lines on the board activates the tiles cleared, both yours and your enemies. The enemies take an action every turn, usually either directly attacking, blocking, or adding traps/curses to the board. You can also cast spells similar to Puzzle Quest, most of which have cooldowns or activation requirements tied to clearing lines. The rest of the gameplay loop is what you'd expect from a roguelike deckbuilder. You travel nodes on a map that include battles, events, shops, and rest spots, ending with a boss at the end of each area. I really like the style of the pixel art, the creature designs especially. The background music is good, though like all of these roguelikes the music eventually will become repetitive and you'll put on your own music or a podcast. It's too early to comment on things like difficulty and enemy/boss variety, but I will say that I beat the tutorial seed pretty easily. I did encounter a single bug (at least I think it was a bug), though it may have been me misunderstanding the effect of one of my spells. EDIT: I posted the bug in the Steam forum for the game and it got fixed a couple of hours later. For $10 ($8 launch discount) I'd say it's absolutely worth it. This game scratches the Puzzle Quest itch that other games haven't been able to replicate for me, and it's going into my regular rotation of roguelikes.

After about 3 hours, I feel like I've seen all the content of the game and don't really have a big incentive to keep playing. I think the price point for this game vs the amount of content is way off. That said, I feel like it's a novel enough idea in the world of roguelike deckbuilders that it has a lot of potential. This is basically tetris in combat form, and it was fun. The game and map progression plays like most other roguelike deckbuilders, so if you're familiar with those you'll be right at home. Just again, the price is way off and I think it's going to kill this game unless there is a lot more content added. I can not recommend it at the current price of $!0 or even the sale price of $8. I try to get an hour of gameplay per dollar minimum, and this fell short by at least half.