Criticizing Dungeon Drafters

A certain boss begins the fight by summoning minions, but I had a lucky card draw and managed to kill all of them in a single turn. I slowly destroyed its disembodied fists, then began to work on its body.

The body has an innate melee counterattack, separate from the normal Retaliate status effect. I had no way to know this in advance. But I piled on Max Health +, so whatever.

The boss has a move that can kill you pretty much whenever it wants, and there’s no way to dodge. You’re immune to it at max health, but I had no way to know this in advance. You can also prevent it with stun or stealth, but I had no way to know in advance I needed to make a deck composition that could use those kinds of cards.

I could slog my way through the tedious battles to get back to the boss, then fight it again with stun and stealth cards, while exclusively using ranged cards to keep it from countering. But there’s no way to guarantee I’d be able to kill all the minions again before they damaged me, and there’s no way to guarantee I’d have enough stun and stealth available when I needed it to make up for taking damage. So I rage quit.

In praise of Dungeon Drafters

You start the game by picking two of four card types to specialize in. You soon meet masters of all four, and over time, you can build your deck out of any of them. But there’s a fifth card type, Stranger, and it’s associated with the evil god you’re trying to kill. You can only get these cards from “corrupted” packs, a lot of them have a special mark saying it’s “blasphemous” to use them, and there’s an NPC whose entire purpose is to destroy them if you’d rather not keep them around. The game’s deliberately vague about what happens if you decide to be “blasphemous.”

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