The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I tried, but I just don’t understand Dungeon Solitaire.

This game was at the top of the App store lists for card games, and man, do I love card games. It was $2, and I thought, sure, I’ll give it a try. I’m down with card games, and a good single-player one seemed neat.

It just doesn’t work well, though.

Basically, you have two columns, an enemy column and a hero column. There are monster cards, hero cards, green buff cards, equipment cards, and trap cards. You place these down, and try to fill up the whole hero column with heroes to win the game. If you draw a 6th monster three times, the game is over.
Every card basically modifies one of the two stats on a hero or monster card: Strength and Magic. You line up the cards on the grid, and if the numbers on one are higher than the other, that card wins, and the other is destroyed. However, both stats have to be higher. If each card wins one stat, then a Stalemate is created. This can trigger special abilities, but mostly just results in the cards sitting there doing nothing. Equipment and Buffs are in the game to get you out of these Stalemates, but since a card can only be modified by one Equipment ever, and buffs are almost all completely random, they don’t actually help. And since you are forced to play every monster you draw, you get into Stalemates a lot.

That really isn’t fun.

So often you’re randomly drawing cards, hoping for a solution to a monster. But there’s maybe one hero in your deck that can beat said monster. So you keep drawing, but that just makes you draw a monster, and you lose. It’s really stupid, actually. A good card game has an element of randomness, of course. That’s what makes it fun. But there are so few options you actually have in the game, you are almost fully dependent on the draw. It’s very rare when your decisions on where to place monsters and heroes come into play. I’ve played many games now, and it really just seems like a slot machine. It’s pretty unsatisfying. Plus, the game seems based around you failing, and is all about getting a high score. But since it seems like the score you get is equally random, based on how long the random cards let you survive, it really doesn’t seem like a useful way to go.

The iPhone platform is perfect for a good card game. It would be fantastic. It’s a shame this isn’t it. I really want to play a good little card game. I really do! Oh well. I’ll try again, I’m sure.