Dawncaster | The RPG Cardventure

This might be the best deck builder yet, and I've played dozens of them at this point. I don't think I've ever played a deck builder with such a large variety of deck styles that all play in a unique way. And it's not like the decks are designed for you; my favorite example of pre-designed decks is the "affinity" mechanic from M:TG where the designers clearly just put together a deck and gave it to you. There are obvious synergies here, but there's also such a breadth of cards that many of the cards interact in subtle ways and let you create decks that feel emergent. The game lets you feel clever when you put together decks, and that is not a common occurrence. The encounter design is really fun. I love that all the battles are 1v1. This gives the game a unique feeling in a market that's saturated with copy-and-paste StS clones. The encounters remind me of old school JRPGs, where some of the battles can just brick builds or are SUPER scary, but outside of bosses you can avoid most of the scariest battles. This rewards your for gaining game knowledge which feels great. The RPG encounters do this cool thing where they give you different options based on your stats and things you've previously done, and you won't ever know what options could be there unless you look up spoilers. It helps inject a lot of replayability into the game, and I'm still not confident that I've done everything in all of the encounters at this point. So, criticisms. - My biggest criticism is that not every screen lets you see your deck and/or character talents. This is a huge pain point and a common criticism of games in this genre, so every time I run into it it's kind of shocking to me. It is extremely frustrating to not be able to see what talents you have while picking a new talent when leveling up. - At 150 hours, I don't have everything unlocked yet. At this point I think I'd only have the character portraits left to unlock if I spent all my fateshards, and those are just cosmetic. But the unlocks are a real grind at this point after all of the expansion content, and some of those unlocks gate deck archetypes. - The game doesn't seem to play that well on Steam Deck: there are times where the scroll breaks, the selection indicator isn't showing you what you actually have selected, and the outside-of-a-run card gallery doesn't seem to work at all as I can't move past the first page of cards. - There's a sort-of post-battle results view where you can see what cards were played, but it's flawed. When I was starting out I'd die to like an environmental effect and there was no information available about what actually happened in that view. The cards on that display don't show what damage or healing or whatever they actually did, just the base card, so modifiers aren't factored in. A proper battle log would be a blessing here. Overall, it's a great game made by a passionate group of devs. I expect I'll get another 100 hours of fun out of it at least.

This is an excellent deckbuilder, with many classes, and many valid archetypes within each class. The upper levels are far from easy, and there is a lot to learn and explore. This gets my highest recommendation.

Great game all around. Art style is nice. Game is fun. Pretty impressed. 10/10

Very good custom deck builder like Beneath Oresa and others. Only played a couple rogue and arcanist builds but they are somewhat different. Not really an RPG like Knock on the Coffin Lid but there are a lot of zones and they act very different so you can't go full 1-trick pony.

Will add more, great card game

Dawncaster hat extrem viel Potenzial. Die Zeichnungen der Gegner, Karten und Gebiete sind wirklich wunderschön und geben dem Spiel eine einzigartige Atmosphäre. Gerade das Art Design sticht für mich richtig heraus. Die deutsche Übersetzung ist insgesamt auch gut gelungen. Hier und da tauchen zwar noch englische Texte auf, aber nichts Dramatisches. Was das Gameplay angeht: Es gibt unglaublich viele Karten. Wirklich sehr viele. Dadurch entstehen unzählige Strategien, Builds und Kombinationen. Außerdem hat man schon früh mehrere Charaktere, die sich komplett unterschiedlich spielen. Durch das Freischalten von Portraits, Waffen, Talenten und Fähigkeiten hat man zusätzlich Motivation weiterzuspielen. ABER… jetzt kommt mein größtes Problem mit dem Spiel: Dawncaster ist nicht einfach nur schwer — es fühlt sich teilweise unfair schwer an. Die späteren Gegner und Bosse machen gefühlt alles gleichzeitig: Sie heilen sich jede Runde, debuffen dich dauerhaft, buffen sich selbst, entfernen Karten aus deinem Deck, erhöhen Kosten, machen Karten nutzlos und bestrafen dich sogar fürs Ziehen oder Ausspielen von Karten. Und nein, das sind keine einzelnen Mechaniken verteilt auf verschiedene Gegner — die letzten Bosse machen gefühlt ALLES gleichzeitig. Es gibt zwar einen einfacheren Schwierigkeitsgrad, auf dem man nicht sterben kann. Dadurch kann man die Gebiete kennenlernen und ausprobieren, welche Wege und Strategien funktionieren. Und ja, Scheitern gehört bei solchen Spielen dazu. Trotzdem habe ich aktuell keine Ahnung, wie man die letzten beiden Gebiete halbwegs fair schaffen soll. Vielleicht bin ich auch einfach schlecht 😅 Trotz aller Kritik: Ich hoffe wirklich sehr, dass das Spiel weiterentwickelt wird. Die Grundlage ist fantastisch und ich kann es definitiv empfehlen. Im Moment fühlt es sich für mich aber noch etwas unfertig bzw. unausgeglichen an.

One of the best deck building RPG games I've ever played. Lots of different cards, classes, skills. My go to game.