Erannorth Chronicles

It's a curse common among deckbuilders, that making builds is far more entertaining than actually playing them. All the positive reviews are correct in praising the breadth and depth of building in this game. However, all of the other supporting elements of the game suck. Progression is tedious through too numerous of low stakes tactical battles. The strategic/adventure map is even worse, where it feels more like you're gamifying minimal time progression than actually engaging in broader decision making.

I was writing a very detailed review after my first playthrough only to foolishly go to my library to check something and lose it, so for now I'm just going to say that the game is providing a unique blends of modern roguelike deckbuilder gameplay with a persistent card collection element that is, for some reason, been missing from the genre since 1997 MicroProse Magic: The Gathering game. It's also astonishingly well done and has an absurd amount of content. I'm very happy I randomly stumbled upon it since it seems to have flown under the genre enjoyers radar and has little to no content about it on YouTube. Criminally underrated.

It was a great game, till the dev started adding AI crap years afterwards and ruining the experience

I tend to only post reviews on things that I feel like I have either a unique perspective on, or can word things in a way that isn't being articulated by other reviews. This game is made by an insane person for insane people (like me). This is not a popcorn game like Vampire Survivors or Slay the Spire, it has no concern for the general public. This is licorice, black coffee, you have to WANT to like this game before you start trying it because it will be off-putting at first. Once you dig in, seek answers to your questions, truly learn and internalize the game, you'll find an extremely rich deckbuilding adventure game with nearly endless build options. Calling this a "roguelike deckbuilder" is somewhat disingenuous because so different from other games that hold that title. This is a game for people who have nostalgia for Magic: The Gathering (1997, otherwise known as Shandalar), people who are interested in picking up a new hobby that can keep up with their desire to learn more. My time in the game isn't even enough to see 10% of what the game has to offer. I do recommend the game, but if you're looking for "another game like monster train", or something you can pick up and play for 15 minutes then put back down, this isn't it. (And if you do like insane games made for insane people, check out Siralim Ultimate)

I've played more than 30 different card games on PC and Erannorth Chronicles is one of the best and truly special. The scope of its sandbox options, RPG quests, and the cards pool is like nothing out there. MASSIVE CARDS POOL, UNIQUE MECHANICS The complexity of builds and storylines you can create, backed up by tons of cards, truly stands out. Playing as a Witch, organizing a coven with other Witch character cards, manipulating day/night cycle to "bewitch" enemies to fight each other is just an example how unique the Erannorth Chronicles mechanics and options are. COMPLEX CHARACTER CREATION, ENDLESS REPLAYABILITY In EC you can play as 14 organizations, plus unaligned: occult groups, covens, pirates, nobility, scientists…. Plus 15 Species with different stats and several subspecies each (humans, angels, undead, elemental, shapeshifters …). Then 15 classes with several subclasses (the Witch has 10 different options for example). And then a choice from a ton of Backgrounds to add even more story and depth to your character. All these provide cards and access to different card sets. So EC has so many options to juxtapose, creating a different game experience each playthrough (if you're willing to experiment). I haven't seen this complex card game before. I enjoy almost everything about EC. The most important is that building decks is a lot of fun. A free moving around and exploration are exciting. Big map with many different regions, enemy types, cards, npcs and (legendary) items to equip. A lot of flavor and mystery! No fixed story and captivating events in between card battles. You visit towns with their own politics, intrigues and legends you can become a part of. Did I mention you can build your own castle? The only criticism I have, I wish its deckbuilding UI had just a few extra, simple options to make it more user friendly. (For instance, when using "q split view" in the column on the left where your deck is shortlistedt: instead of "my deck" at the top there should be the name of the deck you have open currently and I wish the "b Card Collection" button would switch on/off between all the owned cards to cards in this particular deck only. It seems like if I want to see what cards are in my deck only, I have to go back and forth to "F6 manage decks" and click the deck I want to see = unnecessary trouble and clickfest). Above the character picture its all traits should be listed (if you're a witch, dancer, mystic etc) EC is a complex game and requires time to get used to. I dropped it right after buying it due to frustrations (I'd say the game is original in its design and takes time to get used to). Then after a few months I tried it again and fell in love! Erannorth Chronicles is a super unique, massive card game that has been the best mix of a sandbox RPG with cards on the market. Fully recommended!

Erannorth Chronicles is Mount and Blade or Battle Brothers, but with card battling instead of M1+back and forth atop a ladder for ten minutes or telling obese tactical dudes to camp and hold their spears out for 20 turns. It is a far cry from the roguelite deckbuilders you are familiar with, and much closer to the other two games in scale, power growth, time investment, and game flow, but Erannorth Chronicles blows both out of the water in terms of scope of the card part of the game, not to knock M&B or BB for what THEY do well, but Erannorth models a truly baffling amount of content within the card battling. I am not kidding. You can be an angel paladin burning heretics, you can be a demonic witch hexing and controlling enemies amassing a coven of ally witches, you can be a foppish noble dwarf with an army of disposable soldiers using his wealth to crush the enemies, a half vampire hunting vampires, a demon alchemist, you be a dancer or con artist that charms and tricks enemies, there are more combos than I can count with totally exclusive card pools, synergies, and mechanics, all with proper theming and meaningful gameplay differences, at least as much as throwing cards at jpg enemies can be meaningful. It would take me hundreds of hours of play to sample even half of what this game has to offer in terms of archetypes to even have some understanding of what is good or bad. It is insane what this game models. For all this variety though, the game remains fairly elegant; the loot pools only drop what you can use, so a quick glance at the card packs your character has and you can identify often what skills would be good and choose to discard what skills you don't to thin the loot pool. Once you cross the initial hurdle of learning, the game is fairly easy to pick up. The card battling has you construct a deck and battle to find an ever increasing array of cards to improve your deck dropped from all the various battle gauntlet quests you can engage in. Equipment is cards, which if equipped show up in your hand every single turn. Potions and consumables are cards, which you can chuck in your "backpack" to pull as a sideboard in the event you need them. The cards themselves are packed with synergies, the next card gets +1 multicast, +2 dmg, everything synergizes with something else or does two or three things and within your character's archetypes you have many different ways to take your build and focus, and depending on what zones have what resistant enemies, sometimes you might need to take all the disused cards you have amassed and make a second deck with a different focus to get through a tough challenge. Every game mode also tweaks large parts of the game; you can run a linear series of dungeons, you can put the campaign on a timer and restrict shops, you can make every single dungeon on the map a single run only, this game is happy to disassemble and reassemble itself any number of ways to provide a variety of ways to approach this card battling. Now, this means of course it will never be as tight or as elegant as a Monster Train, but it is, at least ostensibly, a big open world RPG-themed M&B style game of immense growth in power scale, and in that matter it succeeds. If I had to charge the game with some weaknesses, it is that the text quests in the towns are fairly silly (Those might come from the DLCs, I cannot possibly identify what comes from what DLC and this game is so enormous few people probably can either) and that one of the core mechanics of the game is modifying enemy intent by dropping them below HP thresholds, but you only get to see enemy intent if your "account" has beaten that enemy before, unless you use some cheat to unlock them all, but that just means your first couple runs are warm ups anyway, and in a game with this much content that's understandable. This game fits perfectly right next to all your other autismal forever games like BB, COE, Dominions, etc, and is a wonderful piece of work. EDIT: Here, let me just give you an elevator pitch as to HOW MUCH STUFF is in this game. The Pirate class has the following subclasses that all have distinct card packs and perk sets: Buccaneer Gunslinger Cutthroat Swashbuckler Treasure Hunter Dread Captain

AI slop game, I bought it and saw that in the DLC's especially there is a LOT of AI generated art for the cards. Avoid at all costs

First off - AI. Yuck. Secondly, I really wanted to like this game and tried to get into it, but things are explained really poorly and it's not clear what cards do. You'll find yourself looking up a keyword on a card, and then that keyword references another keyword, and still at the end of this chain, you'll have no idea what this card actually does. This game would benefit a lot from a much cleaner UI that made things more digestable.

Super Slay the Spire that's open world. 3x the number of race and classes you can be compared to a roguelike. Very solid game with a ton of different ways to build your character, and die later on.

Dev degenerated to aislop for their third game. Do Not Touch.