Stash: A Card Looter

I want to like this game so bad. It has a lot of elements that I like. But so much of my success relies on rng that hovers at the low end unless you use a charm to get into the mid-range numbers. There is a bunch a factions, a bunch of spell effects, a bunch of combat modifiers - and I am lost as to how you are supposed to make a constantly evolving cohesive unit with this rng system. There is obviously something I am missing, I could not get better at this game, but never did it reveal or guide me in teh right direction. And why the hell is my life total not always on display? You can only see it after each battle, and if you have the turn speed turned up it's easy to miss. Also, the auto-battles are pvp against the ghost of other players. Sometimes I have to play my own ghost, and I can tell you it sucks to be taken out by your own army. Change that now. I am willing to try it again if I can get some solid advice, but I can't keep playing something that I am unable to improve upon or even know what I'm doing wrong.

Looks like strategy initially, but the mechanic is actually slots type / relies a lot on random chance

stumble around in the incoherent mess as rng dictates the outcome against the only four other people you play against over and over.

An amazing autobattler! The basic mechanics are simple enough to get started right away, but there is so much depth to how you fully optimize a run. The game probably has the best end-game mechanic I've ever seen. Once you achieve 18 wins and 'win' your run, you get to face 1 of 12 King Decks. If you are victorrious, you take their place and future players will have to try to defeat your deck! This makes it super fun to try and build the strongest possible deck, even if you're likely to win the run regardless. There are some negative reviews regarding RNG. In my opinion this is just inexperience with the type of game. Autobattlers ALWAYS have RNG, the whole point of a skilled player in such a game is to navigate the RNG better than your opponents. Similar to how in Poker the better player might lose a hand but will win in the long run. By making good decisions about where and when to use your charms you can make the RNG a tiny factor and come out on top if you're the better player. I'm a livestreamer & YouTuber, I initially got sponsored by Stash but I enjoyed the game so much I played it a bunch extra on stream for free. At less than $10 (with ZERO extra monetization, no P2W, no Gacha, nothing!!!) I believe the game is incredibly underpriced and an amazing deal for anyone that enjoys strategy/autobattler type of games.

Edit 1: i read alot of negative reviews and many of them complain about bugs. Here are the ones i encountered: - hero getting deleted when swapping on board - finishing two quests at the same time finishes only one and entirely skips the draw phase after battle. Very interesting game with unique mechanics and concepts. Sadly, even though they have a tutorial, its not super on depth and leaves a lot of neccessary knowledge for the players to discover for themselves. This can get very frustrating if you lose matches and dont even know what to change to get stronger. So how does the game work? You have four main systems to interact with. 1. The card draft. Everything you can use are cards that you can draft as a reward for surviving (not winning) fights. You can draft heroes, weapons, armor, relics and some special cards. 2. The hero creation. You need a hero and a weapon (ranged, melee or shield) and you can optionally add an armor. You can then "fuse" all three to create a playable hero. Heroes are different humanoid animals and every type of animal has a special ability that has the same effect among animals of the same species but not the same Power level. For example, the fox can heal his partner (ill get to that) and himself but the amount of healing varies greatly. 3. The board. You have 8 slots on the board. Two lanes of 4 rows each, meaning 4 frontline and 4 backline cards. Heroes have speed stats that they mainly inherit from their weapons and get "a turn" every couple of seconds (faster weapons = more turns). Every turn they generate one mana, cast their spell if they have enough mana and attack if possible. Backline heroes can only attack or be attacked with a ranged weapon bu beware: they become frontline heroes once their frontline has been killed!! 4. The relics. You have a faction specific relic slot for each of the four factions and three freely useable slots but each TYPE of relic can only be used once. You cant stack multiple of the same effect. Those four systems are explained individually in the tutorial but how they interact is left out. This means you have absolutly no clue how to even get strong and useable heroes or what synergies exist or how they function and the tooltips dont explain too much either. A match of Stash is basically a realtime Autobattler where your heroes fight the enemies. Every hero has a multitude of possible stats but the main ones are attackpower, speed and victory points. The player with Victory points by the end wins the match. If a hero dies, his victory points are lost. You can either focus on killing enemies to take out their victory points or stack alot of points and keep your heroes alive to win that way. The match is timed so its possible to win by surviving only. My strongest deck ever actually was one that couldnt even deal damage but only healed, shielded and stacked victory points. Overall this is relatively straight forward and easy to understand. Now comes the complex part that isnt explained in the tutorial. Building a strong board. You need a combination of heroes, weapons and relics that all interact well with eachother and this is further complicated by the fact that every hero can belong to one of four factions (colours.) Relics only affect heroes of their colour and can affect between 1 and 5 heroes (the more, the weaker the buff.) Should you get alot of heroes of one colour or mix them up? Also, heroes cant really grow in power so ones attained later are almost always stronger than the ones you have so you are constantly replacing them but have little agency over their faction. Get a really good hero pull but he doesnt fit your relics? Tough luck. Wanna replace your weakest hero but you have relics that require the new hero to have a shield and you cant find one? Woopsie. How to exactly manage all these variables takes alot of time to figure out by yourself. Im currently on my seventh or eight run and starting to figure it out without reading up any guides or meta decks. Its fun but one run complete takes about two hours and some parts of it are pretty tedious. I still recommend it because its cheap and somewhat fun but i wonder if it gets better once i get the hang of it or if it then just becomes boring.

Game has some unique ideas that are fun, it has potential BUT and it's some big ones: The game is buggy as hell, sometimes for unknown reason it's extremely laggy during the drafting section, it crashes (and punish you for that). It gets so bad that you just want to alt+f4 yourself at times. The game appears to only function online and I suspect their servers are the issues for most of these problesm. I would stay away until they fix their game cause right now it's not an enjoyable experience.

Tentative recommend. There's something good here as far as autobattlers go, but there are a lot of problems you have to ignore. For the price it's hard to argue with though. Lot of bugs, i've had units disappear, overlap, get stuck on the mouse, etc etc. The actual mechanics are quite opaque, and it's hard to tell why you lose or win certain fights. It could use more variety of weapons, armour and units as you see them all pretty quick and things don't feel like they vary much after a few runs. I often found myself fighting my own past runs several times per run.

My mistake with this game was taking too long to realize I didn't like it and missing my chance to refund it. I was trying to find a new card game and thought I'd give this one a try. For me, this game feels like it mixes PvE and PvP elements in a lose/lose way. I could go into more detail but won't, since I've already wasted enough time on this game.

Decent game here but lots of bugs and inconsistency - Overlapping graphics in tutorials with arrows pointing to nothing - No option to set resolution in window mode, doesn't remember window size and resets on start or even when you open the options menu. Also always starts up in fullscreen mode. - Often swiping a card to the left freezes when choosing cards, forcing you to do it again. - The purple cards are called Fang in tutorial but Kaizer in other places? - Missing or hard to find Tooltips for many card elements List goes on... Overall feels like it should still be in early access, it lacks polish.

no