Wasn’t this the name of an iOS game?
A different game, I believe, but yes
Sorry I’m thinking of the well regarded (and lost to 32 but ios) sword & poker titles!
Really cool changes in the patch today addressing one of my gripes with the game, the length. Now you can choose to end a run after each boss. An excerpt from the patch notes:
- NEW FEATURE: Claim Victory & Raise The Stakes
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- After each world, you now have the option to Claim Victory or Raise the Stakes.
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- “Claim Victory” to end the run early, and get bonus Score & XP.
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- Or “Raise the Stakes”, and keep playing, which increases the bonus XP if you Claim Victory after the next boss fight.
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- Getting through World 1 is “Victory”, World 2 is “Victory+”, and so on.
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- We believe these new victory rankings more accurately represent the challenge involved in achieving them.
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- Those of you who previously achieved the old “Victory” status have actually been achieving “Victory+++” without knowing it.
- IMPORTANT CHANGES TO WORLD 4:
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- Due to overwhelming demand from players, we shortened the length of the complete game (assuming you always want to Raise the Stakes).
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- The final boss is now at world 4-1, immediately after the campsite, which shortens the full game by about 25%.
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- The rest of world 4 (after the final boss) is an optional series of boss fights that rapidly scale up.
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- After each fight in World 4, you have the option to Claim Victory, or gamble on the next fight for a higher
This released out of EA in the last week. Haven’t played in quite some time.
Adding my thoughts!
Poker Quest is the closest thing to Slay the Spire I have played since Slay the Spire, but with enough tweaks and variations to feel novel and special in its own way. @Mysterio can vouch for it too. Summonnng thee!
Cannot recommend highly enough that you avoid this game if you love Slay the Spire unless you are ready for a new addiction!
This has the “one more fight” and “one more run attempt” hook absolutely nailed. Throughout a run, the challenge level is steadily increasing, and if have just the right level of skill and fortune, your power level will grow to match or exceed it.
Core Gameplay
Choose an archetype, which will determine a special power and starting equipment. Choose whether to play the ‘unlocks’ mode which lets you use points earned in all previous total runs to unlock some meta-benefits, such as starting with extra coins or food. Next, you have the very familiar branching trail structure with encounter nodes, letting you choose a path. Nodes present a combat, an elite combat, a shop, an upgrade option, a mini-game or some resources. Winning combats also grants resources, and you see exactly which before you choose the node.
This plays out over a 3-act structure, each act ending in an act-boss.
So far, so very, very familiar and similar to Slay.
What makes Poker Quest different from Slay?
In combat, instead of drawing and playing cards, you draw a set of poker cards and use those cards to activate one or more of your equipment. For example, you may have a sword that does direct damage and requires a matching pair. You might have a wand that applies poison and requires cards of value 6 or lower.
There is a very pleasing variety of equipment and you can typically have up to 8 pieces equipped at a time, albeit slots need to be unlocked via upgrading your “bag”.
Similar to Slay though, this lets you effectively set up a tableau that emphasises something in order to be effective. For example, direct damage, damage over time and damage mitigation.
You have constant on demand access to upgrades to enable you to draw more cards, have more equipment slots or see further ahead on the map. In another tweak from Slay, your map vision starts out limited to two nodes ahead, but you can expand this to 3+ via upgrades. Most all of your equipment can also be upgraded several times. This might, for example, take a sword which initially accepts just one card to a sword which can accept up to 3 cards, with a damage multiplier applied to the sum of the cards.
Another major difference to Slay is that part-way through each act you reach a settlement, which has some consistent and some randomised options, including dungeon fights, temples and inns for rewards, boons and resources / healing.
How much poker play is there?
Very little. I was worried about this, as I am not at all a fan of traditional card games like poker and blackjack. The only appearance of these games is in entirely optional and occasional mini-games, playable for prizes. When you play them, the full rules are one click away in game.
Skill vs Luck and difficulty
Like many similar games, when you are starting out the randomness elements i.e., card draw, may seem unfair and some combats may seem impossibly tough. Then you start to spot the synergies, what makes a good tableau, what node choices are better and so on. I am a middling-Ascension 20 Slay the Spire player, and I am yet to complete a full run of this game after about a dozen attempts on its default challenge level. There are also daily challenges with run variants, and additional challenge runs to take on.
Value for $$$
If the gameplay hooks you, this is a 100+ hours playtime game for sure. The production values are a little lower than Slay, with more simple art and common audio assets, but it plays slick, looks good enough, and feels like a fully developed game.
Hey, no one @ tomchick’ed me when this left early access! : )
Thanks for the bump, @Lykurgos! I’ve been bouncing off most videogames I’m trying these days, but one that I’ve enjoyed recently is Aces and Adventures, a Slay the Spire clone that uses playing cards. And a big part of what I like about it is that I don’t have to learn a bunch of nonsense cards, but I’m instead trafficking in a familiar deck of playing cards.
So on that note, I’m going to dive into a little Poker Quest this weekend now that its out of early acess!
Hehe, so I have Aces and Adventures on my wishlist and the reason I have not bought it is I dislike regular poker type card games so the theme repels yet. Yet . . . Poker Quest!
So maybe I should try this Aces and Adventures too!
OK you guys sucked me in on Poker Quest. The mechanics are simple (at least so far), but it was pretty fun - deciding when to use my limited resources of energy and gems to tip the scale in my favor. It will be a good game to play while eating breakfast.
And, I won my first game!
What are the ramifications if I end the run and claim victory? It says I will get +50% bonus XP and score, and unlock Rogue. I can also raise the stakes and journey onward (harder). What happens if I lose? Will I still unlock Rogue? Will it have negative consequences if I lose?
Edit: It looks like I could just lose bonus XP if I lose the next world, so not a big deal.
Apologies if it feels like I’m hijacking the Poker Quest thread, but I fired it up, tried a few runs as a knight, almost unlocked the rogue, and then decided it’s not really what I’m looking for. I think what I prefer about Aces and Adventures is its overall structure, which is about giving you different ways to flex the basic card gameplay instead of housing it all in the context of a leveling up RPG. Hmm, maybe we should start an Aces and Adventures thread…
I think it’s very much a “me issue” at this point, but I feel like “leveling up dudes” is a gameplay loop with less appeal for me than it used to have. I love leveling up dudes in the context of gameplay I already enjoy (e.g. Phoenix Point, the Pathfinder and Apocrypha card games, a Rainbow Six shooter I’ve been playing called Extraction), but as the hook to get me playing a game, it doesn’t have the draw it used to have. So I’m afraid Poker Quest didn’t “take”…but it did rekindle my interest in Aces and Adventures.
No maybe. You do.
Ya, it’s unfortunate that they locked the way more interesting classes behind what is arguably the worst. If it’s not for you, than its not, but if you can stick around the next 3 classes(rogue, priestess of diamonds, queen of spades) all unveil much more interesting gameplay mechanics.
You just forfeit the bonus score. However if you continue, you keep gaining xp for the run so you do end up gaining more (i believe harder encounters generate more xp as well).
Seems just to accelerate the unlocks. I am preferring to continue onward. I initially thought that this game had a 3-act structure, but am no longer sure. I am yet - after more than a dozen attempts - to beat the 3-act boss.
My early experience is that any characters that lack both enemy card manipulation (like steal or swap) or reliable dodge or block are doomed to an early run-failure. I might have taken a few like this to stage 2, but the relatively few opportunities to heal grinds them down, or they go down to one big hit.
I’ll just say it’s very similar to slay the spire ;)
You definitely need a trick - swap and steal are both good, as is store. The thing i like about the game is if you know the structure of a card deck (4 suits, 13 cards in each), you can quickly get a hang of probabilities: A guy who does damage with any black card is going to do damage 50% of the time because half the deck is black; a card that triggers off the ace of hearts is only going to function less than 2% of the time. Now the real trick is how you can influence the deck/hand to change those odds :)
I don’t think I like this game. After playing enough to unlock four characters and beat at least the first boss with each of them, I have two main problems.
One is the randomness. Not the concept of it, but the way it’s actually implemented.
It’s is incredibly swingy, and most of it is output randomness rather than input randomness. It’s not viable to build a plan around playing the odds correctly, because the cost of failure tends to be ruinous, so you basically always have to plan for the hidden cards being the worst possible ones and burn resources on mitigating the risk. The hidden cards are the worst culprit here, obviously. But the gem redraws end up feeling really bad way more often than they should too.
This like the one thing I’d expect a poker-themed game to get right: that it should not actually be about whether the outcome of a single call results in the outcome you wanted, but about whether the call was mathematically (or psychologically) the right one. If you played the odds correctly and lost, you should feel good. If you played the odds wrong but lucked into a win, you should treat it as the failure it was.
The other is the tableau building. I feel it has the same decision density problem with the builds as Dicey Dungeons, except even worse. You just get way too few opportunities to pick new cards or upgrade existing ones, the options are extremely constrained, and there’s basically no visibility into what your future options will be like. It’s just nuts for the game to be so stingy on what should be its strongest hook. It should give me a new item every few battles, and force me into hard choices on what I can equip. It should give me items to build toward that I can’t use just yet.
(Oh, bonus third issue. I really hate the “abandon the run to lock in your gains” thing they have going with the early retreat after the first boss. There’s a couple of other games I’ve seen do it, and it just drives me mad. It’s not a particularly interesting risk-reward decision, and it’s just so very very stupid for the developers to put in incentives to not play their game.)
Now, there is something to the game, no doubt about that. If it had controller support and wasn’t so painful to play on the Steam Deck, I could imagine putting a lot more time into the game despite the above.
What’s up with the Queen, by the way? That class seems completely unplayable. Every other class I felt would pretty much automatically cruise to the boss, but the Queen struggled even reaching the castle.
Wait, what? I’m not a “poker guy,” but I’m pretty sure that in real poker, if I play the odds wrong but I luck into a win, I get money. Getting money makes me feel good no matter how I do it (within the bounds of morality and the law).
Playing wrong will lose you money in the long run. Letting yourself feel good about winning big with a bad play will reinforce that behavior, increase the chance you’ll take more bad gambles, and eventually lose you that initial money you won and more.
Likewise playing right and losing to a player that played wrong but got lucky really stings. It’s the easiest way to go on tilt and make a bunch of rash decisions in quick succession. You can’t let that happen. Did you follow the process, was your maths good? If it was, then it’s all ok. Stuff happens, just forget about that hand and continue playing. You’ll take their money eventually.
But - to take this back to Poker Quest - that only works because Poker has an iterated structure where single events are rarely ruinous. There’s the occasional all-in, but most of the time the pots are small compared to your stack of chips. You’ll have time to recover[0] from the bad beat. Not so in Poker Quest. If you play the odds on the hidden cards and lose, that can be half your HP gone in a single bet. Now the next time you’re wrong that’ll be game over, and the last 30 minutes of gameplay wasted.
I think this is a problem for the game even in isolation, not just when compared to Poker. It’s just that the theming makes the comparison to Poker obvious, and the problem even more glaring.
[0] Tournament poker excepted, where you’ll be on a clock, but tournament poker is weird and oh-my-god now I want a game that somehow replicates that feeling.
The queen can be a lot of fun. It’s the first hero you have with the ability to manipulate the enemy’s cards. In an ideal situation, you curse up the enemies abilities and then deprive them of the cards to play those abilities. It works best, i find when you can add some curse or poison synergy, and you’ll need to figure out some damage mitigation - oh, and anything that can expand on the card inventory works out well too (like card storage). The curse is reusable, so using your ability to draw all spades can allow you to dump up to 6 curses on a foe in a round, so in the early going this can wipe a lot of creatures out.
Money is the main thing. you want to see further so you can plan ahead? Upgrade your map with money. Want to draw more cards? Money. Want to upgrade those weapons you do have. Money. Want to draw more cards with red gems? Yup, money. You’ll have at least 2 chances per level to upgrade/buy weapons and abilities, and I typically find its not the vendor accessibility thats the limiting factor its the money.
Claim victory? If you like how your build is going, you keep going. If you dont, you stop and get a bonus. I don’t understand what you hate?
I can see some definite caveats about Poker Quest relative to Slay the Spire, may be useful to highlight them.
One, it is very possible to start out, on a standard run, with a hero and tableau combination that guarantees early failure, with no player agency. For example, a recent run of mine started out with a hero equipped initially only with abilities that enabled to apply “Enflame”. You apply this to an enemy card, and the enemy will take flame damage when they play it. The choice of initial enemies was such that their damage output from playing their abilities brought my hero HP to 0 before the Enflame brought theirs to zero, and there were no other options.
Two, the opportunities to upgrade / shop vary far more than in Slay, both in their frequency and what they offer. Within the first act, for example, you might get 0 upgrade opportunities, or you might get 1 or 2. A problem with this is that you probably do not know this in advance, and if you do find them, may not have the coins to make use of them. Hence planning is not always possible.
In mitigation, there is the option of a “Custom” run in which you start with no pre-picked abilities, but extra coins, enabling you to tableau build before you begin. This eliminates the initial RNG effects, enabling you to set up a viable early game tableau. This is so good, I would even say it could be a better “default” game mode.
A second mitigation, easily overlooked, is upgrading the map “look ahead” value early. It is an easy one to ignore, but upgrading it at least once right away enables far better tracking through the available nodes.
Something I do think is really cool is the daily challenge runs. These play out as per other games, with a pre-picked hero and run variant. The cool thing I have not seen elsewhere is the game tells you how many other players visited each node that you can choose. So if you have for example, a choice between a bonus resources node and a hard fight, you might see 60 players went to the former, and 5 went to the latter, and several did not continue. This is a great early learning aid, as it shows you what might be the better picks by experienced players.
It seems that you’re like a third of the way through a proper game, and the UI even makes it clear that it’s about to get harder from that point. To have any chance of ever actually getting to the end, you need to start playing the back half of the game as early as possible, and e.g. understand what kinds of encounters the game will throw at you.
It isn’t even about whether you like the current build or not. Most likely even the good builds aren’t cruising all the way to the end without you knowing what an endgame build needs to look like.
But the game actively penalises you for continuing, by giving you more XP if you quit now! You need that XP for the character unlocks, so it just ends up being a decision that feels bad either way. Lose the extra XP, or lose the chance to learn.