Oh nice! I've only tried 4 classes so far and Rogue is my favorite, though I haven't beaten the game yet. Still contemplating how to defeat that Seagull boss before I end up facing him again. I was doing really well up until that point. That guy was just unstoppable.
Is the AI more difficult with the veteran cards? Or are those decks just labeled veteran bc of the way the class plays?
My personal favorite is Monk. His wild card spell has saved my bacon many times, and his Counter Punch spell is a great armor/stun combo, especially when you start upgrading it. It's also the class I've gotten the farthest with (Battle 17--so close!), so I don't feel like its "Veteran" rating makes it harder to use or anything. Honestly, though, it feels like all the classes are viable, which is part of what makes me love this game so much. I know that even after I max out my Monk and beat the game with him, I'm still going to be interested in figuring out how to use the other five decks. And I think they hit a real sweet spot with the overall difficulty. When I first started playing, I thought the game was too hard, but now that I've learned the mechanics, I can breeze through the first few fights and save up some gold. But a dumb move or bad luck can still get me killed in the third or fourth areas, and the fifth and sixth areas require me to really pay attention and optimize each play. I always love games that figure out an elegant way to incorporate RPG elements into an established game mechanic. Solitairica does that for solitaire just like Puzzle Quest did it for match-3 and Sword & Poker did it for poker. Solitairica also has an amazing level of polish, with fantastic art, animation and UI design, as well as a dark whimsy that kind of reminds me of Adventure Time. In any future updates, I'd be thrilled just to get more of everything--more class decks, more spells, more items, more monsters, more modifiers--and as somebody else mentioned, even more differentiation between classes would be great.
YEAH! Beat the game for the first time. Did it with the Warrior deck. Strategy was to begin with 2 stun and enough defense to stun again so 4 stun at the start of the match. Keep spamming stun as much as possible. With that there was no need to up armor (I started every match with 17 health and 4 armor) OR to heal myself. Before using the spell to destroy one card I always use the spell to show every card in the second row. Had 180 coins and 2 hour glasses left Perfect game!
Whew, have now beat it with Warrior, Wizard, and Paladin. Now on to rouge. This game is so intense, nerve racking and gives such a rush when you finally reach Emperor Stuck!
The seagull? Don't remember having trouble with that one....do you remember what was hard about it? Might have been a funky prefix combo. And occasionally the game will just drop you into a situation that isn't "fair" (don't mean that in a bad way, it's just the nature of the roguelike elements at play). Last night I had the coin demon on a bad opening position change all the front cards to coins at the start of the match then drop back to back 3 damage per coin attacks. Sometimes that's just going to happen in a game like this.
The goal is for the decks to be fairly balanced difficulty wise. Also there is no AI, just pure card shuffling with no faking it behind the scenes. We think fudging solitaire behind the scenes is heresy The labels are an attempt to put the decks into tiers of how advanced they are to play. Bard for example requires a bit more finesse with the use of inspiration. Not sure they are super useful though, as the decks are all pretty straight forward. If anything if we went back in time with all the feedback, I would swap Monk with Wizard, as Wizard seems to be the toughest leap to make (no defense) and Monk is well, just a powerhouse with the face punching.
That makes me feel a bit better. I rocked it with warrior but it's feeling like more of an uphill climb with wizard which seems more one dimensional without the defense (and to some extent the green one as well) aspect to rely on. Even though warrior likewise has only two traits emphasized, for some reason it still felt wide open.
Well my favorite iOS solitaire game was fairway solitaire (even after it became freemium I still used to revisit it regularly) but this has usurped its position. Ace.
So what's up next for you folks? Are you planning more content for Solitairica or is focus going to shift to something new?
We definitely want to add more content. Once PAX is over I think we will do a big poll and let the fans decide what they want most. We have a pretty long list of ideas!