Game Impressions Hey, here's a game you will lose 80% of the time. Have fun! Whaaaat?! What an absolute waste of time and money. The deck is so ludicrously stacked against you that this is tantamount to just hitting your head with a wooden plank repeatedly until you finally miss once and are relieved by the lack of pain. Wow. Seriously folks, this is quite frustrating. Imagine never even having a chance as 8 Monsters are drawn in the first 13 cards. Statistically, this is not all that improbable since there are 20 Monsters in the deck out of 60 cards. Imagine getting to the point where you get lucky and are finally ahead and all you need is to draw 1 MORE HERO for the win and up come 5 straight Monsters GAME OVER. Since there are only 10 Heroes in the 60 cards, again, this is not all that improbable (actual odds 38.8% = almost two-fifths of the time). Solitaire? Yes. Depth. Yes, enough to make the game quite interesting if there were a better win/loss ratio. As is, whatever tactical decisions you make are likely to be voided by the inevitable bad draw, so I ask, WHAT THE HECK IS THE POINT? As well, the design suffers from an incomplete implementation. Given the likelihood of bad card draws, EVERY CARD in the Armory should be accessible and this would be an easy programming matter. Touch the top card, they all fan out, slide your finger to the one you want and it is on top. Granted this is not the current rule, but if it helps boost the win/loss ratio, why not? And it won't help all that much anyway - perhaps boost the ratio from 10%-20% to 20% to 25%. I also very much dislike that if I draw a trap and I've run out of spaces on the Monster side, I MUST place it for one of my Heroes. This is like adding insult to injury. The deck is so stacked that this is inevitable. It's not bad enough that the Heroes are weaker cards to begin with, let's make them even weaker. Even after looking at the cards available in the so-called expansion packs, the deck is always going to be incredibly stacked against the purchaser. Whoa, correct that, the deck will be even MORE stacked against the purchaser. 60 cards/20 Monsters/10 Heroes = 2:1 Monster:Hero ratio. Both of the expansions add 3 Monsters and only 1 Hero, so the overall ratio becomes even worse. Wow. That's just pathetic, simply pathetic. Hey, more bad news. The Monsters are MUCH stronger than your Heroes. Not only do you not get the opportunity to fight - it's not a fair fight!!! Check out the card list for yourself at http://puzzle-app.com/2010/02/26/dungeon-solitaire.html. Now this is totally bizarre, get this; of the 10 Hero cards, 5 (count 'em) CANNOT defeat any of the Monsters unless they are boosted by "items" or the monster has been placed on a "trap." Talk about stacking the deck, OMG this is torture! Please, please, please give me a game I can win at least half the time with some strategy and if I lose a bit more often because I'm not planning correctly, okay, I can accept that. As is, this is just a waste of my time and money. I want good strategical decisions to be rewarded fairly, not constantly tossed in the toilet by inevitably rotten card draws. Thanks for listening to my rant. This game COULD have been great.
And another thing....I get the point about scoring. If you're going to lose that often, at least you might have a score to shoot for. Well, sorry, for me that just means nothing at all. Why not have scoring actually mean something? Like you get to draw a more powerful card in game, perhaps a Hero that you desperately need? Or at least a Holy Armor? As is, the scoring is an almost meaningless element, for me anyway. A win with 11,000 points is more rewarding than a lost with 18,000 points. Bizarre, really.
So you can only enjoy yourself if you win? I think its the very challenge of the game that keeps me coming back to it. It is solitaire, its playing me against the draw. The theme of the game is dungeon questing, which surely is always a very risky pursuit? The win to loss ratios are skewed, but surely thats the beauty of the game? Because its not just a "win" its a win with a certain amount of gold stored. In fact trying to last longer (in terms of gold) than your best game score is more of what motivates me than whether I end the session with a win. If you add the Dragon booster cards it can get brutal, but sometimes, you know, you want an adventure that is brutal, and against all odds. I even like the idea of your armoury being a stack, because it adds to the tension, you can play all your armoury cards if you can find a way to drop them on monsters or heroes, but having them all available would mean you could cherry pick whatever come out the deck whenever you wanted. I think that would make the game substantially easier. Its the circumstances when the stack falls right and you overcome almost insurmountable odds that really make the game zing.
I think thats the point. Its an adventure, a quest, a fantasy based journey into the Dungeon to face the evil horde. The "win" itself is not the end point. Its the quality of the win. More gold, more time holding back the horde, and accruing the gold as your score. Perhaps you're onto something, if there was a campaign developed where you face different dungeons, with different themed sets of monsters and you could carry gold over to purchase extra cards to add to the deck? Not necessarily new cards, but perhaps multiples of items etc? I think that would be a very welcomed addition to the game. Give each blast in a dungeon a higher meaning to an adventuring campaign.
I'm with amn624 tbh. I loved this game when I first played it - because it's REALLY well done. Lovely graphics, great interface. But the balance stinks. You get a 6/6 creature out first turn (and this happens a fair bit), how do you get rid of it? I don't think there's a hero even close. There's maybe a 4/5 at best. Some 1/6 or 2/6 which will draw but can hardly ever win - since you can only equip one item - at best, (+1,+2). So you run out of creature slots and you draw a trap... you have to trap your own heroes? Huh? Making it even less likely you'll recover. In fact once I've got to the point where I had to trap my own heroes, I've usually lost within a few moves from that point. Great concept, lovely interface but ultimately incredibly frustrating. Jamie.
Aren't most of the 6/6 creatures Dragons/Wyrms? If they're the ones from the Dragon Booster pack, then you have Heroes with the Dragonslayer ability, which wipes them out. Or you can engineer a shuffle down off the board for them, if you manage to place them cleverly. The Dragon booster does make the original game much much harder, but I mean they're DRAGONS!! they're not meant to be defeated easily! I think the game is fine as it is to be honest. I'd like to see some more specials interact, to perhaps give heroes a bit more oomph, but ultimately I'm playing the game to survive an adventure in a dungeon, and not to beat all hordes of monsters everytime, so my stats show a higher Win to Loss ratio.
Winning once of five or six times does not constitute a game. While it might be entertaining to play against a Chess Grandmaster and get your butt kicked repeatedly, even that would wear our with time. Here, it's not even a matter of garnering enough knowledge to finmally get the upper hand. The odds are forever stacked atrociously against you. If you find that fun, more power to you. I think it is torture, especially when one card away from a win after careful planning, only to be beaten by the inevitable rotten draw that awaits. FAIL.
In the first couple of games, I admit, I had a couple of bad moves, put a Hero in a tie against a Monster with a Skull - goodbye Hero. Haven't made any substantive errors since. The odds are really conclusive evidence but will not prevent someone getting tremendously lucky - like yourself - and winning a larger share. Take ten million people and have them flip coins until they come up tails, in which case they lose. One will still be a winner after 20 flips. Your success is as random as the draw.
I am having fun with the game and bought the expansions, but I kept track of my 6 and 48 record. Out of the 48 losses over 12 games I got one hero card during the entire game, which lasted 10 draws, 4 of my wins were the exact opposite (3 monsters to my full hero pull), and the rest of the games had nothing to do with strategy / more to do with eventual bad pulls. I deleted the game for a time and reinstalled and I did find that when I took out the dragon deck, it made the game a lot easier. But there are a large amount of games that have nothing to do with skill and there is no way to win. But it isn't like the games take a while to play so I still find it addicting and fun. I understand the strategy of bumping monsters till you get the eventual strong hero... but seriously vovin there is a lot of this game that is based on the draw and not the skill. There are some games that have no way of winning period. Its not a question of doing it wrong, there just isn't a way mathematically.
But it being down to the luck of the draw is common in all solitaire games, it's an essential part of them. Dungeon Solitaire is less luck-based than traditional solitaire games, but it's still a solitaire game. If you don't like them, this won't be for you - it's a variation on a theme, not a reinvention, and as such the name of the game pretty much tells you everything you need to know.
While the game is stacked against you (just like in normal Solitaire), there are strategies you can use to improve your odds. For example, the issue that was brought up, starting with the 6/6 guy (Ice Dragon) as your first draw. That guy is powerful enough you may want to just block him with a tieing hero and not try to kill him - then you've got a hero in the slot across from him, helping you towards beating the game (not optimal, but not deadly either). Better yet, you could set him up to be bumped off the board: put him in the bottom slot, and either setup a tieing hero across from him with bump down, or put a weaker monster above him and setup the tieing hero with bump-down across from that. Traps can help with this - put a trap with bump-down in a hero slot, even with a -1/-1 you can setup a hero to easily bump many monsters down off the board. Here's a fun solution: Are you playing with Potions? There's a potion which gives +2/+2, but then kills the character after the combat. Put that on your 6/6 dragon making him 8/8, then feed him some weak hero and watch him die afterwards! The game is deeper than it seems at first, there are many different strategies you can learn to help you survive. The trick is to think creatively and figure out your own strategies.
I love using that +2/+2 potion on a coin stacked monster. My fav so far is the poison hero spell on one of the few heros with a +6. Eats away at anything you don't like. Use it as a back up while stacking a monster with cash.
I think the game HAS to be stacked against you for it to be any type of challenge. Some of the strategies mentioned above are ones I use, especially the +2/+2 potion and feed a weak hero to it. I also tend to create down escalators and stack the most powerful monsters at the bottom to push them down. Often with the 0/+1 Curse charm on a 1/6 in the middle to weaken guys on their way down. Having a high 1 stat slayer in the escalator will kill lots also.
Suggestion: How about having two high score lists, or even three. One for Wins, one for losses and one for combined? Also tracking more stats over time would be cool too.
Game Impressions Just to add to the silliness, the Baloran expansion gives you one Hero that will instantly lose to 14 of the 21 Monsters (unless perhaps trapped). This is supposed to improve the game? OMG. My original review was based on the original set, no expansions. I have since played three games with the Potion expansion. The first game went relatively easy. #s2 and 3 were ridiculous. I didn't stand a chance. Game #2 started with 5 Monsters in the first 7 cards, game 3 started with 5 Monsters in the first 8 cards. Like I said, I get the point about the arrows and have been able to use them but overall, the win/loss ratio sucks, absolutely sucks. And there should be a use for Gold!
Haha, it'd be cool to see the top losers. Maybe losses could even be renamed to "monster wins" to help make them feel better about themselves.
