Dungeon Drafters is a neat turn-based tactics game and includes my new favourite library
I am all thumbs, so I’m pretty sure it’s my fault that I found Dungeon Drafters a bit fiddly at first. I had trouble selecting things and unselecting things and I made a lot of moves when I thought I was just exploring the UI. Anyway, I stuck with it because the game is so beautiful, with such a lovely pastel colour scheme for its pixelly doll’s house landscapes. I’m glad I did. A few hours in, I’m finding it much less fiddly, and I’m also pretty much hooked.
Dungeon DraftersPublisher: Dangen EntertainmentDeveloper: Manalith Studio, Dangen EntertainmentPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out today on PC, on Xbox, Switch and PS4 later in 2023.
Dungeon Drafters is a dungeon crawler and a card game. It takes place in a world in which magic is real, and real magic is card-based. So I have three action points per turn as I explore this lovely pixel-art fantasy land. I can spend those points on cards, which will conjure various spells for me, but I can also spend them on moving around each room’s snug grid, and by physically attacking any enemies I am close to.
Complexity and depth tumbles away in which ever direction you look, from the classes on offer, each of which comes with their own combination of spell decks to wield, to the way that the game handles status effects, which turn up in your hand as a card you then have to play – possibly even to your advantage. All of this is great, but to tell you about Dungeon Drafters I really just want to talk about the dungeon I just crawled, as it were. It was a glacier, and it was also a library.
For starters, it was almost unbearably cosy to contemplate. Reader, I would live in this glacial library. Loads of books, of course, but also plump chairs and those little bookcase ladders scattered about. Chairs, while being a lovely bit of ornament, can also provide cover, and many of each room’s props can be transformed, if you have the Polymorph spell, into a mob that can fight on your side.
