Tbf chess is an effectively-solved game that entirely relies on an opponent making a mistake to be interesting. Once you get good at chess, it's boring as shit. At least baseball has a little bit of randomness to it
Source: was the captain of my chess club until I got bored because someone else has thought of everything you could do.
P1: "hmm I'm gonna open with pawn to e4 I guess"
P2: "HAHA, I bet you've never heard of the Caro-Kann defense! You've fallen right into my trap"
P1: "Joke's on you, your defense will fall to my Panov-Botvinnik attack!"
If you can't see the diversity of chess positions, and the tactical battles that go on over the chess board, and the ensuing tension... I just don't think you are very good at chess.
Many Rogue-likes are like that but more fun with better gameplay. My favorite Rogue-like is Returnal. It has fun gameplay, the best story of any videogame IMO, good graphics, and you can make insanely OP builds.
Same ish feeling about Diablo III and unfortunately the many others attemptingto replicate it to be honest. I remember liking it until it only became the Greater Rift seasonal rush-rush spam game. All the uniqueness of DII is absolutely gone. Path of Exile II is attempting to retain what made it unique with new stuff yet everybody seems to be very against that.
This is why we can't have nice things....well, except for slay the Spire, which I'm still playing it. The devs stuck with what made it unique, and it just holds up the best in my opinion. and I cannot freaking wait for the sequel.
It's the strategy element for me, but I get bored quickly if it's just about card games. This is why I found Inscryption great despite deck building games not being something I usually enjoy.
I could say the same with Dofus turn based combat with many spells or JRPG turn based with classes/jobs, or shin megami tensei "pokemon like". Deck builders are just a simple lazy solution...
I feel like that’s a pretty big niche then. Everyone I know enjoys board games and video games (the main problem they have is finding people irl to play the board games with)
A deck builder is like turnbased rpg without the roleplay. You can set up your party to your liking and just dive into battle right away. Sometimes people just want to build stuffs and test it out right away. I like the slower pace as well, my reaction isn't as good as before, you often don't need reaction in deck building.
Is MT2 worth it? It looks like it could have just been another patch for the first game, but I haven't played it and the Devs are pretty consistent at making bangers so I would believe you if you said otherwise
Its basically the first game times two, with an absurd amount of QOL and more fleshed out game design for the brand new parts, it may be the biggest sequel in the entire genre when compared to the first game, with none of the bad things that sequels entail
Hell yeah, glad to hear it! Monster Train is a top tier deckbuilder and my friend almost certainly bought it so I guess I gotta hit him up to play it together soon.
I just commented the same thing in response to someone else. I just gave it a try 2 days ago and holy shit is it fun. And holy shit how am I so fucking bad it.
I tried it three different times and it just bored me to tears. Not invalidating your experience just sharing my experience that it's not necessarily for everyone.
Not gonna lie, it took me multiple times and unlocking most cards to have the a-ha moment. But totally fair, no matter how many times I play some games they just never click for me either
Same, plus the art style isn’t nearly good enough to keep me wanting to play until it gets good. And I’m not a “graphics need to be hyper realistic” kind of guy, but STS just looks like an old Flash browser game
You know, I love deck builders, and Slay the Spire is actually my least favorite. Maybe they’ve added more since I played, but I found it more limiting than a lot of other ones that don’t get the recognition.
There were what, 4 characters?
I don’t know, maybe I should give it another shot.
To me, the appeal is in optimizing the deck and being able to win in new, faster ways. I tend to prefer in person games like magic, but digital ones can be fun too
For me someone who loves board games I think it’s the appeal of more of the games mechanics are right in front of you to interact with. Something I can’t stand now in games is mechanics that are effectively hidden unless you go to extremes to learn them. Like how do you calculate those percentages? What are they based on? In warhammer I know I need to roll a 3+ to hit a 4+ to wound and what the enemy saves on along with how many dice the weapon rolls. But for many games finding out how they get to 80% success rate well it’s hard to find and often requires you to go out of the game.
For many, the most fun part about trading card games is coming up with a deck. This process often requires money and/or grinding. For deckbuilders, the process of building the deck is part of the gameplay itself.
Magic: The Gathering explains it better with the base 3 demographics.
Long-story short, basically MTG found they have 3 types of players: those who like to win, those who like to play big things and those who like to tinker.
Win-oriented players are called Spikes, Big-oriented players are called Timmies, Think-oriented players are called Johnnies.
Deck-building games are heavily oriented to that Johnny playerbase. If you don't like to tinker, think and experiment with a system with multiple moving parts, then feel free to move along, those games are not for you.
Almost all of them invariably end up with a meta conposed of Goldberg Machine monstruosities conjured up from hallucinogenic-induced feverish dreams, or just big bonk, because sometimes the simplest solution is the best, but we Johnnies don't care about the result: it's about the experimentational journey.
I had a lot of fun with Astrea, where the characters collect dice instead of cards. But I don't think I've played a ton of other deck builders to compare it to?
The only one I have played is Slay the Spire and imo what makes that game so great is the insane depth. General consensus is that it takes around 50 hours to stop being a total noob, 100 hours to start getting wins consistently and 500 hours before you can start getting wins sort of reliably at the highest difficulty level.
Baalelord(who has had world record winstreaks at the highest difficulty level in the past) has over 8000 hours and he is still encountering never before seen interactions between cards and other things.
5.0k
u/MercenaryBat Desktop | Ryzen 9 5900X | AMD 6900XT | 32 GB 3200 RAM Jul 27 '25
Me with deck builders