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chuckroGailardia - This is Dragon Quest 2. Seriously, that’s what it is. The controls are a bit streamlined and the exactly plot details and map are a bit different, but it’s totally the same game. A team of three heroes descended from royalty go out to fight the demon king, by wandering the countryside looking for plot tokens and grinding like crazy. If you always wished someone had done a full romhack of an early Dragon Quest game, here it is, wish granted.
Match 3 Quest -Mon-battle card-collection meets Bejeweled; similar to Puzzles & Dragons and plenty of other games of this type. I generally found it more playable, despite not totally understanding what triggers special attacks. I’m also not entirely clear on why you need to buy diamonds—you can win plenty by completing quests and winning at PvP, and their use seems to be in reviving monsters during battle (which hasn’t come up much), randomly spinning for monsters or gold, and buying items that temporarily boost your winnings.
Escape Quest - If you enjoy locked-room mysteries played live, you might also like the experience replicated as a video game. The problem is that it can easily degenerate into the computer adventure game trial-and-error style of play: “Use fish on rope. Use fish on broom. Use fish on wall. Use fish on fish tank.” Some of the puzzles are solvable, but require tapping in a very specific spot, which can lead to you searching for the walkthrough just to realize you had the right idea, but needed to tap a millimeter to the left. Fun, but forgettable, and a bit repetitive.
Buff Knight - Reminds me of Loot Hero, as an auto-scrolling numbers-go-up game. You need to tap on urns to break them, treasure chests to open them, fairies to get their treasures, and the “spell” button to call down lightning; all while your hero charges forward and smashes himself against waves of monsters. Each time you die, you get sent to the store where you can spend gold on better items and crystals on better stats (and extra potions, but I never found those necessary). Each “game” has a set ending, though, as there’s a top-tier to the equipment and a “final boss” in the form of a dragon, who seems to always drop one of the twenty Artifacts you’re trying to recover. (They also seem to appear randomly—I had one just handed to me mid-game.) Reaching that point ends the game, shows the credits, and erases your progress, except for that artifact. Once you have artifacts, you can equip them for bonuses in subsequent games. A single game takes about an hour and can be done in as many runs as you want (I was dying 15-20 times per game). It’s ad-supported, or you can pay to remove the ads and get an extra equipment slot and game speed mode. Probably not worth trying to grind out all the artifacts, but fun.
Blendoku - Was this invented by someone who loved picking out color samples in Home Depot? It’s a cute concept, where you need to place all of the colors on the board so that they shade properly from one into the next, but I think it’s appealing to a more artistic mind than mine. Needless to say, this would be pointless to try if you’re any degree of color-blind.
Triple Town - An addictive town-building puzzle game. The premise is simple: Connect three grass tiles to make a bush, three bushes to make a tree, three trees to make a hut, etc. Build up as large a town as you can on the given maps before you fill every space. This is then complicated by randomly giving you other tiles, such as wildcard crystals and bears that will wander around until you box them in. (And ninja bears, that jump around and only die if there’s nowhere for them to go.)There’s also Boom Town mode, where you only have a minute to get as big a city as possible, but you mostly get tree tiles, rather than grass. You can play tournaments of dozens of games of Boom Town, in which you will lose a lot but make enough gold to keep playing the standard mode for a while. (The free version of the game has limited turns that recharge by waiting, watching ads, or spending gold. The $4 version has no such limitations.)
Arcane Quest 2 - Do you remember the RPG board games, like Hero Quest? This is very clearly intended to be an adaptation of those. It was a cute concept that was easy to pick up, but I found it slow-moving and the interface was a little clunky. I find that most of the value of dungeon-crawl boardgames is in the camaraderie, rather than the actual gameplay (one of my favorite games of Ravenloft ended in a hilarious TPK from a single trap).
Match 3 Quest -Mon-battle card-collection meets Bejeweled; similar to Puzzles & Dragons and plenty of other games of this type. I generally found it more playable, despite not totally understanding what triggers special attacks. I’m also not entirely clear on why you need to buy diamonds—you can win plenty by completing quests and winning at PvP, and their use seems to be in reviving monsters during battle (which hasn’t come up much), randomly spinning for monsters or gold, and buying items that temporarily boost your winnings.
Escape Quest - If you enjoy locked-room mysteries played live, you might also like the experience replicated as a video game. The problem is that it can easily degenerate into the computer adventure game trial-and-error style of play: “Use fish on rope. Use fish on broom. Use fish on wall. Use fish on fish tank.” Some of the puzzles are solvable, but require tapping in a very specific spot, which can lead to you searching for the walkthrough just to realize you had the right idea, but needed to tap a millimeter to the left. Fun, but forgettable, and a bit repetitive.
Buff Knight - Reminds me of Loot Hero, as an auto-scrolling numbers-go-up game. You need to tap on urns to break them, treasure chests to open them, fairies to get their treasures, and the “spell” button to call down lightning; all while your hero charges forward and smashes himself against waves of monsters. Each time you die, you get sent to the store where you can spend gold on better items and crystals on better stats (and extra potions, but I never found those necessary). Each “game” has a set ending, though, as there’s a top-tier to the equipment and a “final boss” in the form of a dragon, who seems to always drop one of the twenty Artifacts you’re trying to recover. (They also seem to appear randomly—I had one just handed to me mid-game.) Reaching that point ends the game, shows the credits, and erases your progress, except for that artifact. Once you have artifacts, you can equip them for bonuses in subsequent games. A single game takes about an hour and can be done in as many runs as you want (I was dying 15-20 times per game). It’s ad-supported, or you can pay to remove the ads and get an extra equipment slot and game speed mode. Probably not worth trying to grind out all the artifacts, but fun.
Blendoku - Was this invented by someone who loved picking out color samples in Home Depot? It’s a cute concept, where you need to place all of the colors on the board so that they shade properly from one into the next, but I think it’s appealing to a more artistic mind than mine. Needless to say, this would be pointless to try if you’re any degree of color-blind.
Triple Town - An addictive town-building puzzle game. The premise is simple: Connect three grass tiles to make a bush, three bushes to make a tree, three trees to make a hut, etc. Build up as large a town as you can on the given maps before you fill every space. This is then complicated by randomly giving you other tiles, such as wildcard crystals and bears that will wander around until you box them in. (And ninja bears, that jump around and only die if there’s nowhere for them to go.)There’s also Boom Town mode, where you only have a minute to get as big a city as possible, but you mostly get tree tiles, rather than grass. You can play tournaments of dozens of games of Boom Town, in which you will lose a lot but make enough gold to keep playing the standard mode for a while. (The free version of the game has limited turns that recharge by waiting, watching ads, or spending gold. The $4 version has no such limitations.)
Arcane Quest 2 - Do you remember the RPG board games, like Hero Quest? This is very clearly intended to be an adaptation of those. It was a cute concept that was easy to pick up, but I found it slow-moving and the interface was a little clunky. I find that most of the value of dungeon-crawl boardgames is in the camaraderie, rather than the actual gameplay (one of my favorite games of Ravenloft ended in a hilarious TPK from a single trap).
