Dungeon Drafters is a unique card-based RPG that’s currently looking for funding on Kickstarter (check out the campaign here). In the game, magic is cards, and cards are magic, and everything sounds like that. I like the look of it because it’s an RPG with an open world to explore, one that’s filled with enemies, but you need to use cards in order to fight, heal, and cast spells. Check out the trailer for Dungeon Drafters below.
Story
In Dungeon Drafters you take on the role of an adventurer. You’re eager to explore the world’s dungeons and uncover more of the long-forgotten cards that lie hidden within them. Your ultimate goal is to build a deck powerful enough to defeat the most powerful card wielder in the world, the one everyone is afraid of. Along the way you’ll be looting chests, rescuing NPCs who get themselves into tricky situations, dungeon crawling, and building up a deck that you can confidently use to create amazing and useful combos for both battle and life.
Gameplay
The minute-to-minute gameplay of Dungeon Drafters is tile-based RPG gameplay. Your cards are your abilities and power, but if you die you won’t lose everything. The game is a rogue-lite, so death isn’t always the end, but it will have penalties. Cards are used to summon earthquakes, floods, lightning and more to defeat enemies that get in your way, but they can also heal and protect you.
Dungeons are the lifeblood of Dungeon Drafters. There are a wide range of dungeons to crawl through, from dank caverns to ancient libraries, and each can be plundered deeper and deeper. At certain points in each dungeon you’ll be given the option to go deeper for better spoils, or return to town. Obviously if you go deeper you run the risk of losing everything you’ve earned. Return to town however, and you may not get those rare and powerful cards that you need.
Returning to town allows you to interact with NPCs and advance stories with them. This is the hub world of Dungeon Drafters, and provides a small sanctuary from the madness outside of it. NPCs can aid you in your journey with unique abilities, but you need to unlock them in order to access them, and that takes time and patience. You can buy and sell cards with NPCs, and I can see myself spending hours opening card packs from them.
When it comes to the cards themselves, there’s a lot going on in this game. Cards have synergies, and understanding how these work will allow you to cast much more powerful spells. If you build your deck correctly, you can use combos with each draw, and destroy your opposition. On top of this there are Runes, which are required to use certain types of cards, and Archetypes, which let you play in certain ways that suit certain decks. As you progress, you’ll unlock more Runes and be able to play with more complex decks, opening up the most powerful cards and combos in the game.
How’s It Looking?
This Kickstarter campaign is just about fully funded at the time of writing, with pledges of £9,537 and a required goal of £9,507. That makes this a sure thing, so any money you pledge is a guaranteed purchase of the game, and whatever reward you go for. With 21 days left on the campaign, I could see it hitting some of its stretch goals too. So far we can see that those include an Arcade Mode and a new NPC, The Collector, who will gift rare cards to players. I can’t wait to see what the other stretch goals are, though if this campaign manages to hit The Collector I think that would be more than enough.
The rewards are both physical and digital, and they’re pretty cool. There’s art, and even a physical deck of cards made to play this game in tabletop form. I’ll probably be going for as many of the physical rewards as I can, but there’s plenty here for someone who wants to make their mark in a game in the form of unique content that players will see.
Sometimes we write about games that are crowdfunded on Kickstarter, or have been successfully crowdfunded there. If you enjoyed this look at Dungeon Drafters and want to see more games from Kickstarter, check out our other similar pieces here.