Deck of Ashes...Will it Slay Slay the Spire?

Deck builders, Deck of Ashes has been released in early access on pc. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/201...

Anyone give it a try yet? If so, impressions?

I also have my eye on Thronebreaker if anyone has anything to say about the experience?

I am patiently waiting for Slay the Spire to release on Switch. It’s one of my favorite Steam games.

Thanks!
Chad

For Thronebreaker I've heard it is good if you like Gwent. If you don't like Gwent the rest of the game is great but the Gwent parts are not fun.

I have been hoping someone would take the Thronebreaker idea of a map, quests, RPG elements, etc and wrap them around a card game that is fun to play. Thanks for posting this because I had not heard of Ashes and it sounds like it might deliver that.

Thronebreaker did very little for me. I played it for two or three hours, and got bored. I just don't care for the underlying game that much. I thought Gwent in W3 was decent, but haven't played the standalone version. I also found the hard ties between Thronebreaker and standalone Gwent to be really intrusive and annoying, trying to push you into playing the other game.

TB is as much Gwent advertisement as it is a standalone title. It's constantly banging on about all the "free" stuff it's giving you in the other game.

I picked this up on the weekend and played a bit. It's interesting, but they need to clean some things up. Specifically, the interface is fairly bad. For example, if you try to play a card but don't have the mana for it, you have to do a pointless click on the screen before you can play a different card. Minor things like that will kill a game like this very quickly. The interface needs to be seamless.

I'm sure they'll get it sorted out, but kludginess in a card game is death.

Thanks for the initial impressions.

Played Thronebreaker recently. Even if you like Gwent, Thronebreakers card game is not very good imo. It is neither the very accessible Witcher 3 Gwent nor the previous version of TCG Gwent, but rather some simplified version of the latter (which has supposedly received the same treatment itself). I kinda liked both of those original versions.
Nearly everything else about the game is nice, especially if you like the world itself. Lots of choices to be made, and consequences to suffer. But there is a whole lot of card game in there too, and they really struggle to make it fun. Mostly by changing the rukes in each match, which does add variation - making it more of a puzzle game really. But also underscores that the basic card game can’t stand alone in there. It might have done much better in a Slay the spire format actually, and not a ~20 hour game.