Dungeon Crawler
Banners of Ruin's gameplay is basically divided into 2 stages: street expedition and turn-based combat.
Each game requires that you complete three streets in order to reach the (ridiculously hard) big boss battle at the end, with each street having three possible lanes of advancement. Each lane is filled with 20 cards, the topmost being revealed. To advance along the street you select a card from the three available and either engage in combat or resolve the non-combat encounter (which can sometimes degenerate into combat anyway). You're also able to look at your party's characters and available cards, and adjust their battle positions, while in this mode.
Non-combat encounters range from easy shops, to combating dens, to altars, and a reasonable couple of more, however the majority of are merely well-presented wrappers for including a card, getting rid of a card, getting experience points (XP), or getting health. They appear fairly varied at first, but I found them repeating often across multiple games, and, at least from my experience with them, each one only seems to have a single result, so once you know the "correct" choice for the few encounters that offer one, there's no risk in always choosing that choice the next time you see it.
Combat is the meat and potatoes of the game. This is presented in a "2.5 D" view of a battlefield, with each side consisting of up to three characters in each of two ranks: front and back. The gamer constantly appears to have the very first turn.
Each of your characters has a specific variety of stamina and will points, with maximums that can only be increased through gaining experience and levelling up the character. You typically start at Level 1 with two endurance and one will. Existing worths are set to their optimum at the start of each battle. When used, will is gone until restored by a card result or you start a brand-new encounter. Endurance, however, replenishes every turn.
Each turn you draw five cards from your deck, plus another if you have a certain modifier active. If you run out of cards to draw then your dispose of stack is mixed back in and drawing continues. Each card costs a specific quantity of stamina and will points. Cards may be general use cards, which might be utilized by any character with the offered stamina and will, or character-specific cards, such as weapons and talents, which may only be used by the designated character. Card results are solved right away, making the order in which you play them important to success; there's no point playing a card that makes an opponent take increased damage from attacks this turn after you have actually currently played all of your attack cards, for example. Your turn ends when either you run out of cards you want to play, or you have no characters with endurance and will readily available to play your staying cards.
At the end of your turn you dispose of any staying cards and play moves to one of the enemy ranks: front and rear act in alternate turns. (Some puzzling guide info suggested that defeating the active rank before its turn made play move to the other rank, but this does not appear to be the case; rather it provides you two turns in a row.).
A character is defeated if its vigor is minimized to no, but characters also have armour to help secure them. Armour points are brought back guide at the beginning of each combat, whereas vigor is just restored through healing. Healing is hard; I believe I've only seen a couple of cards that do it throughout fight, and encounters tend to be irregular and costly, though there are occasional exceptions to the latter. If one of your characters passes away then for the rest of that battle that character's cards become useless, blocking up your hand and making the remainder of the fight more difficult. The cards are permanently gotten rid of from your deck after the fight.
Damage from cards can be direct attacks, which generally subtract from any remaining armour points initially prior to decreasing the target's vitality, or indirect, such as toxin or bleeding, which do damage with time. As is common for the genre, there are many modifiers that can be applied to characters due to card results, both enthusiasts and debuffs, and the key to winning battles with as little loss to your own team as possible is utilizing these impacts efficiently. A battle is won when all opponent units are killed, and lost if all friendly characters pass away. You then either go back to the street or return to the main menu, depending upon which it was.
Back on the street, when you empty at least one lane of cards, you reach the end of the street and the boss-level encounter afterwards. Do that 3 times and you reach the final boss. A minimum of, I believe you do; I haven't managed to beat that a person yet.
Battle wins and certain encounters provide additional cards to select from and XP to improve your characters. Each level up you can increase either stamina or will by one point, along with unlock either a brand-new talent or passive ability-- these alternate with levels. Fight experience is shared in between all characters in your party, so smaller celebrations level up faster. That said, the optimum level is just eight, so you do not have too far to go regardless.
The video game uses Rogue-like elements in a relatively common way for the category, with permadeath and procedural generation, and likewise includes meta-progression-- or irreversible enhancement between "runs" at the game-- through "unlock tokens", rewarded depending upon your performance in the run. These can be used to open 3 passive abilities and 3 active cards to appear arbitrarily in future runs, in each of three various streams: warrior, priest, and rogue. There are just a few truly game-changing things in here, however, and a few of the others seem even worse than a number of the normal cards. However it's a great start.
There are currently 2 selectable campaigns, however on the surface, a minimum of, they seem to be the very same except for the beginning two characters, and, naturally, the cards that accompany them.