In Cave of Cards, you clear dungeons by making poker hands.
The X button opens the shop dimension, and the O button lets you crouch (preventing you from banging into things).
Find and unlock the exit door by clearing the dungeon.
High score is based on how many hearts you have left at the end.
Got my first win after.. Four tries? Not sure if this is a good or bad score but I'm happy to get it (probably should have spent my last diamonds on hearts but w/e).
What's the 2nd stat under the hearts mean?
@Verb nice! 2nd stat is how many heart cards are in your hand when you exit, they're only worth 1 point each tho
@adam Atomic - I think I need some instructions here.
- If I dig it uses 1 spade. If I have no spades I use 1 heart.
- If I fight I lose 1 sword and the enemy loses 1 hit point (???) . If I fight without a sword I lose 1 heart - and the enemy is also injured.
- There are some strange mushroom things which spread around. Also a pot seems to generate enemies. No idea what the squared things are or if I should care about them
- Don't know what the cross is, but it has lots of hit points
- In the shop dimension I can swap diamonds for other items.
- 3 of a kind is the best hand to get ???
Is the above correct? What is the purpose of crouching? Thanks
@phil my only addition is you can make bigger hands by buying expansions in the shop! the squared things, if you're referring to what i think, do drop a helpful resource...
Thanks! I am actually really enjoying this. I wonder if I had the instructions up front, would I have actually stuck with it? Possibly not.
Nearly cleared the dungeon. I think I am getting the hang of it
@phil yea its always a tightrope in a design but something im exploring a lot in this run of carts is like... i know i enjoy exploring / discovering these designs while i make them, so what do i and don't i say to the player so that maybe they will have some of that fun too....
Close one, but I made it!
This is pretty fun. Figuring out what the rules are, is pretty nice. I think I got most of it. At least roughly on an intuitive level. Not really sure about exact numbers.
That was great. Finally beat the game 3rd try with a score of 320. Focusing on having more max cards was key. Probably also got lucky with the diamonds early on. Having the green 1 life monsters give diamond rather than heart makes a big difference.
Interface wise, crouch is absolutely great when playing on mobile. A new game in the very small collection of pico-8 games that work well on mobile phone.
I could have scored a bit better : a few mis-moves here and there of little consequence, a mushroom invasion that required a lot of cleaning at the end of the game, bought five spades+clubs at game end, thinking they would be worth 5 points, tried the 6 times plusses combination and think it was probably not worth the 30 diamonds. I'm still not sure what the plusses do exactly, next game I'll try to pay more attention to their effects...
I also lost a few cards by trying to finish red combinations with a double heart or a triple diamond, assuming you could exceed the card limit that way. Turns out I was just losing the excess without realizing it.
I found a door, but I can't go through it. Do I need to clear the whole map?
The ending of my best/luckiest run so far.
Scored 430, and finished while holding a + card on hand that turned out to be worth zero point.
We try things, sometimes they even work...
Figured out that jokers count as one card of each, witch is actually not that great because the gains depend on how many cards of each separated suit you have on hand.
For 6 identical cards, that's 5 hearts, 15(!)diamonds, 12 spades and 12 clubs.
Finally completed it!! With a mighty 115 points
I still don't understand all the rules, but I'm having a lot of fun figuring them out!
@OverTheWorld , I'm currently stuck in the 500 points range, like your best(mine is 540 currently).
Maybe 600 is reachable that way ?
holy smokes y'all i thought 400 was near the top of the range. the highest score i've seen is around 580 so far. i agree, mold farming has some potential for going over 600 but im scared to try it lol
Well this was kind of unfortunate coincidence I guess:
Died at last successful hit, no other choice.
Edit:
Oh ok, starting to get familiar with things, great job I'm enjoying it 👌⭐
This run did not have mushroom farming. With decent optimization and farming we can definitely break 600
@OverTheWorld , just realized that the mushroom drops are NOT random :
you get a heart for just spawned ones, a diamond for next step, and a spade for last step. If you encounter a mushroom at the end a two cells wide corridor, you can farm hearts : you spend one spade and one club per heart card gained, so -6 spade and -6 club for +5 hearts. Did it until there was no more spade and clubs in the shop, but ended up using most of my hearts to finish the level and didn't beat my high score in the end, so there's some better planning to do there.
I'm confident you could farm diamonds instead of hearts, but I'm already emptying the hearts and crosses from the shop, so maybe not interesting... But now that's there's a way can covert clubs+spades to hearts via mushroom farming, that might be interesting so that the entirety of the shop can be used to get more hearts...
I haven't found a way to farm spades from mushrooms without losing ground yet.
If we find a way to get one spade cart for one spade and one club, that would be 6 spades and 6 clubs for 12 spades, meaning you can convert clubs to spades.
Lastly, I haven't figured out yet what the exact mushroom spawning logic it.
Player movement and effect seems to occur first, the mature mushrooms turn grey and spawn. empty tiles orthogonaly adjacent to new greys get new mushrooms most of the time but I've seen cases where that wasn't the case, and there's also possible diagonal spawning, but mostly in tight spaces ?
It seems fully deterministic, but not yet clear to me, and not symetric either...
Once it's figured out, we might be able to save some spades : at the moment, I'm only farming by letting a mushroom spawn into two, needing on spade to clear the grey mushroom and one club to kill a mushroom.
We might find a configuration alternating between 2 spawn and 3 spawn for example...
@RealShadowCaster I started 30 games and I found out that the visible starting bombs can range anywhere from 16 to 20 bombs. It may be easier to get a high score on a level with more visible bombs to save spades.
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