Deckbuilding, Pugnala, and More

[rocky olive]

As an amateur board game designer, Vampire Crawlers has interested me a lot since it was announced, but I ended up being very let down by it after playing the full version for a few hours. I wanted to put my thoughts here as a way of thinking about the game more and trying to crystallize why I didn't like it.

Vampire Crawlers follows a long lineage of card games with adjacent mechanics but has enough big differences to catch my attention. My favorite mechanic in the game is getting multiplied power by playing cards in increasing cost, which makes card costs contextual (a 2-cost card is not strictly worse than a 1-cost card that does the same thing). That kind of contextuality is the driving force in some of my favorite games.

But it feels like Vampire Crawlers doesn't have a handle on the fundamentals needed to capitalize on the design space the combo stack provides. As you level up, you are forced to take new cards, which often results in just taking a card that destroys itself because bloating my deck with more 1-cost attacks increases my brick potential without notably increasing my power. Since most crawlers have a quite good starting deck, I am encouraged to slow down my XP gain so I don't get too many card rewards, which is dissonant with all the mechanics that let you increase your XP gain and present it as an upside.

Similarly, card destruction is often treated as a downside even though you always have near-full control over which cards are destroyed and thinning your deck is really good in a game where drawing a "straight" often just wins the fight. That is to say, the event that gives you +1 mana is worse than the event that has you destroy a card for +1 mana, but the game treats the former as more exciting. This suggests to me that Vampire Crawlers does not understand how deckbuilding games work, which I would really like to not believe.

I think this is exacerbated by runs taking too long. The improper costing of card mechanics snowballs over time and often resulted in me having a deck capable of killing the last boss by floor 3, at which point I just tried to rush to the end to get the run over with. Admittedly, I am not the target audience for "dopamine-core" video games, but given how roguelite this game is I was surprised how quickly I was getting bored with it.

I think my fatigue with the game spiked majorly when I tried Pugnala, who is quite obviously stronger than all the other crawlers up to that point. Her starting deck would go infinite if not for the card-cracking mechanic, but that quality allows you to play Spellbinder multiple times in the first few fights, ensuring Pugnala will never leave play. Once you do that, your deck is a 0-cost cantrip, a 1-cost ritual, and two huge attacks at 2 and 3 cost, which is enough to clear at least an entire floor.

Basically every action I take in a Pugnala run is just reinforcing what my starting deck already does - attaching gems to important cards to increase my ceiling, expanding my deck solely to increase my endurance against the card-cracking mechanic, focusing on card draw and mana generation, and taking Spellbinder basically on demand. While you can never go infinite, you can maintain a deck that usually but nondeterministically kills everything, which is worse.

I'm a few runs in since unlocking Pugnala, nothing has gotten remotely close to stopping me from doing basically the same thing every run, and I am no longer having fun.

I could play a different crawler, but I'm one of those players who can't get over there being an obviously better option. I don't like games where the optimal line of play isn't fun. There's also no point in adding additional crawlers to my team because they make my starting deck worse (another deckbuilder oversight).