Alchi

The card edge system is really fun to mess around with and gets your dopamine flowing like crazy when you find those great combos.

Alchi takes a stab at fixing the core problem of Balatro, and partly succeeds! The cards in this game have side-pips, which are a clever way to make both the sequence of card plays and the positions of cards matter. This potentially gives you a lot of choices on each hand, and makes Alchi play more like Wildfrost or Super Auto Pets than your usual big-number-deckbuilder. There are some problems with balance which (for me) reduce the replayability of Alchi. Because of the way side pips confer points, a lot of re-trigger effects are basically doubling everything. Even on hard mode, it feels a bit too easy to force the same doubling or re-triggering deck with every character. This means taking a yellow card like the butterfly, the rhinoceros beetle, or the ant with blue pincers, together with an enabler and the black garlic. To me this feels like a problem with the mechanics and card pool, more than with the enemies or deck-tailoring events. This game has a lot of heart, a clever core mechanic, cool events that let you modify cards in creative ways, and some memorable bosses. I think if HOMEK tightens the balance on the card pool and adds some more events, this could be a classic of the big-number-roguelike genre!

I'm a big fan of this game's systems. I've played way too many roguelike deckbuilders, and I think the way adjacency and sequencing of your cards plays out makes turns much more interesting to play than the vast majority of the genre; I'd say it's easily better than Slay the Spire and Monster Train on that front, and probably most comparable to Wildfrost in terms of turn-by-turn complexity. It falls short of those in terms of routing complexity (your agency is pretty much limited to post-fight reward types) and is comparable in terms of deckbuilding. From what I've seen so far, the game's main shortcoming is a lack of run variety (mostly due to a small pool of enemies and cards and a lack of things like artifacts) and one specific enemy that hides your hand 3 seconds after you draw it (which would be fine in a game like Slay the Spire, where every card is very simple, but is quite brutal when every card has a power, asymmetric adjacency considerations, abilities, and a color). If this were a $15 game, I'd probably skip it, but at $5 it's a pretty easy recommendation for an offbeat roguelike deckbuilder.

If you like mind-bending strategy, crazy combos, and big-number roguelikes, this is the game for you! Shifting cards, cards that consume each other, cards that draw and discard and replay, and all of them can be sliced and diced to create crazy-broken builds. A must-try for anyone who likes to push their deckbuilding creativity to the limit. Even at full price ($5 currently), this is an absolute steal.

This game has so many fun mechanics and it is so satisfying to build nasty combos. I am obsessed. I have played a lot of deck building games and this is among the best.

This is a very fun game! I enjoy all the different ways you can customize your deck, such as drawing cards, removing cards, changing the side colors, increasing the card damage, upgrading the card, etc. It adds a fun layer of strategy where you can form your deck and get it to work the way you want to. Overall a very fun card/deck game!

great game with a great mechanic. if you like deck builders i recomand!