If you follow JohnHQLD on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, you would have seen that I did a little electronics project last weekend. This necessitated playing games on the Switch – oh the hardship! One game that I hadn’t realized I had stopped playing was One Deck Dungeon, and I had to redownload it and give it another go.
If you followed the site before the 2022 reboot, you would know my love for One Deck Dungeon. It’s a card and dice-based roguelike adventure where you can build upon set characters for a light campaign-like experience.
It’s also one of the first times I put forward “If you play it solo, grab it digitally. To play with friends, play it on the table.” I have these thoughts about Cartographers. So much so, I don’t even count the games of Cartographers on my mobile anymore!
Well, for a time, I did this with One Deck Dungeon. While the game works on mobile, I do prefer it on a larger screen with everything laid out. So I used to play it on Steam and forgot I had grabbed it on Switch at all!
One Deck Dungeon and the stand-alone expansion One Deck Dungeon: Forest of Shadows offer so much flexibility for players. You can combine the two games for a greater challenge and to expand the adventure for up to 4 players. Building ‘maps’ from decks of cards makes life interesting. You constantly burn cards (dealing straight to discard) to guess what could come next.
Playing One Deck Dungeon takes care of mid-game bookkeeping for you but does deny you the tactile satisfaction of dice rolling. For me, I can get two games in digitally for every game on the table, so for solo play, I prefer One Deck Dungeon digitally.
So while the round on the Switch was fun, I probably won’t keep playing on it. I need to put One Deck Dungeon on the Steam Deck and see how that goes. Whichever platform I prefer, I will probably reset the campaign progress and start again.
So rediscovering One Deck Dungeon was a lot of fun. It was also well-timed with the follow-up game One Deck Galaxy sitting on my table, waiting to be opened!