Trick Art Dungeon Guide

Trick Art Dungeon is a newly announced puzzle-adventure that likes to play around with perspective and expectations. What this means in gameplay terms is that you can complete a painting of a shark in order for it to spring to life and dig straight through the floor, use a reflection in order to walk across pathways that simply don't exist, change your perspective in order to create a gap where there once was a solid wall, and the list of similarly bizarre examples goes on for a while. There is simply no way for me to explain this through words alone, at least not in a way that leaves you less confused than before, so allow me to instead share with you the recently posted announcement trailer. Its not very long, but it will give you a pretty good idea of what to expect from Trick Art Dungeon. Trick Art Dungeon has only just been announced, and as such I'm afraid there is simply not a shred of extra information to be found anywhere online. I can't even tell you the platforms it will be releasing on, let alone the expected launch date! What I can tell you, however, is that you should head over to the the official Facebook page if you would like to follow Trick Art Dungeon's progress moving forward. And since I can offer you very little else.  The playing cards are language independant and are valued 0 to 7. The cards with value 3 and 4 in each suit are magical spells. Each suit also has one card marked as a potion, the value being different in each suit. These special cards offer special gameplay effects, depending on which hero is chosen in a round. The other playing cards show typical dungeon inhabitants. These become relevant with a few heroes that are in the game.

Players compete over multiple rounds to accumulate the most gold and the player who ends up with the most gold wins the game. There are 3 sets of 5 unique heroes and each game a set of 5 heroes is chosen to play with. Every round one of the players acts as the active player and has to choose one of 5 available heroes. Each hero changes the game and describes how gold is earned. All the other players have to cooperate and try to stop the active player from reaching this goal. The active player chooses the hero to play with after the playing cards are dealt. In a 4 player game each player receives 7 cards. The remaining 4 cards are set aside. After the active player has chosen the hero for the round, that player may exchange up to 4 cards from hand with the remaining cards. In a 2 and 3 player game each player is dealt 9 cards and 5 cards are set aside and available for exchanging. Each hero determines the goal for the active player how gold can be earned. This can be a scaling amount of gold. For example if a player chooses the Barbarian gold is earned for every collected trick and potion card above a certain threshold. Some heroes offer a fixed amount of gold. For example, if a player chooses the Assassin, 4 gold is earned if the active player wins the final trick of the round. When the active player did not manage to earn any gold, all other players are rewarded for their good cooperation by earning 1 gold each. Some heroes change the game in other ways, for example playing cards without revealing them or making use of the set aside cards during a round.

The playing and winning of the tricks uses mostly standard trick-taking rules. The first played card of a trick determines the suit that is asked. Other players must follow suit, if they can. In general the player who played highest card of the suit that is requested, wins the trick. Some heroes add trump cards that round, this can be a suit, one of the special cards (magical spells, potions) or even a specific number. If one or more trump cards is played in a trick, the highest trump wins the trick. Each suit is ranked (1 to 4), if multiple trump cards of the same value are played (e.g. multiple 4's with a hero in play that makes them trump), the higher ranked suit wins the trick. The three sets of five heroes each offer a range of options for players. Starting players are recommended to play with set A first. Sets B and C offering more tricky heroes to play with. Besides these three unique set of hero options, the game also suggests a few variants to increase variability. Instead of playing 2 rounds per player the 'Adventurer's Guild' variant forces players to play once with each of the five heroes that game as an active player. Another variant, 'Random Dungeon', shuffles all the 15 heroes together and the active player is offered 1 hero at random to choose to play with. Up to two times this hero can be refused an a new hero is revealed.Each week (in the game) you send your quartet of champions out to one of four main areas in order to gather coin, accouterments, and experience required to tackle the eponymous darkest dungeon. These areas all have different enemy types and challenges that require specific strategies. Some need big, heavy-hitting brutes, while others require poison to get the job done, and the trick is to balance your adventuring party's classes and tactics appropriately. That, however, is complicated by the fact that with each subsequent adventure, your soldiers inch closer to stress-induced heart attacks or debilitating diseases, to name a few possible downfalls.

The game is played in rounds. The player sets up the base character and all the equipment equipped. This represents every player as a fully equipped dungeon delver. Each round, the start player (the person who challenged the dungeon last or the last player to be in a dungeon) can choose to draw a card from the monster deck or pass their turn. If they choose to draw, they can do one of two things: (1) keep it and de-equip an equipment or (2) place it face down in the dungeon. Placing it face down in the dungeon creates the dungeon deck and fills the dungeon with monsters that the challenger will have to face later. If they choose to pass their turn, they cannot participate in the rest of the round. Once only one person is left after all the other players have passed their turn, that player then becomes the challenger and must go into the dungeon with only the equipment he has equipped. The player then flips cards off the dungeon deck and fights the monsters within. Some equipment allow you to null the enemy damage or be able to withstand it by increasing your HP. If the player survives the dungeon with at least 1 HP, they win that round. If not, they lose. The players then reshuffles all the cards to make a new monster deck and re-equips all the equipment to start a new round.

Trick Art Dungeon's progress moving forward.The deep-voiced speaker, who portrays an ancestor of yours who first unearthed the dungeons before recognizing his folly, also doles out bits of loose, Lovecraftian story more as flavor than a meaningful plot. Mostly when beginning boss-level dungeons, he’ll give some background on how each unholy horror came to be and what role they played in his own mad quest, and it’s all fantastically grim and delivered with great gravitas. Battles are great to watch, too. Using just a few frames of animation and some parallax movement, Darkest Dungeon conveys action and excitement, and the monster designs are varied and often creative. Battle is fought against a wide variety of bandits, skeleton warriors, fish men, filthy pig monsters, Eldritch horrors, and all manner of creatively designed monstrosities in between. The grotesque bosses are especially noteworthy for their unique and powerful abilities, which include a transforming lump of flesh and a Siren that temporarily seduces one of your party to her side. The first complex thing you have to consider is that each character has seven skills, such as the Highwayman’s bleed-inflicting Open Vein or the Grave Robber’s blight-loaded Poison Dart. You can only have four equipped at a time, and unlocking and upgrading each skill individually represents a considerable investment of resources. This forces you to specialize characters for specific roles, such as front-line melee or back-row support, or to spread your abilities thinly across the positional slots. Each class’s ability set is flexible enough that most characters can serve multiple roles, which adds a lot of diversity to possible builds.