Backlog Bloggery: Aces & Adventures

Posted on January 3, 2025 by Aywren

Aces & Adventures Steam Page

This is an RPG deck building roguelite that incorporates some poker hand elements. I do enjoy a good battle card game roguelite type game, but it took me numerous rounds of failure before I was able to clear the Warrior story tutorial.

Do note that just because it says there’s poker elements to it, does not mean this is a poker game. You simply can play poker hands (pair, triple, four-of-a-kind, or valid five-card) to do damage.

The game’s tutorial tosses you right in and teaches you on the go, which could be good or bad depending on your familiarity with these kinds of games. It took me a number of retries before I got a decent enough grasp on what the game wanted me to do to push through the first story and finish it.

Like many roguelikes, the downfall is, when you’re defeated you start over from the beginning again. You do take mana points with you, which unlocks levels and packs, but it felt like my first upgrade took quite a while to obtain given my poor playing. It’s nice that the story cards have voice acting, but after you’ve retried the same storyline several times like I did, I just wanted to push through past them quickly.

One thing that miffed me is that you have no idea what cards your enemy has, so when you go to attack, all you can really do is throw out all the fire power you have each round and hope they can’t match it. Or maybe I’m doing it wrong, who knows. There’s a little more strategy in defending against an enemy’s attack, and I often had my best luck doing damage during my defense rounds. Often, though, there was just elements of luck on whether you win or lose.

There seems to be a bunch to unlock including leveling up each job and unlocking more powerful card abilities. As you clear one class quest line, a new class with a new story opens up. It also looks like there are various game types here.

I did almost hang this game early up thinking I didn’t understand enough about poker hands to do well at it (and I don’t understand much about poker). But after taking a breather, I came back to it and put in about an hour overall. I might come back to revisit it as I did start to finally enjoy my time with it once I got the hang of what to do – I’m sure with a leveled-up character, it gets easier over time.

I feel like there’s probably a bunch of content and unlocks to this game, and I think what I played was fun overall. But at a $20 price point, I’d only suggest picking this if this is absolutely your cup of tea.

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