Single Player
Banners of Ruin's gameplay is essentially divided into 2 stages: street exploration and turn-based combat.
Each video game needs that you total three streets in order to reach the ( extremely tough) big boss fight at the end, with each street having three possible lanes of development. Each lane is filled with 20 cards, the topmost being revealed. To advance along the street you choose a card from the 3 offered and either engage in combat or fix the non-combat encounter (which can in some cases deteriorate into battle anyhow). You're also able to look at your party's characters and readily available cards, and change their battle positions, while in this mode.
Non-combat encounters range from easy shops, to fighting dens, to altars, and a reasonable few more, however most are merely well-presented wrappers for adding a card, removing a card, acquiring experience points (XP), or gaining health. They seem reasonably differed in the beginning, however I found them duplicating frequently throughout several games, and, at least from my experience with them, each one only appears to have a single outcome, so when you understand the " right" option for the few encounters that provide one, there's no threat in constantly selecting that option the next time you see it.
Battle is the meat and potatoes of the video game. This is presented in a "2.5 D" view of a battleground, with each side comprising up to 3 characters in each of two ranks: front and rear. The player always seems to have the very first turn.
Each of your characters has a specific variety of endurance and will points, with optimums that can only be increased through acquiring experience and levelling up the character. You usually begin at Level 1 with 2 endurance and one will. Current values are set to their maximum at the start of each fight. Once used, will is gone up until restored by a card effect or you start a new encounter. Stamina, however, renews every turn.
Each turn you draw five cards from your deck, plus another if you have a specific modifier active. If you lack cards to draw then your discard stack is mixed back in and drawing continues. Each card costs a specific amount of endurance and will points. Cards may be general usage cards, which may be used by any character with the available endurance and will, or character-specific cards, such as weapons and talents, which may only be utilized by the designated character. Card results are resolved immediately, making the order in which you play them critical to success; there's no point playing a card that makes an enemy take increased damage from attacks this turn after you've already played all of your attack cards, for example. Your turn ends when either you lack cards you wish to play, or you have no characters with endurance and will offered to play your staying cards.
At the end of your turn you discard any staying cards and play transfer to among the opponent ranks: front and rear act in alternate turns. (Some puzzling tutorial info recommended that beating the active rank prior to its turn made play transfer to the other rank, but this doesn't seem to be the case; instead it offers you two turns in a row.).
A character is beat if its vitality is decreased to zero, but characters also have armour to assist secure them. Armour points are brought back at the beginning of each battle, whereas vitality is just brought back through healing. Recovery is hard; I think I have actually just seen a number of cards that do it during fight, and encounters tend to be infrequent and expensive, though there are periodic exceptions to the latter. If among your characters dies then for the remainder of that fight that character's cards become useless, obstructing up your hand and making the rest of the fight more difficult. The cards are completely gotten rid of from your deck after the battle.
Damage from cards can be direct attacks, which normally subtract from any staying armour points initially prior to lowering the target's vitality, or indirect, such as toxin or bleeding, which do damage in time. As is typical for the category, there are lots of modifiers that can be applied to characters due to card results, both enthusiasts and debuffs, and the secret to winning battles with as little loss to your own group as possible is utilizing these impacts efficiently. A fight is won when all enemy units are killed, and lost if all friendly characters pass away. You then either return to the street or return to the main menu, depending on which it was.
Back on the street, once you empty a minimum of one lane of cards, you reach completion of the street and the boss-level encounter thereafter. Do that 3 times and you reach the final employer. A minimum of, I think you do; I have not handled to beat that one yet.
Combat wins and specific encounters supply extra cards to pick from and XP to enhance your characters. Each level up you can increase either endurance or will by one point, as well as unlock either a new skill or passive ability-- these alternate with levels. Battle experience is shared in between all characters in your party, so smaller celebrations level up quicker. That said, the optimum level is just 8, so you don't have too far to go regardless.
The game utilizes Rogue-like elements in a relatively common way for the genre, with permadeath and procedural generation, and also includes meta-progression-- or permanent improvement in between "runs" at the game-- through "unlock tokens", rewarded depending on your efficiency in the run. These can be utilized to unlock three passive abilities and three active cards to appear arbitrarily in future runs, in each of 3 different streams: warrior, priest, and rogue. There are only a few genuinely game-changing things in here, however, and some of the others seem even worse than a number of the normal cards. But it's a great start.
There are currently two selectable campaigns, Early access but on the surface, a minimum of, they appear to be the same except for the starting two characters, and, obviously, the cards that support them.
