Been playing a bit of Merge Maestro every day since I got it and it's quite an addicting/compelling little tile combining roguelike deckbuilder. Your "deck" is a set of eight different emojis that act as cards, and you have a 4x4 game board to place them on - just click on the tile, no resources or anything. The resource management in the game comes in the form of actions per round, remaining HP, and making sure you have a way to deal damage to enemies. There's four enemy emojis that appear in a queue structure up at the top, and if you don't deal enough points of damage to defeat at least one of them once this fills up, the one at the front of the queue will deal a point of damage to you, so it's sort of like how you need to keep clearing lines in Tetris. You have four HP, and four actions per turn (place an emoji on an empty tile or combine two emojis that are the same to level them up). There's eight levels, and you can only get to the emojis at the higher levels from combining lower ones; you get a random emoji from your level 1-3 emojis in your set for placement on the board, and when you play an emoji you immediately "draw" another one from your set. A lot of good updates have been being implemented lately, and it may just be me not playing that many games at the very early stages of release, but this is one of the few games I can remember seeing some quantifiable improvements in quality and gameplay features in such a short time period after release. The challenges and boards feature, for instance, in Merge Maestro shakes up the gameplay quite a bit from the default mode, basically acting like character classes and challenge rules seen in some other roguelites. They're pretty challenging too, and don't really feel unfair; I'm trying out different strategies until I land on the right solution that clicks, but I feel like you could make a bunch of different builds work to beat the challenges. The MM-specific gameplay loop/quirk that keeps pulling me back to it in-between Balatro and other game runs and just at random parts of the day after I've done a bit of writing/coding and want to take a break is the simple aspect of it, the game being turn-based so it's not rushing you or anything, and the gameplay being so different yet approachable than other roguelites I've played in regards to the synergies and the action economy. Emojis have a single simple effect that happens when they are either played to the board, combined with other emojis, or destroyed by an effect. You also have a few relic-like modifiers that can enable or boost certain strategies, and there are not only levels specific to certain emojis - so the dev can balance possible strategies by making a broken combination of emojis be placed on the same level since you can never have two different emojis that have the same level value for instance, like Diamond and Cruise Ship can't both be in your deck since they're both level 8 - but also emojis belong to themed packs, with emojis of shared theme all belonging to the same pack and having similar effects, strategies, and restrictions. Aquatic animal emojis have a drink theme and can be enabled by consumable synergies, while vehicle emojis usually have a passive effect or attack that will not trigger unless they are placed on a corner tile. Since obviously you can't win with a deck full of just vehicles since you only have four corners, or do well running all marine life since they will give you a lot of drink consumables but no payoff to use them on, the real meat and potatoes of deckbuilding comes from going with a couple of different packs in your build and the emergent gameplay mechanics that come out of those combinations, like how in Magic the Gathering you get a different overall playstyle by combining two colors rather than running one color; black or green may care about creatures and things dying on their own but all the death effects may be in black and all the good creatures to use them on may be in green, so in order to unlock their synergy you have to make a black and green deck. Same principle here. The other thing that makes it stand out as I mentioned is the action economy. So one of the game design principles behind card games but especially deckbuilders and CCGs is you need a resource to play cards, that way you can have more powerful cards that players work towards and will be excited to play; if your most powerful card is as easy to play as your cannon fodder, it would make these crazy power imbalance swings. Even games where there's not a mana or energy system have resources: chess has one move per turn, material, and board position as resources; Balatro has cards in hand, number of hands left, number of discards left, and money as a resource, as well as multipliers and bonus chips. Shotgun King has shells loaded, shells in reserve, grenades, and your number of moves per turn as a resource. I like to call a resource that you have a limited amount of per turn that are free and refill each turn as "action economy" resources, and this is the primary resource of Merge Maestro since everything else is free to deploy. You get four actions per turn, and since you are on a time limit in regards to clearing enemies efficiently while also progressing your board state - and you can be set back by your on-board tokens getting deleted or accidentally putting yourself into a position where none of your available emojis deal damage - a lot of impactful decisions can go into which emojis to replace, which to combine, and which ones to add to your set. You may have a really cool-looking token in the shop you want to add to your deck, but if you've already got an emoji of that level in your set or you need a damaging emoji more than it, then you get a really interesting dilemma to me that is part of the reason it compels me so. Anyway, game's really fun and has a lot of potential despite its unassuming look - which I think is kind of a boon for the game since going with already established iconography helps onboard the appeal to people. Super Auto Pets already proved the strength of it before (which is also what caught my eye to Merge Maestro since I was a big SAP player at once point and still play semi-frequently).
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