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Spire's End is a solo and cooperative card game with enemy encounters, interactive story-driven scenarios, and high-end art & design. It's a unique gaming experience without a lot of baggage. Simple set-up, intuitive rules, and minimal components. No DM, no bookkeeping or character sheet. Just you, an oversized deck of cards, dice and cube markers.
I am trying to harness my childhood entertainment, raw, analog and unknown. My influences include a wide range of childhood nostalgia like ’70s D&D, Planet of the Apes, The Time Machine and Land of the Lost. There are hints of Zork, Monkey Island, and ’80s-’90s fanzines.
It should feel like something tucked away in the closet for decades that you just discovered. Admittedly with some modern aesthetics…, we will pretend it’s ahead of its time.
It's the grisly tale of a strange tower that emerges in the heart of a bustling Viking city. The townsfolk have vanished. It’s up to you to mount a rescue and unravel the mystery at any cost.
You move through the game like a book. But in this case, it's a stack of ominous cards. Flip them over, make difficult choices and let the story unfold. You have 7 adventurers (7 chances) to face the countless dangers of the spire. The core gameplay mechanics revolve around combat.
To perform actions & attacks it will cost characters hit points. Every action is a risk. To execute stronger attacks you will need to spend more hit points. This makes for tense, close, ruthless battles. Higher risk garners greater rewards, but at a higher cost. Choose your actions carefully!
This is a Six-Chapter adventure, each of which includes a major encounter, loot, choices, dice events and a lot of surprises!
- Strong art and graphic design
- Engaging dice-based combat system
- Compact footprint for a story-driven game
- Replayability through multiple endings and deck variation
- Energetic narrative pace
- Learning curve and rule-book clarity issues
- Ambiguities in card rules and deck order
- Age rating at 12+ may understate violence for some players
- Graphic/animal-cruelty content (live crow card) may be troubling
- Potential frustration with unlucky dice rolls
- Exploration, risk-taking, and choice-driven storytelling
- Fantasy adventure with a narrative gamebook structure across four chapters
- Branching narrative with deck-based events and endings
- Kingdom Death: Monster
- Elder Sign
- Yahtzee
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Card interaction and layout — Placement/order of cards on the table to resolve events; interaction beyond a pure choose-your-own-adventure book
- Chapter-deck structure / story card deck — Four chapter decks with a branching set of cards guiding events and endings; discovery-driven pacing
- Combat: Dice — Dice-based checks with bullseye-like results and temporary bonuses; combines luck with strategy
- Endings with multiple outcomes — Different endings depending on choices and dice results; can end the game early
- Marksmanship currency — Currency used to mitigate luck on dice checks (spend to improve odds)
- Yahtzee-style dice combat — Dice-based checks with bullseye-like results and temporary bonuses; combines luck with strategy
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- the art and graphic design for spiers and the original but as you can see it is a very different uh the original spirez and used these very large cards
- I absolutely love the color of this game
- the dice system... is a lot of fun
- the endings do end your game
- I think this is a very well designed package in terms of visual presentation
- there are moments where the game will just end and sometimes those endings do come just because you didn't roll the dice
- learning the entire rule book before you start