Hand of Fate 2

Hand of Fate 2 is a fantasy-themed deckbuilding roguelike game where everything (but you) is represented by cards. The encounters you experience on your adventure? Cards. Your weapons and equipment? Cards. The damage you take when something goes wrong? You guessed it, cards. If you've played the original Hand of Fate, Hand of Fate 2 is just like that... but more.

The game does deliver the sense of adventure and discovery that its fantasy aesthetic promises, but has some of the aggravations and annoyances of luck-based card games.

The basic idea is straightforward enough. Each map consists of a number of encounter cards arranged face-down on the table. The goal is to move your token from card to card to reach the exit card (which will take you to either the next map or the finale for that campaign). If you move to a card that is face-down, it will be flipped face-up and the encounter on the card will activate. Simple enough, right?

There are a couple of resources for you to manage. First is health, which behaves as you expect. Next is gold, which also behaves as you would expect. Third is food. Each time you move to an encounter card you have not previously visited, you consume one food and gain five health. If you have no food, however, you lose ten health instead. Lastly you have fame, which is new to this game. You gain fame by clearing encounters, and generally don't lose it (although there are a couple of encounters that can decrease it). The main purpose of fame is to serve as a requirement for equipping certain pieces of equipment—you can no longer breeze through an entire campaign if you luck into an overpowered weapon in your first couple of encounters—although there are a few encounters that depend on your fame as well.

Encounters play out through textual descriptions of events, with the outcome dependent on your choices as well as chance gambits. There are four types of gambits: cards, dice, pendulum, and wheel. Cards are the foundational gambit, and the only gambit that was present in Hand of Fate. In the card gambit you are presented with (typically) four cards, each of which can be Huge Success, Success, Failure, or Huge Failure; the cards are shuffled face-down, and then you pick one. As the campaign progresses, the shuffling will become faster and faster. In the early stages of a campaign you can usually make an educated guess on which card is which, but eventually the cards get shuffled so quickly it becomes pure chance. In dice, you roll three dice, reroll as many of them as you want, and then sum them for your score. Your goal is to beat a certain, prespecified number. Dice allow for greater nuance of probability than cards, but with a purely binary result. Next is the pendulum, which is a swinging pendulum of light with gold, silver, and red segments moving back and forth along the bottom. You press the button to stop the pendulum, and the first segment the light is hitting determines the result: gold is huge success, silver is success, hitting nothing is failure, and red is huge failure. The final gambit is the wheel, which is probably the most versatile gambit. Any number of any types of cards are arranged in a spinning wheel. When you press the button, the wheel stops spinning (although not immediately), and the card the wheel lands on is the result.

Having multiple gambits helps keep the gameplay varied, and allows for an event to be easier or harder to clear. The gambits also range from pure skill (pendulum) to pure luck (dice), which both keeps the game from feeling like pure chance while also making sure success is never guaranteed.

Of course, it's not a fantasy adventure without a few brawls as well. While most of the game is presented through cards and games of chance, combat is fully played out in real-time action. Core combat is simple: you can attack, bash (which breaks the enemy's guard), block, and dodge. The "default" action in combat you'll most likely be doing will probably be to spam attack. If the enemy blocks, you break it with a bash. When the enemy attacks, a green or red indicator will appear above their head. If it's green, you need to block the attack, and if it's red, you need to dodge it. Timing is unimportant; as long as you press the block or dodge button while the indicator is on-screen, you'll block or dodge the attack. So the base combat is about mashing the attack button while watching out for enemy attacks to block and dodge.

Combat is then enhanced by various meters and special attacks you can perform. Each weapon has a special attack that is charged by landing a certain number of hits on the enemy without getting hit yourself. You also have a super-bash that can stun an enemy, which is charged by properly breaking enemies' guards. Knocking down an enemy opens them up to a finisher. Hand of Fate 2 introduces allies who join you in battle and have a special move which you need to manually trigger and that recharges over time. Finally, you can bring artifacts into battle, which don't have cooldowns but do each have a limited number of uses. Obviously, this is a lot more to keep track of, and managing all these special attacks while keeping up an offensive and properly blocking and evading all the enemy attacks is much more engaging than a bare bones hack-and-slash. The combat isn't quite so interesting that I think it could serve as the star of a game, but it's not the star of the game so it's fine.

As you might expect from a card game, a lot of progress takes the form of expanding your collection. The mechanic for unlocking cards is the same as the first game: tokens. Some cards have a token attached to them. When you encounter that card, if you fulfill certain conditions, you will receive the token, which will permanently add one or more cards to your collection at the end of that run. Equipment can also have tokens, and unlocking an equipment token requires using the equipment in certain conditions (for instance, defeating a certain number of a set enemy type) with progress retained from campaign to campaign. (The campaigns themselves have tokens as well, so your collection expands through completing the campaign as well.) New to Hand of Fate 2 are shards, which are a bit like generic tokens. The token from a certain card will always unlock the same card(s), which are usually related to the card that the token came from. Shards, on the other hand, don't unlock anything individually. Instead, you get a new card for every five shards you assemble, and the cards unlocked with shards are always unlocked in the same order, regardless of the cards the shards came from.

But how do yo actually use the cards to collect? By crafting decks which you use in the campaigns. The cards you collect are divided into four categories. First are event cards and the event deck, which are the bread and butter of the game. For each campaign you can bring an event deck containing a certain number of event cards. Your event deck is shuffled with a set, campaign-specific deck of events to form the encounter deck used for that run. The second card type and deck is equipment. You have full control over the equipment deck (no extra cards are added to it), but you don't simply get the equipment. Rather, any time you receive an item, it's drawn from the equipment deck. The third "deck" is your companion; you simply select whoever you want to bring along. Each companion assists you in battle, has a passive ability, and has an active ability that can assist you with chance gambits. The final deck is the supply deck. These are items or boons that you start the run with.

So a lot of the game takes the form of properly preparing for a campaign by developing decks that will let you overcome its specific challenges. For instance, if a campaign has lots of fighting you can add events that heal you, or if you need to obtain a lot of money you can put expensive equipment in the equipment deck that can be sold for lots of money if you receive them. Of course, the challenges and available cards are typically not this straightforward, and it can take some thought to figure out how you can use the cards and effects available to overcome each campaign's specific challenges.

Tokens are the vehicle through which Hand of Fate 2 presents its sub-quests and side stories. It's a neat system that incentivizes you to use new cards (to unlock their tokens) and allows for encounters to last beyond one card. I suppose my biggest "complaint" is that, while they do do some cool things with tokens, it's not that often. For instance, there is one card you get near the beginning of the game which unlocks a second card through its token. Much later on you get a third card with a token, but when you clear the challenge, rather than unlocking a card directly, the token moves to the "second card" unlocked earlier. In this way, the plotlines from the "first card" and the "third card" were woven into a singular resolution in the "second card." While cool stuff like this happens every once in a while, most tokens feel like simple one-two encounters. I would have liked if the token questlines were a bit deeper. Also, while I appreciate the fact that shards allowed the developers to add rewards and challenges to cards that did not warrant unique tokens, the balancing sometimes felt a bit off. Shards are undoubtedly lesser rewards than tokens—they're generic, and only bring you one fifth of the way to a card—yet the hardest shards are tougher than the easiest tokens. This makes the rewards for the toughest shard challenges feel a bit lacking.

The game is divided into a series of campaigns, each of which is inspired a tarot card. Each campaign has its own goal, which typically involves surviving to the end and beating a boss. Some campaigns introduce a unique mechanic that can completely change how the game is played; for instance, one campaign feels like a pseudo-RTS, while another is a murder mystery. It's a lot of fun seeing how the developers were able to fit all sorts of stories and experiences into the basic game structure. Most campaigns have both a "moon token," which is awarded for just beating it, and a "sun token," for clearing it while fulfilling a certain more rigorous condition. The sun tokens add an extra challenge to the campaign and often require special strategy to clear. There's one level in particular that requires you to use a unique card to bypass what appears to be a core game mechanic in order to win the sun token; this is an awesome moment, and I wish there were more puzzles like this in the game.

Hand of Fate 2's aesthetic can best be described as "generic fantasy." That's not an insult; I love adventuring in generic fantasy! There's magic, and swords, and plate mail, and goblins, and rogues... It's exactly the sort of wild, wondrous world in which you'd want to have a grand adventure. And everything in the room you play The Game in, from the hand-drawn cards to the wooden playing table to the metallic pendulum, gives a cozy, rustic feel—exactly the sort of place in which you'd want to play a tabletop roleplaying game about a fantasy world. The models in the room are a lot higher quality than the battle models, which was a good choice, because you see the room a lot more often, and those models aren't constantly obscured by animations and effects.

Speaking of the room, Hand of Fate 2 has a much more robust story than the original. In both this game and the original, the only "direct" character was the Dealer of The Game. In the original you and he were in direct opposition, but in Hand of Fate 2 he is training you to play The Game in order to defeat Kallas, the protagonist of the first game, who has taken control of The Game, and with it, the world. The Dealer has taken your memories—which is why you know nothing about yourself—and used them to create the decks with which you are playing. So every level, every encounter, and every card is something from the protagonist's past, and discovering new cards means discovering the protagonist's past and the events that have led to his training with the Dealer. The allies who assist you in battle factor into the story as well, each with their own side story and effect on the main plot. The story isn't something that will be winning literary awards any time soon, but it's a step up from the first game and provides another incentive to keep playing through the game.

One small thing I appreciated is that the deckbuilder has a filter for pretty much everything you could ever want. Facing a level with a bunch of thieves? You can immediately filter to cards that are good against thieves. A level where you need a bunch of food? Filter to cards that give food. Pretty much every pertinent effect has a filter. This makes deckbuilding a breeze, since you can easily find all cards relevant to whatever strategy you're building, rather than wasting time turning through pages of irrelevant cards.

There is also an endless adventure mode which I... didn't try out, to be honest. But if you really like the game, you can keep playing that even after you've beaten the scripted campaign.

So there's a bunch of coolly designed levels with unique mechanics, an aesthetic I absolutely adore, a neat story in the background, a variety of gameplay mechanics, tons of interesting cards to discover and collect...

And yet, while there was a lot I loved about Hand of Fate 2, there was something that just didn't feel right to me. When trying to put my finger on the issue, the first formulation I came up with was that it was too luck-dependent. That wasn't a very precise critique, though. My mind drifted to Children of Zodiarcs, which was also a dice- and card-based RPG. Despite the deep, deep flaws in Children of Zodiarcs' story, it managed to have a combat system that was rooted in chance and randomness yet never felt unfair. Hand of Fate 2 and Children of Zodiarcs are completely different games so there's no way to do a direct comparison, but what was it about the randomness in Children of Zodiarcs that made it feel better than Hand of Fate 2's, even though base games are based around cards and dice?

After some introspection, I came up with my answer. Developing proper terminology to create a parsimonious formulation took a bit longer. I figured I wouldn't be the first person to have thought about this, so I did a bit of research to see if there was already an article or essay exploring this topic. I found some nice articles about RNG in video games, like this one (and a follow-up article here), which certainly discussed randomness in interesting ways, but didn't quite get to what I thought was the crux of my issue.

(Before I go on, I'll admit that I didn't do that much research. So if there is an article discussing the points I'm about to get into, I'd love to hear about it!)

The core component, in my mind, is stakes. What is at stake in the random event? I'm going to coin a term High Stake Event, or HSE, which is any random event where at least one of the outcomes puts the player in a game state where success is impossible. (Obviously, this means that an HSE does not need to immediately result in failure; it's possible for the game to hide or the player to not realize that the player can no longer succeed.) Simply put, HSEs are unfun, and there are way more of them in Hand of Fate 2 than Children of Zodiarcs.

I think some examples will be illustrative in explaining exactly what I mean by an HSE, and why I don't like them. So let's take a look at Pokémon, which displays both HSE- and non-HSE-based gameplay loops. The core gameplay mechanic of Pokémon, the battles, is full of non-HSE randomness. When you select an attack, it can hit, miss, or critically strike. You don't know which will happen, but generally one miss on your part or critical hit from the enemy won't guarantee a loss. Therefore, your individual turns and choices are not High Stakes Events. However, now let's look at another Pokémon mechanic: shinies. If you're trying to get a shiny Pokémon, then every single wild Pokémon encounter and hatched egg is an HSE: either the Pokémon is shiny and the event was a success, or the Pokémon isn't and the event is a failure. Once the Pokémon's parameters (including its shiny status) have been generated, that's it; there's no way for that particular Pokémon to become shiny. Failure has been determined, and so the Pokémon encounter was a High Stakes Event.

This also illustrates the idea that HSE is a spectrum, rather than a binary distinction, and relies on both context and perspective. Normally a single turn in a battle wouldn't be an HSE, but if both you and the opponent have one health each, then whether you hit or miss that round is an HSE. Or imagine there's a point in a game where you need to flip a coin twice in a row, and you lose if you get tails both times. The individual flips are not inherently HSEs, but the two flips taken together are an HSE. Heck, the game as a whole could be considered one HSE: when you turn on the game and the RNG generates its seed, there's a chance—an unfathomably miniscule chance, but a chance nonetheless—that it could generate a seed that causes every single one of your attacks to miss no matter what you do. In that case, you'd lose regardless of your choices; you'd be in a game state where victory is impossible, thus the initial seed generation was an HSE. My point isn't that we should seriously consider pressing the power button an HSE, but to caution against trying to apply my binary definition of HSE to its logical conclusion because it's meant to be a heuristic, not an absolute classification.

If you simply look at how much more fun battling is than hunting shinies, you should see why non-HSE-based gameplay is more fun than HSE-based gameplay. In fact, the issue with HSEs should become obvious with just a bit of thought. (Perhaps the reason I wasn't able to find an article discussing this topic is because it's trivial and fundamental.) An HSE, by definition, can put a player into a loss state. Therefore, the player has no choice but to repeat the HSE until they succeed. Being forced to endlessly repeat a segment because it is impossible to clear based on skill alone and you just can't get the random non-failure result is unfun. And there are plenty of these in Hand of Fate 2, but not so much in Children of Zodiarcs.

Children of Zodiarcs had two main sources of randomness: the cards you drew, and your dice results. You had control over each character's deck and dice, meaning you determined the overall probabilities of the results of their actions. The battle system had very few HSEs; a single card or dice roll seldom decided the outcome of the battle. As a result, battles were filled with tons of non-HSEs—every card draw and dice roll was a non-HSE, and there were a ton of card draws and dice rolls, because that was what the battle system was built around. Since there aren't any HSEs, you constantly encounter random events, which causes the results to average out to the probabilities you set. And since you're winning by stacking the odds in your favor through your deck and dice selection, you feel like it was your strategy and planning that paid off and led you to victory—even though the entire battle system is filled with randomness. Again, this all comes down to the lack of HSEs: if the battles periodically had HSEs, you'd feel like your planning wouldn't really matter since the entire fight could get derailed at the drop of a hat, and the fact that an HSE could essentially invalidate everything that had happened in the fight up until that point, the random events wouldn't have a chance to even out to their expected values.

Now let's compare that with Hand of Fate 2. Everything in Hand of Fate 2 comes in the form of a card, and these cards are organized into different decks. However, the order you draw these cards from the deck is often an HSE. While simply completing a level typically doesn't have HSEs, you will often need to clear multiple HSEs in order to beat some of the more difficult and specific challenges.

For example, let's examine what you'd need to do to clear one of the earliest and simplest cards in the game: Arm Wrestling. To beat the event, you just need to clear a single dice challenge. The issue is that the number you need to beat increases every time you encounter the card (until you lose, at which point it resets). So while it's easy enough to nab a win or two by luck, strategy is required for later rounds, especially since the target number eventually goes over 18 (which is, obviously, the maximum you can naturally hit by simply rolling 3 dice). So, how do you go about beating this card? There are two ways to increase your die rolls: blessings and equipment. Stuffing your event deck with cards that give blessings covers the former. (There's also an early campaign level that's both easy and has lots of innate events that give blessings, making it the perfect level to use.) For equipment, you would put every equipment has increases your dice rolls into your equipment deck, and put into your event deck events that give equipment directly and that give gold (to buy the equipment). Once your equipment and event decks are set, you're ready to try to beat Arm Wrestling. The strategy is simple: you need to obtain dice-boosting blessings and equipment, then encounter Arm Wresting and beat it.

The issues are probably already obvious. First, the timing of Arm Wrestling is critical. Arm Wrestling might be the first event you encounter, so your odds of success will be incredibly low (or zero if the target number is high enough), and there's absolutely no way you can affect how early or late in the adventure it shows up. That's an HSE. Getting the blessings and equipment is also up to chance. Even if you put all your dice-boosting equipment into your equipment deck, you likely won't be able to fill it up with them, so it's up to chance whether the equipment you can find boosts your dice rolls or not. And you have no way to affect the blessing deck. While each individual equipment or blessing draw isn't an HSE, you only have a certain number of opportunities per run. And even if you've managed to get some dice-boosting equipment and blessings before encountering Arm Wrestling, the dice roll is still an HSE.

So even when trying to beat one of the simplest challenges in the game, there are still three distinct steps in the process that are wholly dependent on luck: when we encounter Arm Wrestling, which equipment and blessings we receive, and the ultimate dice roll. We can tilt the probabilities in our favor through the composition of the event and equipment decks, but at the end of the day there's nothing to do but repeat the run until each of those three components works out positively. Looking through your cards and strategizing the best way to beat a level or challenge is enjoyable and victory is gratifying—but repeating a level over and over and over until your strategy just happens to work out (not because there's anything wrong with your strategy, but because preventing failure is simply out of your hands) is tiring.

That was the nagging feeling in the back of my head sometimes when playing Hand of Fate 2. Exploring the world and discovering new cards and outcomes was magical. When I had some general goal and each encounter was simply a new obstacle to overcome, rather than a chance for unpreventable failure, the game was a blast. But when specific strategies were necessary, the game became a repetitive drag since, while formulating the strategy required skill, executing it typically came down to luck.