My general taste of games is deckbuilding with thousands of hours in games like StS so this game naturally appeals to me.

And while I do (or rather did) enjoy the game, I think it's not ready for release yet.
There are still a few bugs but mostly what I dislike is the amount of content.

It is way too easy and after playing 4 hours I've seen all (continued to check if there was no interaction with the final boss to unlock a new chapter).

There's only one class, the amount of enemies and events aswell as symbols is too low.
Mix that in with the low difficulty and it's gotten stale for me already.

If I was below 2 hours I'd refund AT THE MOMENT.
I do hope there will be more content coming because currently this game is worth 3-4€ imho.

This showed up in my discovery queue and I could tell right away it would be my jam. I don't write many reviews but I want to make sure this game gets its flowers.

The battles are similar to Puzzle Quest, except with Tetris-like pieces instead of Bejeweled gems. The board will be prepopulated with some empty tiles, the enemies trap/curse tiles, and other magical tiles with symbols on them which you place as well. Some of them are your basic attacks + block generators, but you can set up various archetypes and synergies (I won the tutorial run with an Axe + Fire build, for example). You draw three tiles which you can place. Clearing lines on the board activates the tiles cleared, both yours and your enemies. The enemies take an action every turn, usually either directly attacking, blocking, or adding traps/curses to the board. You can also cast spells similar to Puzzle Quest, most of which have cooldowns or activation requirements tied to clearing lines.

The rest of the gameplay loop is what you'd expect from a roguelike deckbuilder. You travel nodes on a map that include battles, events, shops, and rest spots, ending with a boss at the end of each area.

I really like the style of the pixel art, the creature designs especially. The background music is good, though like all of these roguelikes the music eventually will become repetitive and you'll put on your own music or a podcast.

It's too early to comment on things like difficulty and enemy/boss variety, but I will say that I beat the tutorial seed pretty easily. I did encounter a single bug (at least I think it was a bug), though it may have been me misunderstanding the effect of one of my spells. EDIT: I posted the bug in the Steam forum for the game and it got fixed a couple of hours later.

For $10 ($8 launch discount) I'd say it's absolutely worth it. This game scratches the Puzzle Quest itch that other games haven't been able to replicate for me, and it's going into my regular rotation of roguelikes.

Video: https://youtu.be/3rME54E5eNc

I think of this almost like Tetris if it were a battle simulation. I imagine in some version of the future, a game like Arcane Board would be how the world utilized robots to fight each other over territories they'll never physically set foot on.

Anyway, it has great pixel art, a nice soundtrack, and gameplay that is incredibly easy to jump into. The only part that messed me up is the whole reset the board thing. It makes sense, I just didn't take it as seriously as I needed to and it set me down a path of absolute failure.

The nice thing is as you play you'll unlock new tiles which will make subsequent runs a bit easier. You might even say no two runs are alike? Either way, it's a really great combinatino of roguelike deckbuilding, sudoku, and tetris.