Smahtfone gaem tiemz:
Deck De Dungeon 2.
An utterly broken but very enjoyable card based rogue-like. Although the first one was way less broken and more dungeon crawlery. Basically a different game. And it didn't demand a net connection to sync its clock and unlock daily rewards (and allow for leaderboards and timed challenges). Oh, and the it had delicious pixel graphics while this one has normal painted art.
Well, I say rogue-like but it's really just a set of enemy cards you can battle in sequence, with temporary random card draws for your deck in between the fights. Some of these strings of fights can have special rules and effects placed on enemies and yourself to mix things up.
Plus a town from which you disembark after perma-buying cards and creating your comparatively tiny starter deck. There's no death penalty, and every run nets you renown and money and sometimes cards, rarely even dungeon-specific cards.
You have 20HP and 20"MP", and each card has an associated cost and effect, plus there's two kinds of damage that can be shielded by two kinds of shield respectively (which have their own mechanics, one is ablative and the other usually only exists for the turn it has been summoned). After you run out of "MP" or cards to play or cards to draw, the enemy gets to act but unlike you, they have a strict turn-attack schedule that you can look up with a tap. When they're done with attacking/buffing/debuffing your hand gets replenished (to usually five cards, after your discard pile is made into your draw pile if needed).
Why broken? Well, the cards you find or draw can very rarely have permanent effects attached to them. Those are active during battle as long as the card is in your deck. You can sell these special cards and get tokens back that allow you to infuse a random effect into other cards for a moderate to hefty fee, so as long as you have enough money, renown and spare cards you can eventually get any kind of desired effect on any one card.
One example of these effects would be to give you a token that lets you play a single card for free whenever you take damage.
Another would be to suffer a tiny bit of damage every time you play a card.
(Or it would let you gain a tiny bit of life whenever you play a card, or whenever you suffer damage, or outright ignore small chip damage or boost your attack power or gain cards for your hand whenever you gain life and so on and so forth.)
Get where I'm going with this? The originally carefully balanced turn based battle system that limits how many cards you can play per turn and how many cards you can draw per turn can be completely ignored (and with the combination of a renown-based card that lets you shuffle your discard pile into your draw pile from the town shop you can basically play for free while the enemy doesn't get to participate).
Only annoyance left is that going from battle to battle still counts as a turn so your buffs like on-contact poisoning, extra damage or shielding decay eventually. No problem though since you replenish them with every endless turn of yours.
Have been playing those two games ever since I got my iPad 2 back in the day. Nominally, they're F2P with some premium currency, but monetization is so subdued it might as well not exist. Ever so often I just wipe the save and start again because I'm getting too ridiculously overpowered.
Soon, I will get a hankering for DDD1 and wipe that save. I know it's coming.
WheeeFor ios and Android. F2P, Japanese, with terribad english localisation. There's a titled third one that isn't localized and I have no clue whether it's good or bad. Probably best to start with 1 and then try 2. They're rather different games, so give both a try if you're curious.
