CategoriesGaming

With the Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove saga finally concluding this past week, players received a wealth of content in the final update King of Cards. The update sees the regal King Knight take center stage as he seeks to rule a kingdom of his own. The basics of King Knight’s gameplay involve bashing into objects and coordinating bouncy-pirouettes off enemies to navigate around stages. In addition to this new gameplay style, King of Cards also introduces a card game called Joustus into its already ridiculously content-packed world. After playing a few hours of the card game, I have to say I wished there was even more of it in the game and now I’m hoping there ends up being a physical version of Joustus one day.

This feels like the most epic Shovel Knight game of the bunch

The basic overview of Joustus is this: in a two player turn-based match against an NPC, the player must place cards down and “push” either their own card onto or their opponent’s card away from goal or “gem” spaces on a grid. The game ends when a grid, which varies from a 2×2 or a 3×3 format, fills up with cards. The player with the most cards placed on these gem spaces wins. The player has a customizable deck of cards, and each card has at least one direction arrow on the card’s edge, with a maximum of a single arrow on all four edges. These arrows indicate whether the card has the ability to push the adjacent card off the space it is currently sitting. The game is both much more complicated than its basic setup but eventually more intuitive than it at first lets on.

This is the basic Joustus game setup

Joustus initially didn’t click for me and I struggled a bit to play strategically. The King of Cards campaign makes it a point that the player knows the risk of losing a match: the loser forfeits one of their cards. This threat made me fearful of experimenting and I wished there had been just a bit more of a practice section for Joustus before I was up against an opponent I easily lost cards to. I also started thinking it would have been good to place an NPC in the first playing area that wouldn’t take your cards when losing against. The good news is that Yacht Club Games has shared a guide for Joustus on social media to help any players struggling to get in on the fun.

Joustus starts to shine when it begins introducing new gameplay mechanics such as cards that can push two spaces or “cheat” cards. These twists on the basic rules of the game start introducing a really fun amount of strategy to the game. I realized that the learning curve wasn’t what was initially holding me back from enjoying Joustus and it was actually the limited number of cards I owned. Once I got the more technical cards the game started making me want a physical version to share with friends.

Victory becomes more likely as you keep learning

With conclusion of Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove, Yacht Club Games are finally free of their indentured servitude to Kickstarter backers that started 7 years ago. Yacht Club Games promised in Shovel Knight’s Kickstarter campaign to various Kickstarter stretch goals, resulting in multiple unique playable campaigns, a full-fledged fighting game, and a robust card game in Joustus. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the name “Yacht Club Games” ends up becoming synonymous with the term “over-delivering” in the industry. 7 years of stellar work and next-level scope-creep has resulted in the evolution a game package with one of the highest value 2D platforming experiences money can buy. It makes sense that Yacht Club Games would expand into new mediums beyond digital gaming since they’ve expanded on Shovel Knight so much.

In the age of game nights, where people like to socialize with friends over a boardgame or some casual excuse to meet every now and then, people are always looking for new tabletop games to play with friends. Although Joustus is focused on two-player combat, I would still be interested in seeing it made into a full tabletop card game that can be casually played with friends. Shovel Knight’s developer Yacht Club Games has already invested in the future of tabletop gaming with the recently funded Shovel Knight: Dungeon Duels. The game was developed in coordination with Panda Cult Games and is described as a “competitive side-scrolling miniatures board game for 1-4 players”. Dungeon Duels looks like it could be pretty cool, and I’m sure players of Shovel Knight would love to see Joustus get a similar treatment in the future.

You’ll end up playing cards with all types, even horses

Shovel Knight Treasure Trove is available on (basically) all platforms now.

Share this: Twitter

Facebook

Reddit



Like this: Like Loading...