Going Rogue: Tetra Tactics
The fourth-most played game in my Steam library is one you’ve probably never heard of. I mean, you’ve heard of it now, because it’s the title of the post, but you know what I mean.
I’ve logged 70 hours in this unassuming little deckbuilder — more than Slay the Spire, Inscryption, and even that black hole of free time, Stardew Valley.
Just leaving early access this month, Tetra Tactics has struggled to break through in visibility due to many factors, including a Steam-mandated eleventh-hour name change (for the Googlers, its previous name was Card Craft). Which is a damn shame. Roguelikes should be a genre where games rise or fall based on the crunch, not the incidentals.
The Game
Inspired by a classic Final Fantasy minigame, Tetra Tactics involves placing cards on a 4x4 grid, where they attack any adjacent enemy cards. The larger number wins; there are also symbols with special powers — magic always wins when attacking and always loses when defending; shield blocks all attacks, and so on. Defeat an enemy card and it flips and becomes yours — available for the enemy to flip back on the next turn. The winner is the player with more cards when the board is full.
Very few roguelikes feature the ability to capture enemy units. This simple mechanic creates a wide range of scenarios that can turn from overwhelming victory to crushing defeat in one ill-chosen move and back equally quickly.
Since cards are only ever flipped or placed, not removed, matches are a lightning-quick seven moves per side. Deck building may not be strictly the right term for this game, since you start and end with eight cards — when you gain a new card, you have to swap out one of your existing cards. (Choose carefully!) Games clock in on the longer side, at about an hour per run.
The weak parts of this game are mostly in the fluff — if you’re the sort of person who deeply cares why you’re fighting this particular Grand Magus, or why one of the characters is a mink in an Elizabethan collar, you won’t find any answers. And while the asset-pack graphics achieve a holistic look, they also make it difficult for the game to achieve a distinctive visual identity.
Simple Math: A
Really, there’s no math at all, unless you count inequalities. Cards don’t have hit points; they’re either defeated or not.
The complexity arises from predicting chain reactions. If you flip multiple cards in one move, it creates a combo, and all the captured cards attack their neighbors. Ostensibly good moves can turn out to be disastrous if they leave you open to an enemy combo; much of the strategy revolves around placing cards so as to cut off combos.
Deterministic Outcomes: A
No dice-rolling here — A > B and them’s the breaks. The joy of deterministic combat is on full display here — you can set up a move two or three steps ahead and still execute it with perfect precision.
The only randomness comes from a few relics and enemy powers, which sometimes have effects like “-1 to a random card,” but most of these happen before the player moves and therefore still adhere to the rule of deterministic outcomes. One lone enemy breaks this rule — it randomizes the symbols on your cards after you play but before calculating the results — and boy howdy, is that a gnarly battle.
The game’s overall trend, however, has been towards less randomness. Several of the heroes initially had powers with random elements, most of which have been replaced with more-useful deterministic powers.
Tradeoffs: A
So a typical roguelike tradeoff is a card that has a positive effect and a balancing negative effect, like “Deal 10 damage, lose 2 health.” And these are perfectly serviceable.
Even better, however, is a card with an ability that is both potentially positive and potentially negative, depending on the circumstance. And that’s what’s so clever about Tetra Tactics: Since every card might be controlled by both you and your opponent, every card is both advantageous and disadvantageous. A card with a lot of shields is a good defensive play — but if the enemy does capture it, it’ll be equally hard to reclaim. A card with three zeroes will be lost immediately, but you can flip it back just as fast. The enemy’s massively powerful augmented cards are dangerous — but once flipped, they become equally powerful assets.
Because of this, it’s possible to win incredibly lopsided matches. While most roguelikes are ultimately a raw numbers game even with the best strategy, there’s functionally no such thing as an unwinnable deck in Tetra Tactics. If you can get a foothold anywhere, you can turn the game around.
Geometry: A
Cards in Tetra Tactics have a different number or symbol on each side, which attacks or defends against the adjacent side of the card next to it. Thus, whether a card is strong or weak strictly depends on how it’s placed — a card with three swords is useless if the side you need is the side with a zero. A deck ends up with stronger and weaker sides; in-game tactics require positioning around this, while progression strategy is all about shoring up your weak sides. A middling card that puts a symbol on a key side is often a better pick than a mathematically stronger card that is redundant with existing cards.
Geometry is also crucial to the all-important combos. To flip two cards, typically you either need to place adjacent to two cards, or you need to use a bow, which hits the cards both two and three spaces away but not the adjacent card. Either move requires a specific board configuration.
Board positioning, then, is significantly more important than raw numbers. The best character in the game by a strong margin is the one who allows you to move cards and rotate their symbols. Fight smarter, not harder.
Overall Score: A
That’s right: IT’S OUR FIRST STRAIGHT-A GAME! And believe you me, at the Nightwell Forge, you don’t get As by sleeping with the professor.
Metaprogression: Toy
Tetra Tactics includes several forms of metaprogression. Shards collected during runs unlock perks, providing benefits like more starting gold and more uses of hero powers. Individual cards gain augmentations over time, which persist run-over-run. To balance it out, there are curses that add difficulty by lowering the numbers on your cards or putting a time limit on matches.
Unlike the games other we’ve covered, though, all these elements are completely modular. You don’t unlock consecutive levels of curses in a linear progression — they all become available at once and you can choose which ones you want a la carte. The perks have trees, but you can freely buy and return them to build a configuration with as much or little assistance as you like. Even the card augmentations can be changed or removed later.
As a result, there’s no single measure of how difficult a run is. There are achievements for winning at different curse levels, but you get them whether you used all the perks or no perks at all, and there’s no achievement for winning with all the curses, which is presumed to be impossible (but maybe you’ll be the person to do it!). Some heroes, as aforementioned, are vastly stronger than others. All these are deliberate design choices.
This structure may infuriate (or simply bore) more goals-oriented players, but for those who like open-ended games, the lack of objectives creates a sense of playfulness. You wouldn’t pick the underpowered characters if you cared about winning, but you might for the challenge. It is a metaprogression sandbox, and that’s something we don’t see often.
Oh, and speaking of challenges: I am currently the record-holder for this game, having beaten it at Curse 25. Think you can dethrone me? Well, put your money where your mouth is.
For our honorary award, how many other games have you played where you can be losing 8–2 on one turn and winning 10–0 on the next?
Honorary Award: Best Reversals
And that’s Tetra Tactics, the best roguelike you haven’t heard of. Will it become your next 100-hour game? Only one way to find out!
Next month we’ll be looking at a big title! That’s right, I do occasionally give the people what they want. Don’t get used to it.
More Going Rogue
Mortal Glory
Iris and the Giant
Fhtagn Simulator
Meteorfall: Krumit’s Quest
Monster Train
