Deckbuilder Grail quells the fear in my heart of playing the wrong card by pinning all of the strategy on the deckbuilding

There is an anxiety to deckbuilders that I don't find with many other games, in that I get incredibly stressed about which cards I should play. I feel this way about card games in real life too, for reasons I truly cannot understand. It's just a game! And yet I can't help but scold my tiny, silly brain in moments where I pull the wrong move. So I am quite keen on how Grail sounds, the latest little game from little game aficionados Sokpop, where after you build your deck, the deck does the fighting for you.

Grail, a roguelike deckbuilder, starts you off with just three cards. When you're plonked into your first match, it seems a little daunting at first. You haven't chosen any of them, and you don't actually decide what cards to play, you can only watch it unfold. So, you see that one card does some damage, another heals you, and another card increases the damage of your damage card. Each card requires energy to be played, of which you have four points, but some cards cost multiple points of energy, and you recuperate one point of energy after a card gets played.

Once all of your cards get played, the match doesn't end. Instead, they're returned to your deck, randomly shuffled, and continue to play themselves. In cases where you start to run low on energy, only a single point might get attached to a card that requires two, so you have to wait until it gets reshuffled into the deck to use it. But remember that card that increases the damage of another card? That gets replayed too, so you get stronger as turns unfold in front of you.

This is essentially the core of the deckbuilding. You are looking for cards that can synergise and build off of one another, strengthening themselves through repeated uses. You don't want matches to go on forever though, so after 40 turns, yours and your opponents' health goes down. And don't worry, 40 turns don't take that long either, as each reshuffle of a deck ups the speed at which cards are played.

It's all quite satisfying, pinning the entirety of the strategy outside of the matches themselves. Now, yes, this does present a new anxiety for me: have I chosen the right card for my deck? But at least that's a new feeling! And a satisfying one to unpack and figure out on subsequent runs. Plus all that rodent themed pixel art is just lovely. You can try all of this for yourself too thanks to a demo on Steam, or if you want to wait for the full thing, it's currently due to be released September 1st.