I think it's about delaying using the heart-healup as long as possible. Use them at later levels, not earlier levels, whenever possible.
As you find rats, they are facing towards the rat king, which helps you locate it, get the scroll, and reveal cheap kills.
- Spaces contain monsters of various levels (numbers) and cause your character to lose that amount of HP when clicked. They drop the same amount of gold which you use to level up.
- Leveling up fully heals you and you gain 1 max HP
- You'll need to explore the map beating enough low level monsters to continuously level up while managing your HP. You CAN go to zero HP but not below.
- Get to level 15 and defeat the dragon to win the game.
The first level is easy. I have 5 HP, and I need 5 gold to level up, so I kill monsters worth 5 and I gain enough gold to level up.
But after that I need more gold than I have HP to spend. There's the odd heart, which gives me more HP, but there don't seem to be enough hearts to make up the difference.
Edit: Ok, I got it now. Like minesweeper, it requires careful exploration of safe areas in order to gain those hearts and chests that are needed to bridge the gaps between HP and XP.
I got to level 13, then misclicked.
* Treasure chest (beware of mimics) containing the above or XP directly
* Walls cost a random amount of HP (despite registering as 0 for adjacent counts) but grant a random amount of XP. I suspect that getting a good score requires getting lucky and hitting a low-HP high-XP wall early, to stretch your score just a little bit further
* There's a gnome(?) that costs 0 HP but gives 10 XP
* Once you find the scroll of anti-mine, you get a lot of XP from picking up the leftover mines
But yes, many games are unwinnable.
* It works similar to minesweeper so hints/patters for minesweeper also applies.
https://minesweeper.online/help/patterns
* Prefer levelling up to heal over the hearts. You can use hearts later for bigger heals
* Don't level up unless needed to. Try to hit 0 heart before levelling up.
* Point is exploring as much as possible
* You can use right mouse button to mark cells with numbers or X (for mine). If you figure out a cell don't open it unless you want to explore that area. If not just mark them and leave them. Later when you need to heal/level up, you can kill those marked cells for extra XP with no cost since the health you have will be wasted anyway.
* While picking up hearts again prefer the ones that in areas you want to explore into
* To make things easier, at the beginning you can just open random cells that are far away from the orbs. If you die, you won't lose much :)The ultimate goal is to kill the dragon, which has 15 lvl, so you need 15 hp (15 lvl) to fight it.
You therefore need to get 15 lvl.
You therefore need to kill monsters.
Killing monsters doesn't give you enough exp, so you need to find healing/gold to compensate.
As you pointed out, healing scrolls heal you completely and therefore are more effective at higher lvl.
The strategy therefore, is to search the map for gold and healing, by spending as few health as possible.
The exception from this strategy, as pointed below, is gaining information (helping in the above strategy) by killing the slime mage and rat king.
--
My tips:
- if you can't find a low lvl monster before healing up, hit a wall to get your hp to 0. I think a wall on average gives you less than 3 gold, which makes it a punishment for when you didn't strategize the monster killing optimally. Of course the wall could be strategically placed, explained later.
- Prioritize hitting low lvl monsters above hitting high lvl monsters, because you want to explore as cheaply as possible.
- Prioritize hitting where a monster can be, above where it surely is. It's probably a good idea to decide where to click based on average possible lvl multiplied by the chance it is there. Calculating this could be extremely hard (it would involve statistics from the Monsternomicon for example) but estimating it is pretty simple. Obviously ask yourself a question if you want to risk death if the average is very attractive, but maximum is beyond your current hp.
- Prioritize revealing fields with possibility of monsters of the category that you almost entirely discovered; you want to remove that lvl from possible combinations. Doesn't apply to rats and slimes.
- Of course combine the three points above with prioritizing fields that give you a strategic advantage; it's tricky to explain what a strategic advantage is: for example being able to swipe from a side, so that you have two numbers, where one describes 2 fields, and other 3, so that you can derive the strength of the third...
- SUPER IMPORTANT: try to find the slime mage: the pattern is simple, he's only lvl 1 and you want to kill him as early as possible.
- IMPORTANT: likewise, you want to kill the rat king as early as possible. That's the only non-slime 5, so should be easy if you listened to the above point.
- 3-digit numbers can be thought of as two numbers XYY, where X is the number of mines, and YY is the sum of strength of monsters. The game then plays as Mamono Sweeper (BLIND mode) merged with minesweeper, you can separately try to figure where mines are and the monster distribution. The logic of both games then applies.
- Just like you know the first digit of a 3-digit number must be a number of mines, because monsters aren't strong enough to combine to 100, sometimes you can know the distribution of monsters based on possible combinations. In particular, you should be able to quickly rule out all lvl 5 monsters, and all lvl 8 monsters, so you're left with a just a few lvl 6-7. You will probably save yourself a lot of time if you don't miss the moment when all lvl 7s are revealed. I think lvl 11 hides near eyes, but lvl 10 should be easily found. Rat king rules out lvl 1, so if you hunt for bats, the number of combinations becomes very manageable.
- Once on lvl 11, you probably already won. This is the time to kill the lvl 11 guy. Before you do this, mark your mines.
- Reveal destroyed mines. No need to remove the mark.
- Spot patterns, as Monsternomicon suggests. The most important is the fuchsia slimes pattern, also lvl4 go in vertical/horizontal pairs - near the end of the game you probably can figure out where the pairs are based on detecting x+y = 8 strength, and limited number of positions where the pairs could hide.
- I didn't dare to kill the mimic, because Monsteronomicon told me to fear it.
At the end, by using the strategies described above, I killed the dragon with 3 healing scrolls left: https://i.imgur.com/0Iz2IqT.png
Edit: Final score 195 in about a thousand tries. It was the catchy soundtrack that kept me going.
It seems solvable for me (303 score) without risk about a third of the time. You can also cheat a little by clicking randomly a few times and restarting until you get a good start.
Took me 3-4 attempts to work out a strategy and then a couple more to get the first win. Have since had a few more wins. Great little game.
Amusingly, if you get a 16th (and 17th) heart, the Monsternomicon slides across to the left side of the interface to accommodate it.
A few essential things you should know: 8's are only on the 2 rows/columns next to the edge. 11's are always in the corner and if you see a '?' the purple 5 point monster is 2 blocks away, which direction you'll need to figure out!
Not essential: Mice look at a specific direction for a reason. You might figure out why later
Two things bother me though.
The thing that I continue to find most confusing is that sometimes a square has a question mark instead of a number. From looking at boards after I lose there does not appear any pattern to this.
The other thing that's strange is the "wall" squares -- seems like a wall can take a couple of hits to break, you can't die from a wall, and you seem to get damage each time you hit it and an arbitrary amount of gold from breaking it. Does anyone have any better ideas on how these work?
For the walls - think of them as an HP sink. The game largely revolves around using your health as efficiently as possible to explore the board. Walls are useful since you can attack them 1 HP at a time to get the XP out of them (thus allowing you to always fully use your allotment before refilling your health).
It took me a second to figure this out, too. Here's a couple hints (base64 encoded to prevent spoilers for other folks:
Hint: QXQgdGhlIGRlYXRoIHNjcmVlbiwgdGFrZSBhIGNhcmVmdWwgbG9vayBhdCB3aGF0J3MgKipuZWFyYnkqKiB0aGUgcXVlc3Rpb24tbWFyayBzcXVhcmVzCg==
Answer: VGhlIGdhemVyIGVuZW15IG1ha2VzIGFkamFjZW50IHNxdWFyZXMgc2hvdyBhID8uIFRoaXMgZWZmZWN0IGV4dGVuZHMgcGFzdCB3YWxscyBhcyB3ZWxsLgo=
Everything else works, but like 3-4 columns of tiles missing on the right and a purple book at the bottom which is visible in the screenshot.
So seems like just some fix needed to avoid that cut-off in the right an it should work properly on mobile.
I tried both chrome and firefox on android, with and without desktop mode, with and without horizontal orientation. Always exactly same cutoff problem. I have no idea what creates this problem so consistently in 2 different browsers in desktop mode.
- a grid of hidden tiles containing monsters
- that you fight by clicking on
- where you balance exploration and combat
- using your HP and level-ups as resources
I'd say this game was directly inspired by Desktop Dungeons (which isn't a bad thing!)
This would be more actionable if it revealed to me what platform the game is designed for.
Out of curiosity I tried running it anyway and it filled the viewport with rapidly flashing colored bars.
The rapidly flashing colored bars is just the intro graphic while it loads.
This game was released on android at a point (and removed from the store later). It's my favorite game ever.
This is a cross between Minesweeper and an RPG.
You gain levels by killing weak monsters and win when you defeat them all.
It's a bit different than Minesweeper in that the number you reveal when you click on a square is the total of the levels of the monsters in adjacent squares.
When you click on a tile with a monster in it, a battle begins.
First you attack, and deal damage (equal to your level) to the monster. On the next turn, if the monster is still alive, it attacks you back. Your attacks alternate until one of you dies. You don't see this, though -- the battle plays out instantly after you click.Form another slightly similar game, they used a trick to avoid stupid errors. When the user clicks on a monster that would kill them, the game ignores the first click. If the moron clicks again, they die. You can implement the same trick to squares marked with a red number too. (And perhaps to upgrade or hearts when you are too healthy.)
[spoiler alert]
Most of the time you have to buy knowledge in exchange of health.
I can now fully clear the board very quickly. A few insights:
Since the lich is always in a corner you can guess where he is by checking just three corners. This also unlocks a free powerful spot on the map. It has strength 11 mind you.
You have to get your extra power ups early if you want enough hp to clear the board. This means you have to explore aggressively to find the gnome (10 coins) and the lich (2 coins per mine). It’s not terribly strict but you can’t waste time grinding up levels. You generally just want to explore tiles that you know won’t kill you. Don’t waste time on walls. Those are just buffer spots to help you avoid wasting heat scrolls.
The ? Blocks mean there’s a strength 5 beholder guy 2 spaces away. He obscures all tiles within a radius of 2 so it’s pretty easy to guess where he is. He’s a great target to hit because it usually lets you jump forward.
The 8 strength slimes cluster together. Might as well just leave that area alone once you find it.
Edit: 5:21 for a first attempt at an any% time
SSS
SLS
on the right there are some fields with improbable numers, 116 (first picture) and 200 and 112 (second picture) seem in conflict with other numbers.
The resizing fails so gracefully i dont even notice its cutting of part of the board.
One gripe, the code is incredibly inefficient - my laptop fan was running full speed and battery draining fast, while the game board just sits there with no animations or anything going on. Should be basically using 0% CPU while idle.
Anyway really fun concept & execution, and great game design.
Also the boxes are not dangerous, and the walls are unknown in strength.
It could help to add 0 to non-dangerous items, to make this more aligned to the rest of the numbers, or a ? for the walls.
I also struggled to understand that i survive with 0 health.
Lastly it doesnt make sense to me why the killed monsters "gold" must be gathered (clicked again). I strongly assumed i cannot have more then the slots filled with gold, only when i had to pick one up i did so and figured out i can have + gold.
Apart from the difficult part of understanding how it works, its a very nice game. But you took quite some time off the reviews i have to do for my students game design projects ;-) The ? do appear to gathered in some areas and prevented me from finding the bombs, but i was able to slay the dragon.
Also add a mute button...
edit: more detailed description
[Spoiler]
Extra experience points go into the next level up, so it is better to empty the hearts before leveling up.
Excellent work! I think a lot of the feedback here is well intentioned but not from people as used to the turn-based space.
Really enjoying this. Thanks
Does not run in edge/Firefox/chrome on my windows 11 laptop. Just rapidly changing colored bars forever.