Worshippers

Not a bad little game for the price. The graphics can be off putting at first but grow on you; there are some deliberately wall-eyed characters, for example.

More card synergies and better difficulty scaling would improve the game. The last campaign level is a massive jump in difficulty and damn nearly impossible, if you haven't had a perfect campaign run.

More opportunities to explore the late game would also be fun. Typically by the time you start you playing your t3 cards, you'll need to fight the boss army immediately.

Worshippers has the potential to be a great game but in it's current state of design and balance it's not worth buying if you are a gamer who expects skill to net you success instead of RNG.

This game is structured with 4 playable gods who each have 3 build paths, totally 12 fairly unique playstyles that can be slightly mixed and matched. You select your god and build out your deck based on 1 or 2 of these play styles and need to focus on synergistic decks as much as possible to find success. The various playstyles and builds often have a very rock/paper/scissors design to them and you have to pick a build and stick to it to have a chance to make it to the final boss battle with a reasonably upgraded deck.

Here comes the mind boggling part of this game that completely ruins it for gamers looking for skill-based gameplay. The final boss army might just spawn as a "rock" archetype and you spend the last 5 hrs building the strongest "scissors" deck in the game which is now completely invalidated by the RNG of what the final boss army is comprised of.

There's no telling what the final fight will be so winning this game is just a matter of playing over and over and over again until the deck you spend ages on ISN'T massively cucked by RNG.

I'm 30 hrs in and i've reached the final fight with a strong deck 4 times, and only once was I able to defeat it because the other 3 times the boss army completely -completely- countered my decks. It feels like absolute shit to spend several hours on a deck only to see it get obliterated by RNG and until there's a way to determine what the final boss fight will be at the start of a run, you're wasting your time playing this game.

Warning: There are a LOT of bugs in this game.

TL;DR: The game is pretty fun, but the undo restriction and bugs put me off. Overall, 7/10.

Art and Ambiance: The hand-drawn figures and maps add something unique to the look of the game. Simply put, it is beautiful. There aren't many animations that aren't instant, which I believe helps to get the game move along at a quick pace, unlike so many other strategy games (I'm looking at you Civ V). I often find myself humming or whistling the melody of the music in my everyday activities, so how could I not give the composer a nod? The melody is jaunty and enjoyable, which causes me to nearly always play with the music on.

Gameplay: This is a deck-building game, and that means you're dealing with cards. There are four specialized groups of cards (Items, Buildings, Units, and Spells) united under one of 4 champions, the basic warrior type, the animal-based type, the undead or "ancient" type, and the bandit type. There are many ways to play the game, though I've found a few combinations that seem a bit strong for what they are. I don't think that's necessarily a negative, however. There are many different ways to counter enemies, sometimes you need to be creative. I would probably call one or two units "overpowered," like the Scout or the Bies, but you will face enemies throughout the game that tend to disregard their strengths.

Game Mechanics: There is a bit of RNG with resource generation and card draw, which makes the game very save-scummy, which has been dealt with by the developers via a maximum of 3 undos per map. I do not like this workaround because I tend to make stupid mistakes in combat, which lead to devastating results. So, overall a negative in my opinion.

Personal Time-Value: After spending 8 hours in the game, I can confirm that there is still more for me to discover/try out. I haven't played around with animals or bandits very much. I've kind of stuck with a few combinations that tend to work for any situation, though I'd love to branch out and learn more interesting combos. Though the bugs tend to put me off of this game quite a bit, I am quite interested in continuing to learn about the game and the lore behind the game, which seems to be based on Slavic mythos.

Despite the bad translation and interface, this bare-bones graphics game is pretty well-thought in terms of its mechanics. Challenging, unbalanced, but becomes beatable when you get around its logic. Worth a few playthroughs until it gets boring. Extremely addictive for my first playthroughs.

Generally a good game, could be better if polished.
TIPS:
1. Star 5 scenario is quite easy once you figure out the tricks.
2. AP per turn is the most important resource, so scout is a must have.

The Good

• It's cheap.
  

The Bad

• Clunky and buggy user interface that makes action selection frustrating.
  
• Each turn you are highly limited by the number of actions you can take, the resources you have, and the cards in your hand.
  
• Because actions get more expensive as you use them, it's possible to have entire turns where nothing happens.
  
[*] Difficulty has no balance. Your game generally starts off with a few good rounds of explore and expand and then randomly ends with a OP stack of wandering enemies that ends your game early.

Final Thoughts

tl:dr;
Bugged, imbalanced, on the clock and confusing menus, little lore to explore.

Review: 5/10 in current state

Sound & Graphics: average. Nice hand drawn images, but very small and uneventful maps, with little variety.
Every map in campaign feels the same.

Problems:
- Confusing menu: if the game can't explain basic functionality on the first glance, you know there will be issues. For example, you cannot rearrange cards in you hand or in units in your army (Wth?)
- On the clock: missions are very short, growth takes a lot of time, suddenly you loose because you failed some objective in 30 days
- Bugged: some items don't work as expected, army does not gain per battle exp (only unit gains per unit kill) which can lead to some serious issues if you want to level a unit but can't score a kill because it is weak
- Imbalanced: overall game mechanics is just bad. Simple, yet unnecessarily complicated.
Deck building feels very awkward due to very serious card limit (can I increase that or what?) card unlocking feels weird and cards themselves - are extremely unrewarding.
Example - Talisman of life, +1 health per level. Remember my previous remark about difficulty with levelling?
Units are weird - I like the lore, but they are limited to 3 lvls (why not have 9 and change graphics every 3 levels instead??) which ends up in further levelling problems (usually your strongest units will end up getting the kills, and thus - experience).
Battles feel were awkward as well. Action limit. Somehow I always have fewer than the enemy. Unit shuffling in and out of combat. Trolls for example do not regenerate until levelled up and shuffled out and into combat. Why? Things like that are everywhere.
Strategy is problematic as it seems like 2 or 3 valid combinations otherwise you enemies will reap you like a harvest (they seem to have more actions, remember?)
No in battle magic, no in battle consumables, no activated items (some are auto-activating, but fail on the occasion). Very little room to navigate.
Add to that - low spawn of low level enemies to level up units, weird cost increase for cards, building limits, resources not carrying to the next day (I can understand food, but tools and gold? What happens to my gold overnight?)
List is long and I won't bother you - game is simply badly designed and underlying mechanics is very simple, but gets overcomplicated conditions just to hide its simplicity.

Greatest offence of this game is no lore to explore. Monster have no Monsteropedia entry (there isn't one). Completing the mission does not unlock any new lore or information from your god or whatever. Not even a clearly visible shine on the star (weird menu - campaign is starry sky and every star is a map you can replay few times?!).

Also, I was not able to start a new campaign with a different god after resigning from previous one without game restart.

After a few games, it looks exactly like what I want to play now : a short yet deep enough 4x like game, where every action counts. And due to this and the character level-up, it reminds me a bit of Desktop Dungeons.
We will see how it goes after more plays...

Some reviewers explained that the graphics were all wrong : they were unsettled. And I understand that. Indeed, there is a strong style which everyone won't like. But for my part, I really love it, and is a great part of the game's quality.

This is a great game for TBS fans who prefer tough, short scenarios. It has a steep learning curve, but once you get the hang of it, you will succeed.

Some reviewers criticize you cannot undo actions, but due to the exploratory nature of the game undoing acions would be cheating. It can be frustrating when you enter a battle wihout any tools, and therefore cannot use your ranged attacks. But on the other hand, such unforgivableness makes a game also challenging. Resources and actions are always scarce, and you should check twice before doing an action.

The world is rich with slavik folklore and deadly creaturen. Only a few of your warriors will survive to level up, and even the most experienced units can perish in an instant. Battles feel a bit like Darkest Dungeon in this regard. It also reminds me of the old indie game Armageddon Empires, though with a totally different setting ofcourse.

TLDR; Worshippers offers tough gameplay, UI is rough around the edges, but overall is a real indie strategy pearl.

A pleasant and fairly original deck building 4x game. You unlock cards during play and between games of a modest campaign structure, The combat, economy, and deckbuilding is all interesting and has pleasant tactics and strategy.

This game needs a better tutorial or guide, but it isn't so complex I couldn't figure it out. It has some annoying interface issues - the worst for me being that you can easily accidentally generate resources you can't spend because you run out of actions, and you can't unwind your turn except but using one of your precious unwinds - which are more powerful than I want in general, since they unwind bad combats and such - but all I want is to be able to undo stupid counting errors,

But still - if you have patience it is well worth it.

----------------
The amount I have played it warrants an update in review - it really is a lot of fun, with a nice learning curve. The number of crazy combos on the game is exhilerating. The variety in which an island plays out depending on its layout and what weird items or creatures you find is constantly engaging. You can win in many different ways and even significantly faster than the 10 games alotted to you for each campaign.

I would be interested in any additional content the designer makes for this game - or any other products they work on.

Surprisingly great. A heavily card deck influenced 4x strategy. The 2D folk art style and Slavic/Rus Viking mythology setting is fantastic, and immersive enough to forget the English mistakes. You must make the most of action points to explore the map, manage your settlements, and harvest the resources required to play the cards used for everything; troops, buildings, and improvements. Combat is basically an animated card game, using resources and cards aquired from the map. To be honest, I still dont fully grasp all the combat mechanics, but I've managed to beat a few maps already, and learning has been fun as hell. This game deserves more attention.

TL;DR: Old school machoistic turn-based TCG, a game that is as fun as it is frustrating, and occasionally more of the latter than the former.

The best game I have deleted from my hard drive out of frustration in recent memory. It has a great variety of options and obstacles to contend with that will suit the most fastidious micromanaging card collector enthusiast.

I recommend this game but worry about how well it will fare in overall ratings and sales due to its high frustration factor. I love the high difficulty games where you go into a play session expecting to die at some point, but this one has gotten too much even for my own tastes due to the blatantly unfair (verging on AI cheating) stacked hands of the AI.

A game that poses high difficulty levels is exactly what I want, but one wants to be able to feel they can overcome the unfavorable odds by putting together a clever machine (by "machine" I mean card cycling synergy) and executing your strategy flawlessly, but unfortunately eventually one is going to run into a boss fight where the AI machine has an overwhelming advantage and the entire play session feels wasted.

Part of the problem in my experience is while the victory point threshold for winning a given scenario decreases with decreasing difficulty level, I do not believe the difficulty of the final boss fight does, and while one can argue that a victory may be achieved without ever having to face the final boss fight, those fights represent the climax and so I know I want to beat it as opposed to avoid it.

The problem is with the creation of challenging AI, which like some of my favorite indie TCG's in the past (Astral Masters for instance) is heavy-handedly created by giving the AI a near-perfect hand and scripted play order, but believe me, it is no fun to go 1st, place a single unit out, and then have the AI's machine cycle through cards and eliminate your units without a chance to recover.

People mistakenly refer to the frustration arising from RNG, but it is more of the opposite in this case where the AI RNG is reduced to a near-perfect hand with little leeway to exploit potential unfortunate RNG on their part.

There are other problems such as having an unexpected unit shoot out from the fog of war early on and destroy a settlement, because the cost of rebuilding it (6 tools) can be prohibitive prior to having built up your economy; a reasonable fix could be having a lower cost to rebuild that increases each time, and that way an unlucky random death spiral can be avoided for early losses (as opposed to just setting a fixed lower value that might foster players not prioritizing defense), so maybe 3>5>7>9 for instance?

I was curious why an update for an "undo" function was important but believe me it is critical for this game due to the multiple layers of possible interactions between unit rank order, abilities, level, and items, which if it wasn't in place the frustration level would rapidly skyrocket to unenjoyable levels.

So, I do worry about the success of this game, as if someone like myself who actively seeks out the hardest of TCG games (a niche demographic to start) finally calls it quits due to repeated feelings of unfairness, then I wonder where it's audience lies, and whether they will be sufficient to support the developer's efforts?

I will follow this game because I loved playing it, but for the moment I end up playing for hours into the night with a sense of accomplishment, and then fall into a prescripted death trap which feels like there was little I could have done to prevent, which is the antithesis of fun and a sense of accomplishment.

This is a great game. I'm about 15 hours in and I am finding it rich, fun, and challenging.
* Each faction has a very different flavor, and you have to be thoughtful about your "research" choices (card tree).
* Resources are tight and you will be constantly deciding between exploration, economic development, and military buildup.
* There is a smart blend of an ongoing campaign feel and a quick-scenario (15-45 minutes) feel.
* Graphics are good.
* You will find yourself really caring about each of your units/cards.
* The game is mature, well coded and bug-free.

This game combines many of the best features of deckbuilding games such as Lucadian Chronicles and Thea the Awakening with classic games like Civ, Age of Wonders, and an RPG.

It's posslbe that the game is a little too hard at the start. It's also got a few grammatical and spelling mistakes. It's not beautiful by big-budget standards. But it's hella fun if you like smart, crafted, balanced, satisfying strategy games.

TLDR: It is an okay game, just a few jumps shy of being good.

Everything in the game just feels slightly off. It all feels executed by someone who had a good idea what they wanted the game to contain and do but not really the best idea of how to go about implementing it.

My biggest complaint is not the RNG or difficulty or controls or UI which in all fairness do just feel off. It is the lack of forgiveness and I understand it is my fault but it is an unneccasary inclusion in a game that is already this difficult.

If you click on a settlement to repair it, but you do not have 6 tools because of one reason or another but you are perfectly capable of getting 6 tools that turn. You can't. You wasted your move. There is no undo, there is no minimize to say "oops one sec let me get thouse tools". It is like this for shops as well, forgot to convert a card to gold before moving your dudes to town? Well too bad you wasted that move.

Thats not to say I did not like the game for the short time I spent playing it, I just did not want to play it anymore.

This game is a medieval fantasy strategy game, but playing it often feels like playing some sort of puzzle game. That's because this is a game of scarcity.

Every turn, there is so much you would like to do, but so few resources that you really have to think about what you want to prioritze and what will have to wait.
You are mostly limited through the number of "actions" that you are allowed to do in a single turn, both on the world map and during tactical combat. This means that every action you take should be thorougly thought about beforehand.

This is mixed with a small amount of randomness, but usually you can choose to have a fixed, less valuable outcome instead of the risky situation. For example, you have the chance to get 0-3units of a single resource from each city per turn if you activate it, but you could also go for a save 1unit of the resource you need by activating a building instead.
Or you can move your unit right next to the fog of war to explore faster, but risk getting attacked from a monster lurking in said fog or war, or you could move your unit just 1 tile away from the fog, revealing less new terrain but being sure about not getting attacked that turn.

And of course, the fact that your units and buildings are cards that have to be drawn in order to be played also adds some randomness, though when drawing cards, you are usually presented with 3 choices, and you can include the same card up to 6 times in your deck of roughly 25 cards, so there is a good amount of reliability in there.

There is a decent amount of content that, depending on your playing speed, will probably take 5-20hours to explore. But the replayabilty is there, especially if you like min-maxing and trying out new strategies and synergies, which are also unlocked through a card reward system after each scenario, making every campaign potentially totally different.

I was also surprised to see the developer so active and responsive. I complained about there being only 1 save slot in the steam forum. He replied almost immediately, and two days later, he added additional save slots into the game.

Overall, I can only recommend this game to fans of turn-based strategy. It can provide a real challenge and at times will feel unfair, but at least to me, this also made the game so attractive.

Fun idea but I feel it’s executed pretty poorly. For one there is numerous bugs with the UI failing to update and showing red numbers when in fact you have enough of the resource. Failed tooltips, apparently they’re programmer thought very high of himself so error handling displays like leet speak from a teenager. Many things feel very clunky like do I left click or right click sometimes maybe but oh no it was over a building so poof goes that action point. Everything broken up into regions so can’t really decide where to build settlements because everything was thought of for you, isn’t that nice? It’s not. Feel like I’m held hostage by the RNG. Decent game but not up to par in my opinion.

A very neat little 4x TBS. I found it quite difficult to get into and figure out but there's a whole bunch of very interesting ideas going on between how you build your deck and pace yourself through the game (I like that you have control over the pacing). I think it gets a little repetitive after a while but it's a long while to get to that point. For its price, I've had plenty of fun with it, and I'm not quite done with it still.

Fantastic game. Takes a little bit of getting used too and hard to get new cards but each card changes the game play significatnly. Battles are very well thought out and allow for great combinations of attacks. Definetly worth a punt.

Very replayable, however bigger maps/scenarios/deck p[tions would be great.

I try and get 2-3 settlments in first 4 turns then focus on a small army, leveling up characters makes them much stronger as does equiping items. To get access to tier 2 and 3 cards you need to play other certain in game card that require faith, action points can be used to increase resources by either selling a card or activating a town or building, resources are then used to play the cards.

There are many ways to win using card combinations.

The game has some nice mechanics, a combination between CTG and Settler. The general Idea, the engine and the mechanisms work, but it seems not yet completely finished. Some usability issues reduce the fun in playing the game:

Bug:

• _All_ stars disapeared after the third level played leaving only the moon... unplayable afterwards :-(
  

• Multiple Safe-Games possibility
  
• Make the areas a settler can settle different from areas already occupied (when you create a settler and find out there is no place to send it to, this can kill a whole game)
  
• Intoduce a mechanism to show places a specific building can be build on. (it sucks buying a building, trying to build it and then notice that it is not possible either because of building limit or terain limit. (sure you could count. But as a beginner you don't know what. Even when you learned this is just boring and not the fun part of the game)
  

• Modify the selection of a new gained card Button from "Back" to "Take selected card" (or similar)
  
• Introduce Back-Button for all actions that reveal no information. E.g. RMB on Farm.
  
• Use "Right Mouse Button" instead of RMB.
  
• "Next Round" Button in fight can be pushed endlessly without any fighter on the field
  
[*] Wenn choosing how to spend skillpoints, the pop-up of multiple elements make it unintuitive where to click to choose the skill-element

Nice game. From the description seems similar to our game Thea:The Awakening, but game format soon after one start first playthrough is very different. It does reffer to slavic mithology though, so if this is what you are looking for then its interesting game.
Game is divided into scenarios, you can do 9 scenarios before you have to do final scenario which results eiether in win or loose.
Maps are very small (whole map almost fits on single screen) and single scenario is designed to roughly last 10-15 turns

Things I like:
- Slavic mithology, which is enforced by the rough painted artstyle and consistent across the game
- ability to use synergy(combo) betwen characters and items
- fair amount of the mechanics to master in game which seems a bit on the casual side

Things I did not like:
- There is to little time to have fun with the army you build when you finally have it as this is usally end of the scenario, and you lose all you had in previous scenario going to the new.
- Some mechanics are far from obvious, and even when one understands them some important aspects are not described well enough.
- Often feels very unbalanced

Overall if you look for some interesting small game with slavic mithology and unconventional mechanics this is game worth few $.

This game reminds me a bit of Thea, though there are quite a few differences. There is no save feature, which I am not a fan of, but I understand why they don't have it in this game. Expect to start over a lot as you learn the ins and outs. There are six levels of difficulty that you choose and progress through. You choose a star (difficulty 1 through 5) and that pulls up a world for you to conqueor. You gain some random cards at the end and points to purchase additional cards to add to your hand. I haven't tried past difficulty 3 stars yet, but I am still learning a lot of the combinations that give you an edge in combat. I've enjoyed learning some of the combinations that the enemy uses on me and then either employing them or a counter tactic.

I haven't experienced any crashing or bugs yet. In my opinion, for under $10, this game is great. I can't wait to see how this game continues to develop, though it is fully playable as is. I wouldn't mind seeing either another game mode or a mod that would make this play more like a strategy at your own pace, rather than the limited time you have per world. Though I do enjoy the current model, as I can sit down and play a world and not waste away too much time (as long as I don't keep saying, "Just one more game..."