Halfway through playing Cult of the Lamb I found myself engaged in a neat little dice-battling game. It was a mini-game, I guess, but it was so nicely handled, so rich in strategy and the suggestion of depth, that it felt like it could well have been spun off as a game in its own right. Call it the Gwent Impulse: inside this perfectly good game, here’s a smaller, also perfectly good game, seemingly included out of sheer generosity.
Since then I have been very lucky with regards to the Gwent Impulse. Is this a trend? I hope so.
When I say very lucky, I mean that I played two games over the weekend and they both turned out to have secondary games tucked within them. The first is Boneraiser Minions, a worryingly compelling auto-battler in the style of Vampire Survivors. (I discovered it thanks to Hit Points.)You move around an arena summoning mobs who fight a horde of enemies for you. It all gets wilder and wilder as you unlock new mobs, new spells and all that jazz. Eventually the screen is filled with action and you can barely keep track of it. Beautiful!
And yet I discovered in a side menu a little game called Clashful Cards. Clashful Cards uses cards that you unlock in the main mode. It’s a two-player affair, you against the CPU, and you both take turns dropping a selection of cards onto a playing grid. Each card has a number on it and an attack direction (or multiple directions). If the number is higher than the number on the enemy card lying in the attack direction, you flip it and it’s yours. If the enemy’s number is higher, they flip your card. The winner is the person with the most cards on the board at the end of a hand.