Monster Train 2
I have played a bunch of Monster Train 2 over the last few weeks.
It's one of those deckbuilders I can play and enjoy while also carrying the deep, shameful awareness that I really do not fully mentally grasp much of what is going on. I do a lot better with deckbuilders that use small numbers... Nine Kings and Slay the Spire are a lot easier for me to grasp.
Monster Train is the deckbuilder where guys run vertically up three different floors of a traincar (?) and resolve combat from top to bottom? And also the final fight of every car just repeats itself over and over again until everyone is dead?? It's a lot to deal with when you are fundamentally not that good at math.
Enjoy this sensory overload trailer:
This is the kind of game where at the end of a match, if I don't do things in the correct order, my spell may do 201 damage instead of 204, and this will cause me to lose.
I enjoy playing games like this because I do experience shiny UI animations and large flashing numbers as a kind of pleasing sensory overload. (There is a great conversation about this in Kaizen, referencing pachinko, haha.)
There are some interesting UI choices in Monster Train and Monster Train 2 which make it a little easier to manage this cascade of flashing data, too - it will precalculate the results of a turn and display each action's outcome before you commit to it. This includes marking which specific enemies and allies will die.
It feels completely designed around this UI feature - there is no way that I would be able to play this game without it. Damages are granular and numerical and units can do damage values anywhere from 1 to in the hundreds. Without a feature like this I'd be stuck adding up 5-10 individual values three separate times for every round of combat.
It's a weird experience! I often feel like Slay the Spire is making me smarter?? but I often feel like Monster Train is more a kind of pachinko to me. Synergies are easy to find and I don't have to be particularly big brain to find them. Each faction heavily prefers certain kinds of synergies, so you'll be presented with a series of more-narrow choices which make it pretty simple to find synergies that work well with your faction and deck. I make my greatest strategic decisions during the setup round of each match by choosing which units to group together in which room. I can easily get to the final fight of most runs, now, but I rarely survive it.
There are a few categories of games which I will gladly play but will never bother spending the effort to deeply understand, and most deckbuilders fall in this category. I do not fully understand my own engagement with the genre, sometimes... am I just playing these games because they go down easy? Whenever I find one that I feel I actually understand, it's a relief - because it makes my own behavior easier for me to understand, too.