Tamarak Trail

The twist to use dice whose sides can be equipped with different abilities is a nice novelty in deckbuilding games. However, "Tamarak Trail" fails to motivate the player to start a new run after his very early death. I started some runs, but after reaching Boss 2 I was killed with only one attack, leaving me with a new die-side that I can aquire in the next run, but not enough coins to increase my characters starting stats. Combined with the not-so-intruiging fighting, which makes the core gameplay, "Tamarak Trail" was not the new favorite in deckbuilding games. Worth a try for the graphics alone, nevertheless.

The game is played entirely with the mouse. You have an overworld map with the usual map points (rest, chest, market, event, combat). You play with dice, that are not „just dice“. You can re-arrange the faces of the dice and interchange them between dice (even before you leave the starting point on the map) and some faces have the action to roll to a different face. And you can add a die core (e. g. +2 to attack/defense face, +5 defense when using a rolling action). I especially like unlocking the infinite combos = making infinite roll loops, e. g. one face rolls left, and the one to the left of it rolls right. Of cause it doesn’t keep rolling infinitely, it results in a special combo with varying effects. But so far it seems, that one of the dice becomes exhausted, meaning you can’t use it again in this fight. And using a die costs determination (yellow bar; the circle left of it shows the regeneration of det. after the enemy action -you always go first- furthermore for each die you don’t use in a round, the regen is increased by 1.). Attacks deplete it too. If the determination bar gets wiped out by an attack the hearts above the bar take damage. And if you use a die, while not having enough det. to pay its cost, it gets exhausted. Furthermore dice hitting each other increases the cost of using the die that roll. (Some die faces require collisions.) You get one new die by defeating a boss. (After each battle won you get to choose a new face for a die from three options.) The field to roll the dice in is rather small, so three dice start hitting each other regularly. You can manually roll, trying to keep them away from each other, but maybe you don’t like that kind of micromanagement. Through fights you earn XP and Garmonbozia (4 bosses) to unlock stuff. Nice art and animations. I played about 6 hours and I enjoy it very much. I still have a lot to unlock. Last boss still to go. 37-52 die faces for a character (3, 2 locked) and 8-15 for combos. 15 die cores.

You can be killed at 1st step