Ophelia Payne

I’ll be honest, card battle games are not a genre I play much. It’s not that I don’t like them; I honestly just haven’t had a lot of experience with them.  Now, Fortune Seller, developed and published by Kiwick, caught my eye with its graphics and trailer that seemed like an inventory management game. When I realized it was a card battle game, I thought…why not? Let’s give this a try and expand my gaming horizons. 

In a dark setting, you are the newest employee of an antique shop where you try to make money by selling as many items as you can to a client by fitting the items into a limited inventory space. Like any inventory sim, each item takes up a specific amount of space in a variety of shapes. Each also has their own values and can be influenced by spells and tarot cards that you have as well. There are also bonus spots that can heavily influence what items you sell, and determining when to make sacrifices comes into play. Some of the spots will give a bonus to the item on it or adjacent to it. This adds a bit more of a puzzle element, too.  There are a lot of moving parts in this game, a lot of rules that take some time to decipher, and there is a lot of randomness in what you deal with in each round.

Items each have their own classifications like junk, heirloom, alchemy, organic, etc., and some of them can be upgraded to give them different properties, while others may get direct bonuses.

Between rounds, you have access to a store where you can use your daily wages to purchase additional inventory items or cards to help you in the following days. There is also a wheel to spin that might give you additional money or cards.

Knowing when to play certain spells or tarot cards to maximize your sales is a skill I clearly struggled with, but I liked that buffs like storm, flood, thunder, etc., all incorporated different challenges to the gameplay. The same applies to the tarot cards. This game was more complex than I anticipated, and each time I died, I learned something new.

Each day has increased targets, culminating in a moon challenge that has its own special requirements, perks and bonuses. Once you fail, you ‘die’ and must start over. In my few hours I spent with the game, I didn’t manage to get past the 2^nd moon cycle. The game doesn’t particularly feel unfair, and creating successful sales really encourages you to have just one more try, but it’s everything I don’t love about games that are heavy on the RNG and roguelike. The feeling of failure and starting from scratch after every run.

So, to summarize, you have a card battle genre, with an inventory sim and all of that, accompanied by roguelike and puzzle elements. Yes, it sounds complicated, but Fortune Seller has a strong base concept, and I am hooked enough that I will likely join back in for more ‘punishment’.

Until next time…be good to yourself and be good to each other.

**Thank you, Press Engine and Starfall PR, for graciously providing the review code**