The dream game for mathematicians

But you don't need to like math to enjoy the game

I’ve been trying to work out a decent content schedule and have realized I’m trying to do too much—so I’ve cut out my non-gaming content creation venture for now to focus on gaming! As is often the case, less is more and hopefully I can keep up this pace.

Hello Scientist Gamers!

The past several months have felt like a relentless storm of team reductions, redundancies, layoffs, and whatever other name you want to give for the game development industry (I just learned about another at Sony). Versus Evil was one of those studios that permanently shut down in December 2023, just days before the holiday season. At the time I assumed that anything they were publishing wasn’t going to get published, so I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Tamarak Trail was still going to be released. Thank goodness because if you’re curious about rogue-like deck-building games, you won’t want to miss out on this one.

Steam page: Tamarak Trail
Release date: February 29, 2024
Developer: Yarrow Games
Publisher: Versus Evil, tinyBuild
Available on: Steam (PC)

What is this game and are there barriers to playing?

Tamarak Trail is a unique twist to the rogue-like deck-building mechanic (we’ll get to the unique bit below). But like most games in the genre, you won’t need to worry about fast reaction times. You’ll take your turns slowly and methodically in both the turn-based combat and the pathfinding portions of the game.

There isn’t a whole lot of lore text or dialogue to get through in this game and all other important information is clearly shown as icons and text descriptions, with helper text to go with it, so there shouldn’t be any confusion about what everything does in the game.

The unique part about this deck-builder is that you aren’t collecting cards for a deck: you’re collecting faces for a six-sided dice (d6) and have complete control over how each of your dice is structured. During combat, you’ll roll the dice and take whatever action you roll, which mechanically, isn’t all that different from drawing cards from a deck. But it does feel more accessible than cards in a deck.

What you’ll be doing in the game

In Tamarak Trail, you’ll take two and a half primary actions. Let’s start with the half because this refers to the meta progression part of the game — inevitably, your run through Tamarak Trail will come to an end and you’ll be forced to start over. But if you collected enough in game currency, you could upgrade your base of operations that will provide bonuses for you for all subsequent runs. You might not always be able to take advantage of this feature though, especially if you don’t get enough currency, which is why I counted this as a half action.

But in every run of Tamarak Trail, you will choose your path from among a branching set of paths, each with nodes that either lead to battle, events, or some much needed rest and relaxation. You can see the trail ahead so you can plan your early path to make sure you get to where you want to go.

Of course, those battles are where the bulk of this game is. Because you are collecting and building dice, you can get very analytical, calculating the probabilities of the combination of faces that you can use during your round of battle. Otherwise, just roll the dice and see how things turn out. In my limited run through the game, there were dice faces for regular attacks, attacks that deal bleed damage, faces that grant armour, and those that will grant an effect and then turn the dice over or flip it, essentially granting you a free roll. Ever since coming to this realization, I couldn’t stop thinking about potentially powerful combinations with these faces.

Finally, as you obtain new dice faces and dice cores to further augment your dice, you’ll be spending time in the dice forge, creating and recombining the faces to get a combination that is suited to your play style. You could move all the defence focused faces to one die, and attack focused ones to another so that you are guaranteed a little bit of both each round. You can also set up synergies within your dice (some abilities will trigger an effect and then flip the die or turn it on its side), allowing you to chain multiple effects with one roll of the dice. Essentially, you can get many rolls for the price of one, which offers some cool strategic options when crafting your dice.

How long you can expect to play the game

Your skill in rogue-like deck-builders will dictate how long your typical play session will last. I’m not very good, so my first run of Tamarak Trail lasted all of 30 minutes when I died trying to figure things out. Battles are fairly short as long as your dice rolls are decent, most of the handful of battles in my first run lasted less than 5 minutes each.

I don’t know how long a full run through to the end will take, but you can save in between nodes so you don’t have to complete it in a single sitting. As long as you can remember what you were doing, there’s nothing stopping you from playing the game one node at a time.

As a rogue-like game, Tamarak Trail is designed to be played over and over again, as you get better at managing your dice and upgrading your overall deck at the same time. The dice-building aspect of the game lends itself well to additional customization, potentially adding other-sided dice to the mix. I can imagine adding a d4 or d10 with different innate buffs and debuffs or the ability to hold multiple cores.

There isn’t any talk of mod support as far as I can tell, but with the meta progression system, I think you can expect to play this game for a long time to come.

Final thoughts

I am not crazy about deck-builders in general, but there have been some gems that I’ve had the privilege of playing this year. Tamarak Trail is on that list, partly because of its interesting twist on the genre (the statistics enthusiast side of me has been running calculations and simulations ever since I stopped playing the game) in addition to the detailed artwork, which adds to the experience. If you’re wondering which deck-builder to get, make sure Tamarak Trail is on that list.

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