Daniel (@dungeondive) takes a patron-voted look at Apocrypha, Mike Selinker’s adventure card game — the design that predates the Pathfinder ACG, was shelved so Pathfinder could be made first, and then arrived after it into a market that had moved on. It is now being cleared out by the publisher, and that clearance is the case for a reappraisal.
The premise: Saints, ordinary people cursed with sight beyond the veil, band into a choir to stop nine Noem from ending the world. Ninety missions across ten chapters, playable in almost any order, because the numbers deliberately do not go up — your Saint changes rather than levels, and the thing that actually improves is you. Selinker’s blog is quoted at length on the fragment mechanic and the fear of cognitive decline that produced it; thoughtful is the word Daniel keeps returning to.
Much of the video is a rescue operation for the notoriously hostile rulebook. Read it through, memorise the glossary, treat keywords as law, watch the Off the Shelf tutorial, download the fan-rewritten guide — and ignore the “start here” tutorial deck entirely. Six distinct ways to discard a card, Halos to slot fragments into, structures assembled as a sentence, mutations rolled when you assist.
His verdict is a qualified yes: a game that haunts him off the table, best at two or three, and only with players sold on the theme.
How much learning friction will you accept before a good game stops being worth the climb?