Daniel (@dungeondive) looks at Heroes of Tenefyr with its Second Curse expansion — a co-operative deck-builder that is very simple, possibly to a fault.
You work through five dungeon levels, each a stack of monsters rather than a space to explore. Decks start at twelve cards, six zeros and six ones, plus class cards; in a two-player game you combine two classes into a multiclass hero. Instead of buying cards with currency, you spend power to defeat enemies, and the defeated enemy card flips over to become the reward that joins your deck — a multi-use design Daniel rates highly. Clearing a level grants a further reward, and the choice of which of two stacks to attack is the game’s main decision, since it determines which reward you’re playing toward.
His honest caveat: the opening turns are thin. Draw three, decide whether to mulligan, repeat — and mulligan too often and you exhaust yourself out of the fight. It takes a while before the rewards, the enemy interactions and the boss track start compounding into something interesting.
The video closes with a tangent on box size, using this game as the example: dividers taller than the box, a tracker sheet too wide for a single well. He also notes his work life has cut him back to one video a week.
A deck-builder where the monster you defeat is the reward card. Clean design, or too simple to sustain?