hey everyone! great game and fun to play, but any tips? I kinda suck and I learn a bit but I keep having to gamble to die because i lost all my hearts and trying to get a heart.
Honestly, I'd say just experiment, and try and look for the patterns in how the monsters show up - many of the monsters have specific behaviors and spawn in certain ways. It's not 100% guaranteed, but it means that if you see a certain pattern on the board, you can guess if there's a decent chance a certain monster will be nearby. I've figured out patterns for the following monsters:
egg, gargoyle, beholder, minotaur, purple slime, slime wizard, romeo & juliet, mine king, gnome
All of the above monsters show up in specific ways, if you can discover how. Once you learn their patterns, you can make educated decisions about what the monsters do and what squares they're likely to be in!
(if anyone else figures out any patterns for rats, bats, skeletons, green slimes, or gladiator ,let me know - these ones still seem random to me)
@GameplayerMcGee I assume by "gladiator" you mean the level 7 monster with the shield. There's definitely a pattern, you just need a ton of games to see it. There's always 4 of them, one per quadrant of the board. The grid is 13x10 so each quadrant ends up being roughly 6x5, excluding the dragon's column. After observing countless runs (you can just click the dragon early to die instantly and see the whole grid), I've never seen one spawn on the dragon's row either. So they basically avoid the central column and the dragon's row entirely.
One detail that's really subtle on the devs' part: each gladiator's shield marks which quadrant they belong to. The center of the shield has a 2x2 yellow square, and one of those four pixels is red. The position of the red pixel inside the 2x2 maps to the quadrant. So the top-right gladiator has the red pixel in the top-right corner of its 2x2, and so on.
About rats, they're not totally random either. Their sprite tells you where the rat king is relative to them. If a rat is facing right, the king is somewhere in a column to its right. If it's facing left, king is to its left. If it's standing upright facing forward, it means the rat is in the same column as the king. And once the rat king dies, all rats switch to that standing pose.
Bats, skeletons and green slimes I haven't been able to figure out either, they just seem to be filler. Their role seems to just be contributing their level to the danger numbers around them. If anyone else spots a pattern there, let me know.
* Each time you die, look at the board, see if you spot a hint or pattern. There are plenty.
* You can count the time until you need a heart scroll by comparing xp row to heart row.
* Save the scrolls as long as possible. A late game scroll is worth a lot more than an early game scroll.
* Bashing walls is an absolute last resort
* Look at squares, do simple math, check the book to see what monsters are still around.