Deckbuilders strike me as a genre of game that is simultaneously easy and hard to build. Mechanically, they’re fairly simple. While the art style and story and setting can all vary, the underlying concept stays the same. You play cards to do things. Bish bash bosh. It’s in designing the cards that the true complexity comes in, and where these games live or die.

For a deckbuilder to succeed, it needs to be sufficiently complex in its mechanics. Too complex, and you end up with something inaccessible or better suited to a CCG. Insufficiently complex, and the game just becomes boring and rote, with each playthrough looking the same as any other playthrough. There needs to be enough potential for the game to be worth playing without that potential being overwhelming. This is the art of the deckbuilder. It’s a careful tightrope walk, and it’s easy to fall off.

Breach Wanderers very much falls off.

Every screenshot is going to look like this. You've been warned.

Breach Wanderers is a deckbuilder. You play as one of several potential characters bound for the breach. While in the breach, each character is tasked with fulfilling a quest, and in so doing, learning more and more about the breach, its dangers, and how to navigate them.

Story is rarely a deckbuilder’s strong suit, and Breach Wanderers is no exception. While there is a story, it’s more a loose conglomeration of potential things to do that I am more or less happy to ignore. Beyond picking a quest and an objective for each run, I’m not particularly interested in any character’s backstory or why I’m doing this. There is a place to explore, and explore it I shall.

Exploring the breach, much like in every other deckbuilder, involves a long series of combats and encounters along an unfurling map. Players collect cards along the way, using these to hone and improve their decks for each of these combats.

This is, once again, the heart of any deckbuilder. A deckbuilder lives or dies by how good this particular mechanic is and how interesting the combinations actually are. This is where Breach Wanderers dies.

I even think the cards are the same.

Breach Wanderers advertises that it offers hundreds of cards and combinations, offering nearly limitless options for play. I have no doubt that this is true. While playing the game, I did see many different cards, some of which actually seemed helpful. However, this doesn’t change the fact that Breach Wanderers, at its best, suffers from what I like to call the Across the Obelisk problem.

Prior to each run, players have the option of setting their starting deck and the pool of cards that might appear over the course of the run, essentially winnowing down the potential chaos inherent in drafting into just those cards that are useful for their particular deck. While which of these cards appear and the order in which they do so is random, that these cards will appear is a given. This creates a problem where, once it’s clear that a particular deck will be successful, there’s very little reason to shift away from it. Once I know I can thrash the breach with my happy little frost deck, there is no reason for me to tweak unless I see a clear upgrade. The game is essentially solved.

Across the Obelisk gets around this problem by investing heavily in its story, forcing players to take suboptimal routes in the name of continuing the story of particular runs. While the decks themselves may be perfectly honed, by forcing players on suboptimal routes, the game provides a test for those players, throwing the decks into combats they might be poorly optimised for. It’s not ideal, but it is a decent solution to the solved problem.

Breach Wanderers does not take this approach. Indeed, its combats all look more or less the same, even if the little monster figure bobbing on the screen might look a little different. Instead, Breach Wanderers forces players to take a card after every fight, bloating otherwise optimised decks with chaff. It creates a gameplay loop where combat feels more punishing than rewarding, given that each combat has the chance to filter down an otherwise lovely deck.

All of this, of course, sets aside that the deckbuilding itself is not particularly interesting. It’s one thing to have a game solved. It’s another to do that within the first couple of runs, just because of how repetitive the gameplay and combat is.

These are all different runs, by the way.

Ultimately, the tedium of Breach Wanderers is just too much to overcome. For all the variety it promises, the reality of playing Breach Wanderers is that there is no variety. Every run looks and plays exactly the same, with the only real difference being the amount of patience I have left to play the same cards over and over and over again.

Developer: Baronnerie Games
Genre: Deckbuilder
Year: 2023
Country: Canada
Language: English
Time to beat: 30-45 Minutes/run