This was a surprise. A while back, I got this on Kickstarter when they were doing a pay-what-you-want expansion. I had pretty low expectations, but figured it was worth the fairly small cost to support an indie company.
The players are wizards trying to defeat all the monsters in a dungeon. Every turn, you’ll have a hand of spell cards and have to use all of them. The person who defeats a monster gets points, nobody else gets anything.
The game begins with a nine round spell draft to build your deck. This moves pretty quickly, with each player choosing a card from one to nine to get first selection in the draft that round. You take a spell and get a number of basic element cards based on that spell. These basic elements do one damage each and generally are junk cards compared to the spells; so, more powerful spells tend to come with more junk. During this phase, depending on your number of players, you reveal which monsters you will have to fight over the nine turns, helping you prepare for the dungeon.
Once you have a deck built, you shuffle up the monsters and set up the dungeon. You reveal three monsters and begin fighting your way to the Dungeon Lord. Each round, you have to play your full hand of cards. If you kill a monster, you take it for points and have the option to reshuffle your discard into your deck.
The expansions are Achievements, which add another way to gain points by completing various minor tasks, and Pets, which gives you a Familiar that you can discard cards to activate their unique action. I think both improve the game and would suggest using them. They just offer you some additional options during a game that could otherwise feel a bit limited.
Pixel Glory is a fairly quick deck-building game with a sense of humor. I’ve been putting off playing it for quite a while, because I was sure I’d regret buying it, but I actually found it pretty well put together and enjoyable. I give it a 6 out of 10.